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Post by boston09 on Aug 7, 2009 13:29:48 GMT -4
Young is the worst draft pick of all time! He makes Ryan Leaf look like an all pro.
Since you brought up Collins care to discuss his cigar incident?
Here is a story.
PRO FOOTBALL: There's Life Beyond Football; Having Hit Bottom, A Wiser Kerry Collins Picks Up His Career By BILL PENNINGTON Published: Monday, May 17, 1999
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Kerry Collins has seen the videotape of himself walking from North Carolina's Mecklenburg County Jail last November, a cigar in his mouth and a slight smirk on his face, four hours after his arrest for drunken driving.
Last week, he offered a self-analysis:
''What a dirt bag. I looked like a dirt bag. I mean, I did.''
The arrest, the scene outside the jail, Collins's apparent soulless impertinence, it was all as repugnant as it would have been inconceivable a year earlier.
Collins, a high school and collegiate all-American and a National Football League star by the time he was 24, saw his life unravel in swift and ignoble steps, a descent that transformed him from hero to cad while he was still just 25.
He ignited a racial firestorm with the use of a slur, albeit in jest, as he joked with black teammates on the Carolina Panthers. A reputation for late-night carousing was aggravated by the drunken-driving arrest. Then, the Panthers' coach announced that Collins had abandoned a reeling team by asking out of the lineup. That led to his outright release.
Collins is fond of summarizing his public tailspin by saying: ''I've been called a racist, a drunk and a quitter. Other than that, I'm fine.''
If his resume was suddenly crowded with demerits, it did not stop the Giants from believing there was a better Collins if examined in the whole. While other N.F.L. teams ignored him, the Giants signed the troubled Collins to a four-year, $16.9 million contract on Feb. 19 and set about helping him bring order to a life where there was only a developing chaos.
Three months later, and after an eight-week stay in a rehabilitation clinic, Collins believes he is poised to reclaim his past successes. More important, for the first time, Collins believes he will be capable of enjoying them.
Collins's life is a complex narrative, one in which the primacy of football contributed to a strikingly unconventional fracturing of a family. It is a tale in which Collins's identity as an athlete consumed his sense of self to the exclusion of everything else, a story where the pursuit of football distinction was painfully ordained -- even at the expense of Collins's relationships, most notably with his mother.
Collins's willing sacrifice and headlong chase ultimately produced success in his chosen profession. A little more than two years ago he was playing for a berth in the Super Bowl.
It was at that moment that Collins was the most depressed.
''The plan for my life had worked, I had it all -- fame, money, cars, N.F.L. stardom,'' Collins said in a long, emotional interview last week, hours after his first workout at the Giants' annual veterans' minicamp. ''The thinking had always been that everything I went through was going to be worth it if I ever made it this far. But when I finally got there, you know what I thought? I thought: 'It wasn't worth it.'
''I had everything and I had nothing.''
A Family of Four Is Rent Asunder
For Collins and his family, nothing really has been the same since a high school football practice 12 years ago.
The 1987 team at Lebanon High School that went to practice that October afternoon had lost three of its first four games despite all the potential so manifest in the 6-foot-5-inch body of the team's 14-year-old quarterback prodigy, Kerry Collins. The losing brought pressure in Lebanon, a gritty Pennsylvania town of 27,000, a onetime railway hub where the high school football games often drew crowds of 5,000.
There was an edge, an agitation as the coaches zealously led the team through a series of fierce exercises and then directed Collins to run a quarterback keeper during a full-contact scrimmage.
''The point was to punish us and the hitting had become vicious -- guys were foaming at the mouth,'' Corey Thomas, a Lebanon lineman and Collins's friend since kindergarten, said recently, his memory of the pivotal scrimmage vivid.
Thomas was part of the pileup that flattened Collins on the keeper.
''We heard something snap and Kerry start screaming,'' Thomas said.
Collins's left ankle was broken in two places. As Kerry screamed, his father, Pat, who was Lebanon's offensive coordinator, began yelling. A loud, bitter argument ensued between the elder Collins and the head coach, Hal Donley, over the keeper call -- whether it was thoughtless, reckless, even spiteful. It was a showdown between longtime coaches and onetime friends that people in Lebanon say had been building for years.
Pat Collins declined to be interviewed for this article, but Donley defended the drill, insisting that Pat Collins had approved it.
Several Lebanon players said they stood by uncomfortably as the coaches shouted, then suddenly saw Pat Collins turn from Donley toward Kerry, who was face down in the grass. Pat Collins reached down and picked Kerry up from the ground.
