Considering Josh Gordon is about to be reinstated into the NFL again, his promo game has been everywhere. Today, Sports Illustrated did a profile on him and his past, what he’s been through and his journey to this point and there were some interesting tidbits in the piece.
Most notably, how he he started doing drugs in the first place (in 7th grade) and how it progressed through the years.
Apparently, he was wilding out in high school, joining the Six Deuce Harvard Park Brim Bloods gang and carrying a gun every day in his bag. He was also taking lean, pills and doing everything. By the time he got to Baylor, he was selling weed in different cities in Texas and then getting kicked out.
Transcendence on the football field, though, gave him a way out. Gordon received scholarship offers from several top programs but ended up going to Baylor because his supervised probation on the credit card arrest precluded him from living outside of Texas. He returned to Houston from Waco once a month for drug tests and passed, he says, because no one ever flagged his diluted samples.
Two hundred miles, though, was not enough to extricate Gordon from the streets of Fondren. As a sophomore at Baylor he says he was receiving as much as six pounds of weed—vacuum-sealed and wrapped in Mylar, sprayed with kerosene and covered in coffee beans to mask the smell, shipped through U.S. mail—every week from a dealer back home. He would drive to Dallas, Austin and San Antonio to sell it, and he estimates he was bringing in upward of $10,000 in profit every month. He was arrested for possession in fall 2010 and one year later was indefinitely suspended for failing a school drug test.
The article also questions which stories that are being said are true and which are fake, considering there have been contradictory statements made to different outlets. As his manager puts it, his story will be told for money one day.
You can read the full piece over at Sports Illustrated.
OS REWIND: Josh Gordon Shares His Battle with Substance Abuse in New Documentary