Kevin Ortiz spent the 2025 season crisscrossing the country to visit every NFL stadium.
Kevin Ortiz’s suitcase has been packed — or rather, bursting at the seams — since September.
He shows it proudly, overflowing on the floor of his Bakersfield, Calif., home, in between another weekend on the road. Ortiz knows this suitcase — consistently over the airline-mandated 50-pound limit with “overweight” and “fragile” stickers stuck to its exterior — won’t last him much longer. So, it’s a good thing he only has one stop left.
Ortiz, 35, embarked on a journey this season to attend a home game for every NFL team. Yes, that meant two stops to MetLife Stadium (for the New York Jets and New York Giants) and two to SoFi Stadium (for the Los Angeles Chargers and Los Angeles Rams). He would have felt like he was cheating otherwise.
He’ll join an exclusive club of fans who have done this before. But Ortiz is also paving a path of his own. He never attended an NFL game before this season. He’s traveling to each game completely alone. And he’s doing it all in his wheelchair — a journey he hopes will raise awareness of the accessibility challenges of attending NFL games.
“The idea was a spur-of-the-moment type of thing. I honestly just wanted to do something challenging,” Ortiz said in an interview before his final stretch of regular-season games in Week 17. “I wanted to do something where I would want to quit every step of the way. Something that I felt like I knew I could do, but at the same time, everybody would feel like it was impossible.”
Ortiz has been using a wheelchair for 13 years. In 2012, he was an active member of the Air Force and battling depression. On Sept. 27 of that year, Ortiz attempted suicide. He survived, but two of his thoracic vertebrae were shattered. He was paralyzed from the belly button down.
He continued to struggle with depression after the incident, a two-year stretch that he said “felt like a lifetime.” Everything felt unattainable as he adjusted to this new way of living. How would he gain back his independence? Own a house? Travel?
His mind spiraled with negative thoughts until an interaction with his sister prompted a change of mindset.
“My sister gave me this weird look one day, and I could just tell she could not wait to get away from being around me,” Ortiz said. “Me and my sister, we’re very close. … Once I saw that, I was like, you know what? I had to realize at that time I was the problem, and I really had to make a change.”
From then on, Ortiz said, “everything just got better.” He moved to California from Temple, Ga., where he had lived since he was 13, and expanded his social circle. He started a YouTube channel and began sharing his life online.
“A lot of people don’t (talk about) their struggles with mental health,” Ortiz said. “Once they see a video of somebody that went through something as traumatic as that — not only having a spinal cord injury, but to be the one that caused the spinal cord injury — and then still be out here, living his life with a smile on his face, I think that says a lot.”
