Good Dexter Manley article. Thoughts?

[Jethrodsp]

Jan 30, 8:06 PM

Manley eager to be free

NFL superstar leaves cocaine troubles behind

By Peter Kerasotis

FLORIDA TODAY

HUMBLE, Texas -- Dexter Manley leans forward, hope filling his eyes.

"What are the reporters and the people in the football world saying about me?"

Former NFL star Dexter Manley peers out of his cell window at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Boyd Unit prison Oct. 1996, in Teague, Texas. Image © 2004, AP

His 6-foot-8 frame, the one that used to give NFL quarterbacks nightmares, is stuffed into a small plastic chair and his arms rest atop a fold-up particle board table in a dreary room at the Lychner State Jail. He is wearing a white jump suit, black shoes and hope, an almost pleading hope.

"Do people remember me?"

Who can forget Dexter Manley? Who can forget the big smile, the big heart and the big problems he brought to the NFL? And to himself. When Dexter Manley played defensive end for the Washington Redskins, and on three Super Bowl teams, he was the standard others tried to meet.

He is the Redskins' all-time sack leader and his 97.5 career sacks make him a borderline Hall of Famer. He'd be a cinch for enshrinement if not for what Dexter Manley calls "The Beast." It is "The Beast" that cut short his career in his prime, at age 32. It is "The Beast" that put him where he is today.

"The Beast, cocaine, is the only thing that could stop me. I had so much going on, but drugs, cocaine, crack, The Beast, it ruled my life, controlled my very being. Otherwise, I couldn't be stopped. This is my humble opinion, but I always was a great football player. I was a force. When you find a defensive end with power and speed, and I had a lot of speed, they last a long time. I should've been just finishing up playing football. Instead, I'm here."

The here Dexter Manley speaks about is a state prison just outside his hometown Houston, so close to Super Bowl XXXVIII that the shadow falls heavy on him.

"I won't watch the Super Bowl," he says, his eyes downcast. "It's . . . hard. Just too hard. I really don't watch football. I couldn't tell you the players if they walked in right now. I couldn't tell you if Tom Brady walked in, and I only know the name because I've heard it. But I couldn't tell you who the other quarterback is. Only one player I recognize is Stephen Davis, because he was a Redskin. I used to talk with him when he played for the Redskins."

Manley used to do a lot of things before he started serving his latest prison sentence, a two-year term for drugs with no opportunity for parole. He is scheduled for release on March 5. Monday, the day after the Super Bowl, is his 46th birthday. He hopes it is the last birthday he ever spends in prison.

"I'm one of 58 men in my dorm," he says. "I live in bunk 37. I have a top bunk. When I came here, I had a bottom bunk, but now I have a top bunk. I've been here almost 23 months."

Inmate number 1090194 points to his cheap digital wris****ch and notes the seconds ticking by.

"One second at a time," he says. "When I came here, I thought two years would be impossible. But one second at a time, and now it's 23 months."Once an inspiration

He was doing so well. For five years, Manley says he was clean and sober. He had married an attractive electrical engineer from his high school named Lydia, and was working for John O'Quinn, a powerful plaintiff attorney, the man who successfully sued the tobacco companies and also brought a landmark court decision against breast implant manufacturers.

It was a real job he had, too. Interviewing witnesses, preparing briefs, researching cases. He wore nice suits and rubbed elbows with important people. Life for Dexter Manley was good. It also was just a few miles away from the 3rd Ward section of Houston where he grew up in abject poverty, in a tiny house on stilts where the mean streets have no offramps.

It's at the 3rd Ward where Manley often came right after his playing days ended, finding himself a resident now in crack houses and on the streets. The place hadn't changed much through the years.

Manley's best friend in junior high school died on a street corner. His only brother was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. He graduated from Houston's Yates High School illiterate, passing through special education classes, taunted as a "retard" by other children. Only in America could that still get him a college scholarship, in this case at Oklahoma State, where he played football for Jimmy Johnson.

Manley still couldn't read when he entered the NFL, and he would often sit at his locker holding a Wall Street Journal to hide his secret, looking at the way other players held newspapers to make sure he was holding his the right side up.

At 28, he was diagnosed as functionally illiterate. Later, in an emotional, tearful appearance that captivated the nation, he testified before congress on adult illiteracy and was later honored by the first Bush White House.

Manley overcame all of that, and became an inspiration. Today, he reads voraciously, as if he's making up for lost time. "I read Newsweek, the Houston Chronicle every day, and books. Lots of books. Mostly self-help books. I'm reading Dr. Phil now. Self Matters."Turn for the worst

Yes, Dexter Manley outran his past. But he couldn't outrun The Beast.

Two years ago, he was invited as a former NFL player to take part in pre-Super Bowl XXXVI hype in Tampa. There was a boxing promotion featuring some former AFC players against NFC players.

"They put a check for $65,000 in my hand. Immediately, I wanted to reward myself. I gave my wife what I wanted to give her, and I took the rest, $2,500."

The 3rd Ward -- and The Beast -- beckoned.