Father and son left the practice field and never returned to Lebanon High.
Two days later, over breakfast, Pat Collins told his wife, Roseanne, Kerry and Kerry's older brother Patrick, who was also a member of the Lebanon football team, that he wanted the family to move 30 miles east to West Lawn, Pa.
There Kerry could attend a school district with a far superior football program.
Roseanne Collins also declined to be interviewed for this article, but her sons said she was angrily against the family's moving simply for football. She defiantly refused to leave Lebanon.
Within a week, Pat Collins had rented a one-bedroom apartment in West Lawn, 40 yards from a noisy railroad trestle but just a half-mile down the hill from pristine Wilson High School, where Kerry could launch his dreams.
Roseanne, whose marriage to Pat would end in divorce a couple of years later, remained in Lebanon with Kerry's brother Patrick.
Pat and Kerry uncomfortably shared a cramped bedroom in the new, modest apartment, often eating take-out since neither cooked. Laundry was shuttled back to a grandmother in Lebanon, where Pat still worked as a teacher of children with disabilities.
Back inside the two-bedroom brick Cape Cod in Lebanon, there was an unsettling stillness. Patrick and Roseanne Collins were restless in their own bedrooms.
''The first couple of weeks after my dad and Kerry moved away were really pretty tough,'' said Patrick Collins, who replaced his brother as Lebanon's quarterback. ''But you got used to it. I just kept thinking, in the end, this would be the best thing for Kerry.''
A 40-minute drive to the east, Kerry began to will himself to the same way of thinking.
''I adopted an attitude that I had to forget about very strong relationships, even a relationship with my mother,'' Collins said last week. ''If I thought about how I'd barely had any relationship with her now, then I don't survive.''
Surviving meant making it to the N.F.L.
''That was the message sent,'' he said. ''It was worth it to break up the family to become a top-notch athlete. Kerry the quarterback mattered more than Kerry the person.''
Kerry led Wilson in three sports, pursuing an athletics-only course so completely that he was taunted for never hanging out late, never indulging when one of the guys had a six-pack of beer. A wild Saturday night for that Kerry Collins was an extra two quarters in the batting machine at the local range.
People in West Lawn got used to seeing Pat Collins at each of Kerry's games, even if always off in the distance, away from the bleachers and the rest of the parents. Roseanne Collins, whose marriage to Pat was rocky before the separation, was sighted more rarely.
''I've seen a lot of interaction between parents and kids,'' John Moyer, Wilson's longtime athletic trainer, said. ''But Kerry and Pat were almost like acquaintances. After a game, there was not a lot of huggy-feely stuff. It was: 'Good game. O.K., see you later.' That's it.''
Barb Heckman, one of Kerry's teachers at Wilson, said: ''You could see he lacked a woman's influence in his life. There are some things only a mother can give.''
Kerry wrote letters to his Lebanon friend Corey Thomas, letters Thomas has kept. They describe how depressed Kerry felt without his Lebanon friends and family.
''But I know he never lashed out,'' Thomas said. ''He never said anything to his dad or anyone.''
Kerry's final football game at Wilson was a loss in the state championship game. A scholarship to Penn State was waiting for him.
His time in Happy Valley was sometimes frustrating. He did not start until late in his junior year. But as a senior, he led Penn State to an undefeated season and a Rose Bowl victory.
With the fifth pick in the 1995 N.F.L. draft, Carolina, an expansion team, made him the first player in its history.
Immaturity, Wealth And Nobody to Say No
Collins's life could have come apart anywhere; it just happened to be North Carolina.
Almost everyone interviewed for this article, Collins included, thinks his problems of the last two years stemmed from a hazardous mixture: immaturity, wealth beyond anything he had known and a burgeoning confusion over football's positive or negative role in his life.
''Things at school had always been structured,'' Collins said. ''Then I was on my own with all this money and attention.
''I wanted to explore the other side of me, the guy who has nothing to do with football. It wasn't Kerry Collins the quarterback 24 hours a day. I wanted to let the other, fun guy out. Then I took it too far.''
Though he was an immediate star in Carolina, there were early signs of trouble. Privately, former teammates criticize him for spending too much time in Charlotte's nightclubs. Returning to the team's dormitory after a drunken binge on the final night of the Panthers' 1997 training camp, Collins tried to joke around with a group of black teammates in the hallway, using a racial slur and unwittingly creating the incident that became the preoccupation of the Panthers' season.
Collins apologized, tried to get people to understand how aberrant one remark was in the context of the rest of his life. Hadn't he invited a former teammate in college, a black running back, to live in his Charlotte house during tryouts that very month?
