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Tony Mandarich Is Doing Alright These Days

The Ryan Leaf story from yesterday got me thinking about our pre-draft piece on Tony Mandarich, and wondering what he’s up to these days. 

Well wonder no more, thanks to this fascinating report from ESPN.  (I guess this came out around around the draft this year, but I must have missed it.  Probably because in general I loathe ESPN’s draft coverage … but they knocked this one out of the park.)

In this candid interview, Mandarich tells the story of downing a pharmacy worth of steroids while at Michigan State, and being tested for drugs less than 5 times in his career there. But things went south when Mandarich got to Green Bay as a rookie and attempted to go off the juice, cold turkey.  The problem was, instead of his usual steroid cocktail, Mandarich began taking, and then shooting, painkillers – including during practice.  And he says he never spent a sober day in his 4 years with the Packers.

Watch and see for yourselves:

In this piece, Mandarich comes of as a sober, contrite, intelligent & self-aware person, who fully understands the enormity of his failure in the NFL. He takes full ownership of his drug addiction, and lets the blame for his fall rest squarely on his own shoulders.

Tony Mandarich could be doing worse for himself

People (myself included) forget that Mandarich came back to play with the Colts, where he had a 3-year career as a serviceable NFL lineman.

There’s a particularly poignant section of the video (around the 6:45 mark), where Mandarich says as part of his recovery, he had to try to “make amends for the disaster you created in the NFL. You had wronged the fans, you had wronged the Packers, you embarrased the sport … how do you right that wrong?”

It seems as though Mandarich has at least taken the appropriate steps to make amends for his past sins.  And maybe – just maybe – he doesn’t deserve to be lumped with some of the other draft busts that he is always associated with ( Leaf, Marinovich, Phillips, etc).

And don’t forget the happy ending: today, Mandarich runs his own Glamour/Boudoir photo company.  So he’s taking pictures of hot women for a living.  And this is his wife.  Not bad.  Not bad at all.