Keith McCants, once the next LT, wants his life to serve as warning

[Toronto_Dirty_Bird]

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Quote:CLEARWATER, Fla. -- The greatest linebacker who never was picked up the phone. He was wearing what appeared to be gray pajamas with orange stripes. There was lettering on the back.

He rested his cane next to his artificial knee, leaned forward and looked into the camera.

“Learn from me,” Keith McCants said. “Learn from me!”

The fourth pick in the 1990 NFL Draft is broke. He’s fighting a drug addiction that has landed him in jail almost a dozen times.

Football has destroyed his 43-year-old body. Now it’s working on his mind.

“I have brain damage,” McCants said.

He wants to tell the world, so it doesn’t happen to the next great linebacker or point guard or aspiring anyone. That’s the only redemption for a life gone so wildly wrong.

McCants had pretty much faded into a trivia question, then I read about his latest jail stay last week in the Tampa Tribune. I called the jail and was surprised to find he was still eager to talk.

“Anybody coming out of college, they need to hear my story,” McCants said. “I will give them something to talk about that’s real.”

Just seeing him would make an impact. The Video Visitation Center is a large room with phones and small TV screens lining the wall. I was directed to Chair No. 4.

A few feet to my left, three people had circled close to the screen. They cried as they talked to a young man on screen.

To my right was a weathered lady wearing flip-flops. She kept loudly reassuring a prisoner that he probably wouldn’t be extradited for his latest offense.

The nearby parking lot was full of satellite TV trucks. Casey Anthony was in the same jail.

Jury selection was underway for the woman accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter. That meant I was waiting for the No. 2 celebrity on the jail’s roster.

McCants has been in since last month on an outstanding warrant from his hometown of Mobile, Ala. He failed to show up for a hearing on a controlled-substance charge.

He was in the Tampa Bay area, where his ex-wife and three children live. McCants has been arrested 11 times since 2002 on various drug-possession charges.

He says he’s been clean for eight months, but when police pulled him over last December they found a crack cocaine pipe in his vehicle. When he was stopped in February and asked for identification, police found a small packet of cocaine.

He pleaded guilty to those charges. The judge sentenced him to the 16 days he’d already served. Now McCants is waiting to see if he’ll be extradited to Mobile, a situation he says is just a “misunderstanding.”

If it sounds as if he’s making excuses, he is and he isn’t. McCants admits this is a bed he made for himself. But he was tucked in by agents, teams and a system that treated him as a commodity.

The details aren’t anything new. Poor kid from the projects. Raised by a single mother. Great athlete. Goes to college. Pampered all the way.

McCants became a superstar at Alabama. Agents circled.

“They weren’t just sharks,” McCants said. “They were piranhas.”

He naively trusted them. McCants signed with Lance Luchnick, who later pleaded guilty to violating Alabama’s agent-registration law.

The Bucs gave McCants a $7.4 million contract, with record $2.5 million bonus. There’d been rumors of a knee injury in his final days at Alabama. Sure enough, two days after signing he had surgery.

McCants never recovered the speed that had people calling him the next Lawrence Taylor. He switched from linebacker to defensive end. Tampa Bay cut him after three seasons.

His stats: 156 tackles, 12 sacks, one yacht, a fleet of cars, countless nights on the town and a mansion.

Seeing how he now resides in a 130-square-foot cell, I asked him how big his first house in Tampa Bay was.

“I can’t remember,” McCants said.

Was it largely a case of a poor kid overwhelmed by sudden wealth?

“Actually, it didn’t blow my mind,” he said. “It blew everybody’s mind around me.

“You’ve got all these friends and cousins and uncles and nephews coming around. You help them out. Then when I needed help, they weren’t anywhere to be found. They didn’t want to see me.”

He started needing help shortly after retiring in 1995. This is where a B.S. meter comes in handy because some claims are impossible to verify.

It’s not as if McCants is necessarily embellishing. He honestly doesn’t remember a lot of things. I asked him about the Bucs and playing for Sam Wyche.

“Is he dead yet?” McCants asked.

Those are the concussions talking. McCants said he had six of them in the NFL. He said he’s had 29 surgeries, mostly on his knees. The damage quickly piled up, but he missed only four starts in first four seasons.