Most of his black teammates never forgave him.
Three days later, a brutal hit in an exhibition game broke Collins's jaw. The free fall had begun. When Collins was released from the hospital after several hours of surgery to wire his jaw shut, hospital attendants were perplexed that there was no one from the team there to drive him home. Collins had them call his housekeeper.
After an uneven 1997 season for the Panthers and Collins, Carolina opened last season by losing its first four games.
At 8 in the morning of Oct. 7, 1998, Collins walked into Panthers Coach Dom Capers's office. When Capers emerged from the meeting, he stunned his players with the announcement that Collins had said he no longer had the heart to lead the team.
Collins's teammates were repulsed.
''It's a hard thing for me to say, but he's quit on us,'' center Frank Garcia, one of Collins's friends, told reporters in the Carolina locker room. ''He jumped ship.''
Carolina released Collins six days later.
Contacted last week, Capers, now the defensive coordinator for the Jacksonville Jaguars, said he did not want to rehash the episode.
Collins refused to make any comment last week on his meeting with Capers. But when asked if he was fully aware of what he was doing when he met with Capers, Collins said: ''Through all the things that have happened to me, I have never pushed the panic button. Never.''
Collins was taken off the waiver wire for $100 by the New Orleans Saints, who in an unkind twist returned to play Carolina less than a month later. Booed and jeered throughout the Nov. 1 game, Collins stayed in Charlotte afterward, went to a party with some former teammates and was stopped by the police on the way home.
Patrick Collins called his brother after his arrest for drunken driving. ''I said to him, 'What the hell were you thinking?' ''
Kerry responded, ''I don't know what I'm thinking half the time anymore.''
A Season Of Self-Examination
Collins got the order to report to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., late last year. The N.F.L. wanted him there by Jan. 24, the beginning of Super Bowl week.
''I didn't want to go,'' Collins said. ''But I got to a point where I said to myself: 'If you don't start letting people help you, you're going to implode.' I went into rehab two weeks early.''
He went to group meetings, met with his counselors, read voraciously, wrote in a journal throughout the day.
''I checked Kerry Collins the football player at the door,'' he said. ''And he's a guy I had lived with since I was 14. I took eight weeks out of my life to concentrate solely on me and the problems I was carrying around.''
Collins came to grips with his inglorious stumble, saw that its roots went far beyond the last two tormented years.
''It's hard to make sense of your life when you don't have any sense of who you are,'' he said. ''People make football a game. I had it the other way around. Football made me.
''Todd Marinovich is a good example. He was brought up as an athlete his whole life. Couldn't go to Burger King and all that stuff. At some point, he started to look at the other side of who he was. And look at all the troubles he's had.''
In time, Collins not only accepted the message of this cautionary tale; more important, he believes, he stopped lamenting the pain of the lesson learned.
''I know I'm lucky to have the unique talent I have,'' he said. ''It gives me opportunities others don't have. I didn't see that two years ago. Was there a bit of a price to pay to get to where I am? For me, yeah, there was.
''Did it have an effect on me? Yeah, no doubt about it. Do I make any excuses about it? No.''
He stopped drinking alcohol, he says, though he believes his drinking only played a part in what he terms his erratic behavior.
''I was misusing alcohol, no question,'' he said. ''It played too much of a role in my life. And I know my quality of life has picked up since I stopped drinking.''
Months before Collins entered rehab, the Giants were surreptitiously monitoring him, compiling a dossier. They made a trip to Wilson High and sat down for hours with Gerry Slemmer, the school's principal and Collins's high school football coach.
Slemmer told the Giants all the stories about the Kerry Collins who made all the teachers smile and made all the coaches he played for look smarter.
Giants General Manager Ernie Accorsi had a personal vantage point. Accorsi grew up in Hershey, Pa., 12 miles west of Lebanon. His father had died in the hospital where Collins was born. He knew people there.
Accorsi had also worked for Penn State Coach Joe Paterno, a Collins mentor. Accorsi's daughter had shared a class with Collins as a Penn State student.
''We checked everything,'' Accorsi said. Paterno, among others, defended Collins's heart and character.
''I believe people with a good foundation who stray will revert to the strong foundation if given the chance,'' Accorsi said last week.
But how did the Giants get past the notion that Collins quit on the Panthers?
''I don't want to stick my nose in Carolina's business,'' Accorsi said. ''But I believe in case history, and when you look at what he's done from 14 years old on, you're not going to tell me he's not a competitor.''
