For 15 days they slept cramped on two foam mattresses, side by side in the living room of family friends. Zein Obeid, his mother, Nadia, his older sister, Zeinab, and his father, Ali, when he wasn’t across town working as part of a documentary crew with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain.
The 2006 Israel-Lebanon War had just started, and Lebanon was under siege by bombs.
The Obeids fled their apartment in Beirut for the safety of one in the city of Jounieh shortly before a missile leveled the building next door. Zein was 7 at the time, old enough to recognize the destruction going on around him but too young to understand why.
More than once, he and his family took cover in an underground parking structure as rockets flew overhead.
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Israel bombed the Beirut airport after members of the militant group Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers, and the retaliation didn’t stop there. They took out power plants and bridges, and buildings shook as jets patrolled the sky.
“The noise was very, very loud. And you can hear the planes flying, it’s so low,” Ali recalled. “Zein was crying. My biggest daughter, she was crying. They asked me if we’re going to die, what’s going on next? I said, ‘No, we’re not going to die.’”
Once Bourdain and the Americans traveling with him were evacuated, Ali made plans to get his family out, too.
He tied a white T-shirt to the antenna of his truck, painted a white cross on top of the cab and kept the windows rolled down as he drove from Lebanon to Syria so soldiers could see he had children inside.
Normally a 45-minute drive, Ali said he, his family and the man traveling with them needed four hours to reach the border because the bombed-out roads forced them to take a circuitous path. After reaching Syria, the Obeids drove another seven hours to a friend’s place in Damascus, where they stayed for a week or so before traveling to Egypt.
The war stopped after 34 days, and the Obeids eventually returned home.
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Ali worked on a few more documentaries, but when fears about his family’s safety lingered, he moved them to the United States in 2009.
Zein was 10, a stranger in a new country, determined to make the most of his new opportunity while having absolutely no idea what was about to cross his path.
“(The war gave me) motivation just to get out. You need to get out and that’s what motivates you,” he said. “Like here, people got so many chances. Where I’m from, you don’t have chances, so it just made me think like, ‘This is my chance, I got to get out. My family’s safe, I’m safe, and then I got to take this chance.’ Just do everything in my power to be able to be something.”
Growing up a die-hard Lions fan
The Obeids picked Dearborn when they immigrated to the United States because of the food and culture, and because Nadia had some extended family in the area.
Ali got a job at a smoke shop that paid $35 a day, cash, and collected scrap metal to supplement his income. The transition was tough. Zein did not speak English, but he hung out with a couple of his cousins who liked to play a sport he wasn’t familiar with in Lebanon — football.
Zein tagged along with his cousins to their middle school practices and learned the sport through them. The physicality of the game appealed to him. And when he saw an NFL game on TV for the first time, the Detroit Lions’ Monday night win over the Chicago Bears in 2011 — the Lions’ first primetime game in 10 years, when a raucous Ford Field crowd caused nine false start penalties on the Bears — he was hooked.
“That was like my first time ever” watching it on TV, Zein said. “And then that’s when my dad, I think, he told me, ‘You should try it,’ cause we were watching the game and then my cousins were explaining to me what was going on cause I wasn’t really knowing anything. And then he’s like, ‘You should try it out, see how it feels.’ And that’s when I started.”
Zein played recreationally with his cousins the next few years and became a die-hard Lions fan. He watched games religiously on TV. Once, he cheered so vociferously — when the Lions beat the Atlanta Falcons on a do-over field goal in London in 2014 — that he hyperventilated, ran a fever and had to be taken to the hospital.
It was around the same time that Zein begged his father to take him to a game. The two spent the week driving a rusted van around metro Detroit, buying used rotors and shocks from mechanic shops and re-selling them for scrap, and Ali used the profits to buy two tickets to the game.
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They got to Ford Field when it opened. Zein hung out by the tunnel and got an autograph from Calvin Johnson.
For Zein, cheering for the Lions deepened the connection he felt to his new home and gave him something to aspire to, even if he did not yet realize what it was.
“I would have never thought that I’d be going to a Lions game then, because we lived in a two-family house and work wasn’t that good, we just moved here,” Zein said. “Trying to make a living day by day, so it’s not now. But it was a blessing. And it just, football it means a lot to me. I’ve always been — I didn’t start in time. I didn’t get all the training that I needed, but I caught up so quick. That makes me proud of myself that I caught up and that I’m in the right position right now.”
‘Football is everything for me’
Zein played organized football for the first time as a junior at Dearborn Heights Crestwood in 2015.
He needed help putting on his shoulder pads and knee braces the first time he stepped on the field, and he had no idea what he was doing when coaches put him in at defensive line.
“When they snapped the ball, I just went backwards,” he said. “I didn’t even run at the offensive linemen.”
The Obeids moved across town a year later — Ali started his own business, A&Z Junk Cars, for Ali and Zein — and when Zein transferred to Dearborn Fordson, his football career took off.
He helped the Tractors reach the Division I playoffs as a senior, where they lost to eventual champion Detroit Cass Tech in the first round, and he earned a scholarship to Ferris State, something he never knew was possible in his previous life.
After redshirting in 2017 and playing as a reserve in 2018, Zein started at left tackle in 2019 when Ferris State reached the Division II semifinals. The Bulldogs did not play in 2020 due to COVID-19, but last season he was a key cog in a Ferris State offense that finished fifth in the country in rushing (280.1 ypg) and won the Division II national championship.
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Zein left school with a season of eligibility remaining in part because of his age — he’s 23 years old, and figured he was unlikely to boost his draft stock with another year of Division II football — and projects as a priority free agent in next week’s NFL draft, though he hopes to hear his name called in the later rounds.
“I feel like that’s the upside for me, cause I never really got to play as much as other people did,” Zein said. “People start playing since little league and middle school and high school, and then they get noticed and people know them. But nobody actually knew who I was when I first moved here, and even in high school nobody knew who I was. But I bring physicality and everything to the game. Like this is my passion. I love football, I love hitting, and the technique part, that I can learn over time.”
Known for his nasty demeanor on the field and his kindness off it, Zein took part in Central Michigan pro day last month, where Lions assistant Hank Fraley ran offensive line drills and all 32 NFL teams were in attendance to see CMU linemen and potential top-100 picks Bernhard Raimann and Luke Goedeke.
He performed well enough there to catch the eye of several NFL teams. The Dallas Cowboys had him take an online IQ test they use in their prospect evaluations, and he attended the Lions’ local prospect day April 11.
In one way, that was conformation he made it, made something of the chance he had when he left Lebanon in 2009. A Lions fan whose passion for the team and sport helped him assimilate to his new country, Zein has the nametag from his Lions workout hanging proudly on his refrigerator at home.
But 13 years after fleeing Lebanon and seven after playing organized football for the first time, Zein knows his journey has just begun.
“Football is everything to me,” he said. “Since I got to Ferris I’ve told my dad like, ‘This is it. I got here, I worked hard, got here, I have to do something with it.’ A lot of people get to college, they get distracted by drinking, partying, going out, this and that. I stayed away from all of this and then just dedicated my life to football.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.