SOLR STILL not starting on RHEL 9.2 as a service

I've gone done a serious rabbit hole but failing to see my error. I am assuming it must be me. I have two instances and both experience same behavior. I can start and stop SOLR normally as my non-root user.  But when I configure my solr.service (which is identical to my previous installs), it fails to see that solr is running, exits and stops the process. I can verify that SOLR does indeed start but the part of the solr script  (called from Index_Search_Server.sh) where it checks that SOLR is running, I think is not detecting it. It times out after 180 seconds and stops. 

Here is what I observed:

• Confirmed that SOLR starts from java process, PID file and logs.
• Noticed "lsof -v" running while it was waiting for SOLR to start and consuming high CPU. Disappears when it bails after the time out. 
• I identified the part of the solr script where it tries to verify SOLR is running. (rabbit hole). I can see that it checks the lsof version (where I see "lsof -v", and then runs it to verify to get the PID of the process running at port 8085. I can validate that these commands return normally when I ran them while waiting for startup script to timeout. 

I zeroed in on lsof since that is what I saw running and a while loop in the script. I gather that Index_Search_Server is calling solr but not getting a successful return. I even dug into the github for solr trying to see when this script change (here it is if you are curious https://github.com/apache/solr/commit/3ed17c2737d )

Here is the section where its stuck

 # no lsof on cygwin though
 if lsof -v 2>&1 | grep -q revision; then
 echo -n "Waiting up to $SOLR_START_WAIT seconds to see Solr running on port $SOLR_PORT"
 # Launch in a subshell to show the spinner
 (loops=0
 while true
 do
 running=$(lsof -t -PniTCP:$SOLR_PORT -sTCP:LISTEN || :)
 if [ -z "${running:-}" ]; then
 slept=$((loops * 2))
 if [ $slept -lt $SOLR_START_WAIT ]; then
 sleep 2
 loops=$((loops+1))
 else
 echo -e "Still not seeing Solr listening on $SOLR_PORT after $SOLR_START_WAIT seconds!"
 tail -30 "$SOLR_LOGS_DIR/solr.log"
 exit # subshell!
 fi
 else
 SOLR_PID=$(ps auxww | grep start\.jar | awk "/\-Djetty\.port=$SOLR_PORT/"' {print $2}' | sort -r)
 echo -e "\nStarted Solr server on port $SOLR_PORT (pid=$SOLR_PID). Happy searching!\n"
 exit # subshell!
 fi
 done) &
 spinner $!
 else
 echo -e "NOTE: Please install lsof as this script needs it to determine if Solr is listening on port $SOLR_PORT."
 sleep 10
 SOLR_PID=$(ps auxww | grep start\.jar | awk "/\-Djetty\.port=$SOLR_PORT/"' {print $2}' | sort -r)
 echo -e "\nStarted Solr server on port $SOLR_PORT (pid=$SOLR_PID). Happy searching!\n"
 return;
 fi
 fi

what's tough is I do not see any of these echo statements anywhere when you start as service so not sure what it saying or seeing. This is top after I start solr. You can see java process which is solr and lsof of script trying to determine its running.

Here is info on that process showing it was running with -v option. Odd since that runs normally and 

This runs normally and I get output:

Totally stumped here.