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Biggest Busts of the NFL Draft – Todd Marinovich

By ArtieFufkin

Todd Marinovich during sunnier days at USC

Esquire Magazine has a fascinating look at the life and times of Todd Marinovich, “The Man Who Never Was”, which makes every other fall-from-grace story in the NFL look like child’s play.

Marinovich was trained from birth by his nutjob father Marv to be a prototype QB, but never seemed to share his father’s dreams of becoming a superstar athlete.  He discovered pot at a young age and gravitated more toward the life of a stoned California surfer than to that of a pro quarterback.  And after achieving his father’s dreams of winning the Rose Bowl at USC and being drafted in the first round by the Raiders, Todd promptly began a downward spiral that included nightly in-season partying, heroin addiction, multiple arrests, a tasering, and of course, the arena football league.

This article really is a must-read.

Here’s a little tidbit from Marinovich’s rookie year with the Raiders:

Sometimes, for fun or hangover relief, Todd took pharmaceutical speed before the games. “I wasn’t playing, so the warm-ups were my game. They’d have these great stereo systems in the stadiums; they’d be blasting the Stones or whatever. I’d take some black beauties and be throwing the ball seventy-five yards, running around playing receiver, fucking around — and then I was done for the day. I never played. Some guys did play on speed. Or they mixed with Vicodin. They could run through a fuckin’ wall and not feel a thing.”

Or, how about this beauty from his days in the Arena League:

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.”