My Dark Side of the NFL

Download or read book My Dark Side of the NFL written by Keith Alvin McCants and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-11-10 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I heard all about fame and fortune as a star linebacker playing for my beloved Alabama Crimson Tide. I suited up with Derek Thomas, the best damn defensive end that I've ever seen. We broke our backs and dripped our sweat on the same set of stadium steps. I was an elite linebacker from Alabama. Hell, that's damn near royalty when it comes to football. I'm not sure when disappointment replaced excitement for me. Maybe it was on draft day 1990, when I believed I should have gone off of the board first, or maybe it was on the sidelines, while a NFL coach towered over my injured body and screamed at me to get back into the game. All I know for sure is that it left and there was a giant gaping hole just waiting to be filled by something. That something for me took the form of drugs. Drugs that I had never even heard of before until I stepped inside of a NFL locker room. My assent on the path to fame and fortune was fast, like a missile being launched into space. The decline was much slower, like a snowball rolling down a mountain. It grew larger and larger in size and speed. Eventually it reached the bottom of the mountain and crashed leaving my dreams smashed and broken. This is they story about my journey into the NFL, but it is much more than that. This is a story about a kid, who lost his innocence long before he was a multimillionaire. It's about secret conversations and pill lines. It's about playing injured and seeing my friends lost to the newfound phenomenon of CTE. Dreams are born and dreams die, and sometimes like in my case, they are stolen. I'm Keith McCants and this is my story.