Former Nebraska defensive end and NFL washout Jason Peter won't be jumping on the "Lou Holtz for prethident!" bandwagon anytime soon, holding as he does a lingering grudge toward the befuddled lisping former coach for the way he treated one of Peter's brothers when he was a recruit for Notre Dame. 

Damian Peter, a 6-foot-7, 300-plus pound offensive lineman from Middletown, N.J., was a member of Notre Dame's February, 1994 recruiting class. That summer, however, Peter was seriously injured in a swimming pool accident, breaking the C5 vertebrae in his neck. For several days, doctors feared he might never walk again.

According to Jason Peter, the author of "Hero of the Underground," Holtz did not call Damian or establish contact during the course of that summer.\

"I still wouldn't turn down the opportunity to spit in Lou Holtz's (bleeping) face," Peter writes in the book, which hit bookshelves on July 8. "Each Saturday in the fall when Holtz makes his jovial, dumb … remarks on ESPN, I hope he knows that there's at least one family on the other side of the screen, the Peter family, that knows what a — – — he really is."

I'm guessing "doddering old coot" isn't what's being elided over in that sentence, because every family in America is aware of that by now.  Perhaps "Betty White impersonator"? But how would only his family know that?Such deviants, those Peters.

Jason Peter was an All-America at Nebraska before the Panthers made him their #1 draft pick in 1998.  His injury-plagued career lasted only four years… but his drug abuse alone should be able to land him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  From Peter's new memoir:

When you swallow sixty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continue to use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined by dollar amounts but by the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure.

SI's Peter King followed up with an interview:

Vicodin. Ambien. Cocaine. Crack. Heroin. GHB, the date-rape drug. Lots of others I've never heard of… Nights and weeks with prostitutes so numerous … well, so numerous that his Madame at a high-rolling Manhattan brothel ran out of girls for him…

It got to the point, he told me, "where it was easier to buy five eight-balls of cocaine than it was to buy 500 Vicodin.'' That's what led to the rampant drug use.

That's what's so great about cocaine: you don't need a prescription.  Of course, it would be wrong to lionize Peter just because he took lots of drugs and used every whore in a brothel… but you've gotta admit, that sounds pretty cool.  Normal people don't survive that.  It's like they cross-bred Amy Winehouse with Secretariat.