Mike Sager of Esquire wrote an incredible article about former NFL quarterback Todd Marinovich. It details how his life unraveled due to heavy drug use. First pot, then coke, and finally heroin. Powerful stuff.
As a consequence of his arrest, the NFL had been requiring Todd to take frequent urine tests. Todd felt he couldn't function without marijuana. "It just allowed me to be comfortable in this loud, chaotic world. Especially the world I was living in. I couldn't fathom being sober," he says. To reconcile these conflicting realities, he kept Gatorade bottles of clean urine, donated by non-pot-smoking friends, in the refrigerator at his Manhattan Beach townhouse, one block from the ocean, which he'd purchased for $900,000.
All season long, this had been his pre-test routine: Pour the refrigerated pee into a small sunscreen bottle. Go to practice. Put the bottle in a cup of coffee and leave it in his locker to warm up while attending a team meeting. Come back, stash the bottle inside his compression shorts, beneath his package. Usually he'd ask the supervisor to turn on the water in the sink to aid his shy bladder. "I got it down to a science," he says.
But now he was out of clean pee, another critical responsibility blown off — like the time at USC when he couldn't be bothered to fill out his housing paperwork and ended up a homeless scholarship athlete. Like Marv, the real world wasn't really his thing.
Luckily, on this Monday morning, one of Todd's former USC teammates was still at his house, left over from the weekend's partying. He didn't do drugs. Unbeknownst to Todd, however, he'd been drinking nonstop since his own game on Saturday.
Soon after, the Raiders got a call from the NFL: Todd's urine sample had registered a blood-alcohol level of .32 — four times the legal limit. "They're like, 'This guy is a fucking full-blown alcoholic,' " Todd says. "They made me check into Centinela Hospital in Inglewood for alcohol detox — and I hadn't even been drinking." The team left without him; he flew later. This time the Chiefs were ready for Todd. He threw four interceptions, fumbled once.
After the season the team held an intervention. Todd spent forty-five days at a rehab facility. The next season, Todd tried to stop smoking pot. Instead, for six weeks, he took LSD after every game — acid didn't show up on the tox screen. After one poor performance, coaches complained that he wasn't grasping the complex offense. Finally, he failed an NFL drug test. Strike two. Back to rehab.
... Except for a little pot, Todd was drug free for the first time in years. His roomie was Canadian. About two weeks into his stay, he asked Todd if he wanted to go with him "to check his babies."
It turned out he was growing potent BC bud. On the way home, Todd stopped at a head shop to buy a bong. There were little vials scattered everywhere on the ground. His junkie warning system sounded a shrill alarm.
Todd had arrived in his own personal land of Oz, a place were junkies bought and used heroin openly and cops only got involved if somebody OD'd. The heroin was called China White. It was infinitely more potent than the black tar Todd had used before — and relatively cheap. He got into a routine: "The day before every game, we would do a walk-through in the dome — that was my day for needle exchange. All my years of being a dope fiend, the hardest part was always getting needles. I was getting good coke and really pure heroin and combining them. That's all I wanted to do. I woke up, fixed, went to practice. Thank God I was just backing up. I was just the clipboard guy, playing the opposing quarterback in practice."
Once, during halftime at a home game, Todd retrieved a premade rig out of his locker and went to the bathroom to shoot up. Sitting on the toilet, half listening to the chalk talk, he slammed the heroin. As the team was leaving the locker room for the second half, he struggled with the screen in his glass crack pipe — he wasn't getting a good hit. Then the pipe broke, and he lacerated his left thumb. By the time he got out onto the field, his thumb wrapped in a towel, the game had already started. He took up the clipboard, his only duty. "I didn't even know what play they were calling," Todd says. "Nobody looked at the shit I wrote down anyway."
At the end of the season, the team had a party. Todd was "gowed out of my mind," meaning that he was "somewhere between a nod and full-on slumber." His weight had dropped to 176 pounds. "I was a celibate heroin monk. I would go downtown, cop, come back to my pad, and not leave till the drugs were gone," he says. "There was no furniture in my place, just a bed and a TV. I wasn't eating. I spent a lot of time in this Astro minivan I had. I'd just climb into the back and fix. My life revolved around dope and my dog."
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