Don’t be fooled by the combination of baby-faced innocence and “old soul” musical instincts – Ty Myers can command any stage with Texas football-level hype. He has already earned this right.
Myers has been honing his songwriting skills since the age of 10, which helps explain why his mature and soulful songs have already drawn comparisons to icons like John Mayer. At the age of 18, he released a new album, Heavy on the soul the highly anticipated follow-up to his golden debut, choice, which showed platinum sales “Ends of the Earth”.
His music has already crossed a billion streams, another streak on the young man’s resume that goes deeper than many veteran artists. What appears to be pure talent at an uncanny level may seem like an obvious explanation for his overnight rise, but ask Myers why things happened so quickly, and he can only point to the scarred, once-inflicted knee he wrecked on the Texas gridiron as the real catalyst for his country sooner than expected.
And for a young athlete who grew up near Austin — home of the Texas Longhorns — he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It’s such a culture here that even if you don’t expect to play professionally, it’s just a way of life,” Myers says. “There are only two kinds of guys in Texas: people who play football and people who don’t play football.”
You could say the former high school quarterback had it all before he wowed young female fans and was hailed by critics as “the next face of country music.” Myers chased down a receiver to make a lifesaving tackle and shredded nearly every ligament in his knee. The moment abruptly ended his football days, but it immediately changed the trajectory of what now appears to be an inevitable rise to country stardom.
Even for “I thought it was love” singer, the speed of his success was a source of joy.
“I knew this was what I wanted to do my whole life,” he says. “The only thing I didn’t expect was to happen so early. But on the one hand, I’m very glad it did.”
surgery, hyperbaric therapy, and about 12 months of rehab brought his knee back to almost 100%. While the two-sport athlete mentally prepared himself to never step foot on a football or baseball field again, he and his family were already two steps ahead when it came to moving on to his next chapter. His mother helped him start a TikTok account and soon his song video “The Tie That Binds” became a viral hit. The rise in popularity of social media led to sign calls, and suddenly future college plans turned into a jam-packed gig schedule.
“My plan was to go to the Belmont in Nashville so I could get over the years of grinding on Music Row,” he says. “But then, fortunately and fortunately, it kind of fell into our laps.”
Today, a Texan teenager whose bedroom was once home to both fastball players and fast guitar players — Nolan Ryan in a Rangers uniform on one wall and a Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar icon on another — successfully swapped shoulder pads for a six-string. Most recently, he played the afternoon show at the UFL’s Dallas Renegades home opener. “When the offer came, I was very disappointed,” he says. “I just love watching football and I do it as part of my job now.”
Myers is now gearing up for a pair of concurrent summer tours. For the first time, he’ll be hitting the road with his headlining run in the US, while also supporting one of his idols, Luke Combs, on a massive stadium tour. There, he takes the stage at some of the sport’s most hallowed grounds, including Notre Dame, Ohio State, and Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers, and gets another treat from his football fans.
He still maintains a connection to his football roots, using his old program as a loose template for the strength side of his training. But his conditioning goals now are very different from chasing receivers. The heavy set and power cleans have been replaced by traininb, which prepares him to cover Combs’ massive stage, belting out each song with the same energy he had on the opening track.
“It’s not CrossFit, but it’s a lot of endurance exercise because you’re singing and running,” she says. “Luke’s stage is huge. It has four microphones, so you have to run and sing while you’re recording, which is a constant lung exercise.”
Rehab, hyperbaric therapy and a new direction of life
Just three years since his music went viral, pop culture pundits are lauding Ty Myers, calling him “the talent of his generation” and “an undeniable talent” with a voice that is “weary beyond his years.”
And while songs like “Drinking Alone” and “Thought It Was Love” (each with more than 100 million streams on Spotify) show her musical maturity, Myers is still an 18-year-old at heart, perhaps as happy turning the bellies of her friends as she is pulling the hearts of some of her fans. All he had to do was post-op photos of his injured knee. “After surgery, they’ll send you pictures of the inside of your knee while they’re working on it,” she said. “I still have them on my phone in case I want to lose my friends.”
As if the pain of that moment wasn’t enough, the uploaded images are a constant reminder of Myers’ final moment on the field. As a freshman safety, he took a corner and chased a corner wide from about 30 yards. The fundamentals were as precise and well-executed as possible: Myers ran him, covered him, and tackled him. But as both players went to the ground, the earplugs inadvertently landed on him and buckled Myers’ knee.