“They didn’t even let me practice. They just said, ‘Go play in the game.’ If you don’t, they blackball you,” McCants said. “I played six years on one leg. That’s spectacular.”

One knee has been replaced. The other one is overdue. What can’t be implanted is a new brain.

McCants said he’s been diagnosed with clinical depression and will probably develop Alzheimer’s. He got quiet and started rubbing his eyes with his forearm.

It was as if talking about his mental condition derailed it. He struggled to form words, and I wondered whether I should tell the guard that a prisoner might be having a seizure.

After about five seconds, he snapped back. What happened?

“Concussions,” McCants said. “I can’t remember too much. Back then they took you out of practice and got you ready for the next game.

“Ask Brett Favre. Ask that boy in Dallas, I forget his name -- Aikman. They’ll tell you. And I was a defensive player. We got even less time off. We were supposed to deliver the hits and shake them off.”

This was long before the NFL set up concussion task forces and ex-players started bequeathing their brains to science. One player who didn’t have anything left to donate was Andre Waters.

“He was one of my best friends,” McCants said. “He blew his brains out. I’m not going to do that.”

His mind isn’t that far gone. As for the rest of him, McCants said the pain has literally imprisoned him. He became addicted to pain medication in the NFL. He said he was taking 185 pills a week when he retired.

“I’m not a junkie. I’m an addict,” McCants said. “I’m not taking drugs to get high. I’m not taking them to indulge. I’m taking them to relieve the pain.

“I’m not a hard-core criminal, where I go out and steal or break into houses or steal cars. That’s not my M.O. I wouldn’t have been caught by the police if I knew how to do that.”

When he realized he had no money?

“I still had some,” he said. “But I couldn’t remember where it was.”

If it existed, he couldn’t find it. He gets $1,100 a month in disability payments.

McCants was never homeless, but he’s lived as if he were. Those days are hazy to him. He was in drug rehabilitation centers. He said nothing worked until he started going to Solid Rock Christian Ministries in St. Petersburg.

“That’s the difference this time,” he said. “If God can’t do it, it can’t be done.”

He had called Solid Rock that day.

“I told them to reserve me a room,” McCants said.

He said he spends a lot of his day reading the Bible. My eyes did not roll, but he felt the need to produce a character witness. Another prisoner was walking behind him.

“Hey,” he said, “I want you to meet my friend Derrick.”

Derrick sat down and looked into the screen.

“We’ve got a lot of young men in here, and a lot of them are in sports real big,” he said. “To actually meet somebody who’s played and hear their story, he’s touched a lot of people.”

Derrick said he couldn’t think of a better time for more people to hear it, what with the NFL lockout. The football meat grinder has more protection now. But there will always be shysters and uncles and cousins and flunkies and temptations and kids who have no clue how to deal with it all.

It was all sitting on a screen in front of me in gray and orange.

“Line me up with a high school. Give me 45 minutes or an hour with those kids,” McCants said. “Whether they’re in the NFL or NBA or children, I want to help.

“In order to have something, you have to share something. That’s how I can help myself.”

Right then, the intercom boomed on and said visiting hours were over. I told McCants I’d try to help him help himself.

“I thank you,” he said. “Love you, man.”

He hung up the phone and hobbled out of the screen. A story still searching for a happy ending.

After reading this you can see why some of the players are screaming about the 18 game schedule and the whole safety issue.

[The Falcon Jedi]

These are the NFL stories nobody wants to read about.

[papachaz]

this is the kind of story that makes me say they're fighting over billions of dolllars, and a LOT of it needs to go to people like these, especially the ones who were taken advantage of by people they trusted. call me naive, i don't care, but guys like this need help

[Radical]

They need to implement strict policies on the type of helmets available to players. I don't give a flying f*ck if it doesn't look cool, it's protecting your BRAINS for fucks sake. I also like keeping the game to 16 games a season, simply because it helps maintain perspective when looking back through the years. Switching from 14 to 16 game seasons blew away a lot of pre-16 game records, and it skews the books.

[Gritz]

All good posts....


