04.20.09 KIDS, DON’T BE LIKE TODD MARINOVICH

With the NFL Draft coming Saturday, it’s an appropriate time to look back at one of the great draft busts of all time. Mike Sager at Esquire comes through with one of those Where Are They Now type pieces on NFL draft bust Todd Marinovich, the guy whose micromanagement of his training, diet, and social life by his father became the stuff of legend. It’s a long, but fantastic read. Here’s one of the more bizarre anecdotes, starting with this Howard Hughes-ish gem regarding how Marinovich beat the NFL’s drug testing (emphasis added):

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…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.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. And then do yourself another favor and brush your teeth, for Pete’s sake. Who’s Pete? The guy that said your breath smells like old camel butt.