"I went to this sleazy place called the Infinity Inn. I had this nice BMW, and I'm wrestling with the steering wheel as I'm driving there. I'm telling myself, 'I shouldn't be doing this. I shouldn't be doing this.' Knowing what the consequences would be. But The Beast was too strong. The compulsiveness to do it . . . I can't even describe it. I got some crack, and I was gone for two days."

Strung out, he was eventually arrested, charged, and with a prior prison sentence for drugs, he was sent away to Lychner State Jail for two years.

Ironically, it also was in Tampa where Manley's NFL career ended. After nine years with the Washington Redskins, he spent a season with the Phoenix Cardinals and then, in 1991, signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with hopes of resurrecting his career.

"But Tampa, it's just so seedy. I've never seen women standing on street corners in G-strings and bikinis selling things like hot dogs and Popsicles. And they have so many strip bars down there. I was bored. I was frustrated with the way they were playing me. I was living in a hotel. So I started hanging out at the strip bars, especially this one called the Mons Venus. I'm not a sex addict. But what I realize now is that women and sex are a trigger for me with my addiction.

"I remember two, three games before the end of the season, we were in Atlanta. I was asleep in the hotel. About three or four in the morning some noise woke me up. Over in the other bed my roommate is with two women. They were doing their thing. I didn't go join them. I just sat up and watched.

"When I got back to Tampa, I couldn't wait to repeat that same behavior. I had a young lady flown in from Houston and I went and got a stripper and I did the same thing. But there was no cocaine with my roommate. But I went and got some coke, just a couple of lines. The next day, I had a drug test."

It was his fifth positive test, and his final one with the NFL.

A tear rolls down his cheek.

"And that was it," he says softly. "I was banned for life from the league. My career, everything I had worked so hard for, was over. And I knew that was what would happen. But The Beast, it was that powerful."Another relapse

Ending a career is traumatic enough for an athlete. Ending it with an addiction problem is a prescription for trouble.

And Manley found it.

Or it found him.

He went on cocaine binges that lasted weeks at a time. He spent much of the '90s high, sometimes deranged, hallucinating. At an upscale Houston apartment where he lived, he would take the sand out of the lobby ashtrays and scatter it along the hallway, into the elevator, and up to his front door. Why? "So I could see the tracks of people I thought were coming after me," he says.

He once threw his oldest son Derrick out of the apartment because he was convinced the teenager was pouring acid on the floor that was burning the bottoms of his feet.

Manley's erratic behavior got him evicted.

Then, on July 26, 1995, police pulled him over on a Houston highway. Strung out on cocaine, Manley ran. The next morning he awoke in a hospital handcuffed to a bed. Not too far before that incident, he was arrested at a La Quinta Hotel when, after threatening suicide, police arrived and found crack rocks on his bed. That August 4, Manley pleaded guilty to two counts of cocaine possession and was sentenced to four years in prison. Two weeks later he was shipped to prison in Huntsville, Texas, chained to a man sentenced to 75 years for aggravated rape and murder.

After his release, Manley worked closely with former NBA star and recovering addict John Lucas, who used to operate a rehab facility in Houston.

"I was with Lucas when we would go into sections like the 3rd Ward and pulled out former NBA players who were supposed to be in rehab. Pulled them out of these horrible places, all curled up in corners. It had a powerful effect on me."

Must have. Because Manley became a functioning member of society for five years with his job at one of the country's leading law firms. But then that trip to Super Bowl XXXVI triggered another relapse.Words of wisdom

And now, the Super Bowl returns to him, just down the highway from the Lychner State Jail in a little town called, appropriately enough, Humble.

Has anybody from the NFL come to see him?

"Nobody," Manley says.

He shakes his head, blinks, his tongue working the corner of his mouth the way it does when he can no longer hold back his tears.

"I feel abandoned."

He stammers, composes himself.

"But I have to say, no matter what I did, I did it to myself. If you can tell those guys playing in the Super Bowl one thing, tell them this: Don't take my road. Don't let football use you. Use football. Maximize it. Walk the straight line. Don't be another Dexter Manley. Please, don't be another Dexter Manley."

Outside, cold rain spits against a window and the sky is a blanket of granite. Manley looks out the window, his eyes focusing on something only he can see.

"I know it's raining, but the sun is going to shine," he says. "That's where I want to be. In the sunshine. You must draw a line in the sand and say, 'That's enough.' I've had enough. I've lived with enough pain. I don't want to live like this anymore. I don't want to spend the rest of my life incarcerated."

How bad is it?

Manley pauses. Five seconds pass, then 10, 20, 30. His eyes stretch to see where the prison guard is. His voice lowers.

"This is a bad place. You might see . . ."

He pauses again, waits.

"You see a lot of violence."

He is whispering now.

"Gangs. Lots of gangs. People have died here."

He shakes his head slowly, purposefully.

"I don't want to die here."

[Muskrat]

That's thoroughly depressing, and unfortunate, that such a great player can be brought down so easily....I hope he finally gets his crap together...

[SittingBill]

Dexter, please get it together

:dallasuck

[prophet]

My favorite defensive player for the skins in the 80's

I pray its over for him - in the good sense

[Jimmythehair]

Good article and even though I don't like Brian Gumble I liked the interview he did with Dexter. I saw it this past saturday and Dexter sounds like he has a better understanding what he is up against and hopefully will be able to control himself.