“It was the worst pain for a minute or two, but then your adrenaline kicks in,” he recalls. “I got up and was able to walk in a straight line. That lateral movement was impossible. But I started running down the field.”
Even with the pain and the strong possibility of a knee injury, Texans still hoped he would return to the game. Hat in hand, he says he stood behind his coach until, he says, the coach saved him from himself. “After about a minute, (the coach) goes, ‘What are you doing?’ “I said, ‘I think I’m going to go back to the game,'” he recalls. “Then he told me to go to the trainer.” After he went to the trainer, the tension quickly became clear. Then reality hit in an unbearable way. “The pain hit me like a ton of bricks,” he says. “It was always bad. I took some Advil, which didn’t really work, and then my knee swelled up.”
MRIs revealed a torn ACL, MCL, meniscus, as well as a posterior lateral angle of the knee (PLC). For NFL athletes, this type of injury usually requires surgery and up to a year of recovery and rehabilitation. For Myers, doctors initially held off on emergency surgery and started her instead hyperbaric oxygen therapy-a treatment that delivers more oxygen to damaged tissue to help reduce swelling and promote healing.
“I was 15 and asked if it would work to put me on a tube with oxygen,” he says. “You put headphones on, you watch a movie, and they only put a lot of oxygen in there for about an hour and a half a week. In about four weeks, my meniscus was completely healed.”
Surgery for torn ligaments followed, but that was just the beginning of Myers’ road to recovery. The operation left his injured quad and hamstring much smaller and damaged by calcification. Restoring strength and range of motion became a top priority. Most of the work, he says, is based on stretching exercises. “I stretched so much … when (muscles) calcify, they get tight and they don’t allow you to stretch your leg, so you have to stretch it, get your muscles back.”
Two days turned into heavy travel days
It seems that no matter what direction Ty Myers goes, football will follow his path. On a recent episode of ESPN The Pat McAfee Show—while the host and former NFL player was announcing Myers’ midday UFL appearance — McAfee inadvertently referred to Ty as “TV Myers,” prompting even more boisterous laughter in the studio than usual.
Myers’ friends caught wind of the fake football, which meant the singer couldn’t catch a break that day. “All my friends, I couldn’t get away from it,” he says, laughing. “I met one of my friends in Los Angeles and all I heard from across the street was, ‘TV Myers! I said, “Oh my God.” But after hearing this, I laughed. It was funny.”
Even with his quick fame, Myers hasn’t lost his ability to laugh, but as in some of his songs, including the words “Me Too” You can call me The Man In Love or Just The Remnants Of The Man I Knew About You Before– performance of work is a serious matter. On the way, he often finds hotels with a good gym, especially in big cities. When a weight room isn’t nearby, he relies on equipment he brings with him on the bus. “Recently, we’ve really started carrying weights, dumbbells and kettlebells in the trailer,” he said. “So if there isn’t a gym we can go closer to, we still train at it.”
He also keeps some form of football training in his routine. “I tend to do a lot of the exercises I used to do back then, which is very strenuous,” he says. It usually follows the distribution of body parts that alternate between lighter and heavier days.
She also does more bodyweight work, including gymnastics and pull-ups. Another addition, light jogging, once or twice a week. He says that while conditioning is important, the mental reset of running helps him both on stage and in the creative process. “I’m not a huge runner, but running has become more of a conscious thing for me,” he says. “It spoils me in a good way.”
His knee is now close to 100 percent, but to avoid serious injury, he leaned on it stretching as abnormal training. “I definitely stretch more,” she says. “I use some of the exercises to work the small muscles, because that’s a lot of what it was attacking — using muscles that you don’t normally use anymore. Obviously, I don’t want to do that again, so I work with it as much as I can.”
The purpose of all of this preparation is simple: Preparing for his 33-date summer headline “Legal Tour” and his supporting role on the current Luke Combs Stadium tour requires Myers to maintain the physical ability to put on an energetic, full-blown show without gas. He takes no chances. “The endurance part of the workout is definitely probably the most important for this stage and performance,” he says.
In 2025, Myers played in front of his hometown at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium, and now a few years removed from his knee injury, he will get a chance to play in some of the most iconic football stadiums around the country in a different uniform. However, trading nets for the stage sometimes brings light reflections of what could have been the roaming defensive secondary in front of Notre Dame-Jesus if not for his injury. Now he wears that knee and its full recovery as a badge of honor for Texas football.
“If I hadn’t torn my knee, I could have gone to the league,” he says, laughing. “I definitely play this joke with my friends all the time.”