Was It Worth It? No, but Life Goes On
Collins is the backup quarterback to Kent Graham on the Giants, which has helped him regain his professional footing largely out of the spotlight. He works out weekdays at Giants Stadium and has begun spending his weekends back in Lebanon, where both of his parents now live. Football may have brought another move for Collins, but home has never seemed closer.
''I love hopping in that car and being home in about two hours,'' he said. ''It's the most exciting thing in my life right now. I'm getting back to being a son to my mother, and that's a bond you can't replace with all the money and fame in the world.
''My mom gave me time. It took me a while, but I realize she knew I'd have to reach a certain point before we could get back together. We're rebuilding the relationship in stages.''
Estranged from his father for much of his time in Carolina, Collins is rebuilding their relationship, too.
''We wouldn't speak for a year at a time,'' he said. ''It was my doing. But we're O.K. now. I don't blame my father for anything.
''He knew my only chance at college was probably a football scholarship and he was trying to give me the best opportunity. My mom and dad were loving parents, doing the best they could.''
Seated in a New Jersey restaurant, more than two hours into examining the vicissitudes of his life, Collins was asked what he thinks of it all now, and was it worth it, the move, transferring schools, losing touch with his family?
''Well, that's the question, isn't it?'' he said.
He paused for several seconds.
''No,'' he finally answered. ''But you have to get past all that and say that's the way it was. Where am I now?''
Collins smiled.
''Football is fun again,'' he said. ''I'm 26. My relationships with my family are better. I've got as good an opportunity as you can get in life.''
It wasn't long ago that Collins didn't like what he saw in himself -- in the mirror or on videotape.
''No, that wasn't the guy I wanted to see,'' he said earnestly. ''I've worked on changing that.''
He laughed.
''I look at myself all the time now,'' Kerry Collins said. ''I've changed my opinion of myself just a bit.''
Photos: Kerry Collins, now a backup quarterback for the Giants, at the team's minicamp last week. Kerry Collins was arrested for driving runk last November. (Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times); Kerry Collins was arrested for driving drunk last November. (pg. D1); Gerry Slemmer, Collins's coach at Wilson High, recently told the Giants that Collins made all the teachers smile and all his coaches look smarter. (Sal DiMarco Jr. for The New York Times); Kerry Collins, right, led Penn State to an undefeated season and a Rose Bowl victory in 1994. His coach, Joe Paterno, left, has vouched for Collins's character despite the player's problems. (Steve Manuel); Collins led the Panthers within a game of the Super Bowl after an outstanding second N.F.L. season in 1996. The next fall, though, he was the center of a racial controversy and his play suffered. (Jose R. Lopez/The New York Times); After his father transferred him to Wilson High, in West Lawn, Pa., Kerry Collins became a star in a number of sports. To succeed in athletics while living away from his mother and older brother, however, ''I had to forget about very strong relationships,'' he said. (Reading Eagle/Times)(pg. D7)
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Post by boston09 on Aug 7, 2009 13:38:10 GMT -4
Battles with alcoholism
Before the 1997 season got underway, Collins' private battle with alcoholism started to make public headlines. In a highly publicized incident, on the last night of Carolina Panthers training camp in 1997, Collins used the offensive racial slur "black" in reference to Black teammate Muhsin Muhammad while in a drunken state at a bar in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Supposedly, Collins also inadvertently slurred offensive lineman Norberto Garrido, who is of Hispanic descent. This resulted in Collins being punched in the eye by Garrido. Collins had stated that, in his intoxicated state, he thought the use of the racial epithet would help him and his teammates bond.
On November 2, 1998, Collins was arrested for drunk driving in Charlotte, North Carolina. He finished the 1998 season in New Orleans and signed with the New York Giants as a free agent on February 19, 1999. Not long after signing with New York, Collins decided to seek treatment for his alcoholism. He entered a rehabilitation clinic in Topeka, Kansas.
While a member of the New York Giants, Collins remained in therapy for four years. As a member of the Tennessee Titans, he readdressed the 1997 racial slur incident, explaining that "The guys were talking to each other that way, and I was trying to be funny and thought I could do it, too. I was so upset by it. It was bad judgment. I could have been labeled a racist for the rest of my career. I had to live with the way I used that word with a teammate. Extremely poor judgment. I was naïve to think I could use that word in any context
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Post by Jake From Miami on Aug 7, 2009 13:39:01 GMT -4
Stephen Doyle, attorney for the charter company, said some of the sex acts alleged by witnesses to have taken place during the party included, "Masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, woman on man, woman on woman, man on man, toys, double penetration, middle of the floor, middle of the couches, middle of the room."
PURPLE PENIS EATERS!
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