This story is like a living Public Service Announcement against an 18 game season. These are the fastest, strongest, most agile men in the world violently colliding against each other. It's greed and avarice in it's most stripped down form for Goodell and the owners to be trying to add 2 extra games to the schedule.

Anyone who supports that dumb shit idea should read this story about 20 times.

[karst41]

(05-22-2011 12:52 AM)The Falcon Jedi Wrote:  These are the NFL stories nobody wants to read about.

The NFL Rookie Symposium is one thing, but I guarantee you that
if every year the NFL took all of the Rookies to a county jail or a prison
that is holding some ex NFL Players, it would be eye opening.

You sit them down in a conference room and enter an ex NFL er who is
now a prisoner, and he tells them all how he got there.

This is why I am for a Rookie salary, Tenure Salary, and Retirement Disability.

A friend of mine who played in the NFL, took his money and put it into
several investment accounts. He also bought a modest condo, and lived off
of %40 of his annual interest.

His career was short (injury) but the boy done good in life.
He has had several small businesses, but never became mega wealthy.
Lives within his means and does not hurt for money.

[Drathdon]

They keep saying 18 games, but if you added another 2 weeks of byes into the schedule, you'd have that extra 2 weeks of TV revenue without anyone really being impacted. Plus it would help with safety. Why aren't they all going for that solution? It works for both sides.

[Beef]

I don't consider myself heartless, but I'm not near as sympathetic about this guy's problems and what he's gone through as some of you are.

Some people are just physically prone to injury and some aren't. There are thousands and thousands of guys who have played football for years and years, and taken hit after hit after hit to the head and have never had a concussion or the symptoms of one. Or have had a few, but nothing that would come close to causing them brain damage.

Does it happen to some? Absolutely. I think it happens to people who are susceptible to it, some worse than others. Same thing with pulled muscles, torn ligaments, broken bones, heart attacks, cancer, baldness, alergies, etc, etc. And if you're one of those people who are susceptible to something, it's not that hard to recognize that you are and take the action to avoid letting it do harm to you. And if you've got brain damage from concussions, then there's something very wrong with you in several ways for it to have gotten to that point.

People need to take responsibility for their choices and not make excuses or use the blame-game as a crutch when it becomes convenient. I find it hard to believe McCants didn't realize he was causing himself harm and that his body and mind wouldn't be effected at some point by all the extremely violent impacts and resulting injuries he was constantly suffering while he played.

My business partner played in the NFL for 4 years between 1992-96, made around $5 million dollars, blew his ACLs out in both of his knees, suffered at least 3 real concussions, chose to retire at age 27, and he is now a wildly successful financial advisor who weighs 190 lbs (down from 290 playing weight), runs in triathlons, has a beautiful family, and has never become addicted to pain medications even though he lives with pain every day. He still has and/or can account for nearly all of his original $5 million (plus what he's made since then) and has never had to go to jail for armed robbery or throw away time in substance abuse rehab.

McCants didn't have to keep playing football. He could have graduated college. He could have not spent all his money. He could have made dozens and dozens of other choices that prevented everything he's going through. But he didn't. And that's nobody's fault but his own. Not the owners. Not the league. Not the 16 or 18 game schedule. Not the design of helmets or protective gear. All those things have done fine by thousands of other players over the years who aren't going through what he is. The difference is, he made poor choices.

The NFL is a business to owners, a career to players, and entertainment to us fans. Sometimes people forget that it means different things to different people. So in my opinion, trying to use McCant's situation as an example why not to have an 18-game schedule is not practical. McCants is the way he is because he's susceptible to the health problems that ail him and he made poor choices.

There's plenty of people who have been dealt a ridiculously bad hand since they were born yet made the right choices to take a different path and live a better life. It's the people who physically CAN'T make choices or function properly without assistance that truely need help and need our sympathy. Not the ones who are capable but don't, and certainly not the ones who were capable but didn't and now they're so pitiful all they can do is blame others and use it as an excuse to continue getting worse.

I do respect the fact he wants to tell others about what he's going through so they can learn from his situation and try to avoid it. Everyone can have some kind of redeeming qualities and derive respect for something, but that doesn't get them off the hook.