Marcus Allen knew and tried to help. So is Howie Long. But many of Todd Marinovich's Los Angeles Raiders teammates in the early 1990s had no idea their young quarterback was using drugs.
Marinovich comes to the Raiders from the University of Southern California, where he led the Trojans to a Rose Bowl victory as a freshman. By then, he already had two nicknames: “Robo Quarterback,” in honor of the legendarily demanding training regimen instilled by his father, former Raiders player and assistant coach Marv Marinovich, to promote athlete excellence. Another nickname was much more unflattering: “Marijuana-witch”, for his marijuana smoking, which became a taunt from opposing fans in high school. When Marinovich reached NFLHe abused more than just marijuana.
“I couldn’t lift my head after another binge of ecstasy, cocaine and alcohol,” he writes about one ominous morning in his new memoir. Marinovich: beyond football, art and addiction. “My body looked like the Tin Man.”
Who picked him up for training that day? It was “a bug-eyed Marcus Allen looking impatiently at his watch” and then “returning to his idling hot Lamborghini.”
For some time, the rising star's problem with drugs was kept secret. Until it didn't, when a third failed urine test the following season, in 1992, left Marinovich unable to leave the team.
“I watched these guys my whole life—I was their equal now,” Marinovich says of Raiders teammates (and former Trojans) Allen, Long, Ronnie Lott and Ricky Ellison. “I didn't want to let them down. However, I had things to do that I couldn't share with them.”
Although he would enjoy a brief career resurgence in the Arena Football League as the team's rookie, his once seemingly glamorous life degenerated into further drug abuse and its consequences under the law: “Over the next three decades, I suppressed my inner hatred through a range of drugs, including ecstasy, acid, cocaine, heroin, crack and methamphetamine in lethal doses to disconnect from internal suffering,” he writes. The memoir was co-written by writer Lizzie Wright, who sees it as more than just a sports biography.
“It’s a story with so many things going on,” she says. “It's so difficult.” She notes Marinovich's emotional awareness and his long-standing passion for art – one of his paintings is in the book.
Wright's husband, Steve, is a former NFL player himself. In fact, he was the offensive lineman who protected Marinovich for the Raiders. Lizzie Wright helped her husband write his memoirs. Everything went so well that Steve Wright recommended it to Marinovich as a co-author.
Now that the book is finished, Marinovich says, “It's almost like talking about another life.”
In college, USC's dramatic victory over Washington State prompted a phone call from then-President Ronald Reagan. Marinovich's years with the Raiders were marked by R-rated nights and drugs in Los Angeles. His youth came to the fore when he started at center in the 1991 NFL playoffs, becoming the first rookie to do so for the Silver and Black. During this period of his life, the defender hung out with celebrities such as Flea and Charlie Sheen.
“Thank God for Lizzie,” Marinovich says. “She did all the hard work. She made my task easier. [did] what a next-level teammate does for me: help you, help you, get the best out of you.”
“Todd's rise to fame is amazing,” Wright says. “He was the best high school athlete in the country to come out of high school. Won the Rose Bowl his freshman year. First sophomore in history to declare for the NFL Draft. He had to have his own team because he was too young. That's the Doogie Howser of football.”
Still, she adds, there was “so much pressure” and “needing medication to get through it becomes a vicious cycle. How do you get out of it? How do you untangle it? It's almost impossible.”
Long after Marinovich's return to the Arena Football League, he got another chance at football in 2017 at age 48, first coaching defensive backs and then becoming a signal caller to throw seven touchdowns in a semi-pro game. He allowed the game to be declared his first doping-free match in 33 years. In fact, he writes, he was still using: “The moment the drugs entered my system, I was fucked, losing another round in a dogfight to stay clean.”
Throughout the book, Marinovich spares no detail. You'll learn all about how he faked NFL drug tests using other players' urine samples, and the time he wore blackface while performing as Jimi Hendrix at one Halloween party, which he now regrets.
Still, there are some silver linings, including Marinovich's love of art, which he says helped save him. His paintings are now decorating the Raiders' art gallery – yes, the Raiders have an art gallery – in their new home in Las Vegas.
Marinovich regrets wasting the patience of longtime Raiders owner Al Davis, who died in 2011. Seeking to redeem himself, Marinovich tracked down Davis' son, current Raiders owner Mark Davis, at a Palm Springs restaurant. Mark Davis warmly welcomed Marinovich back to the Silver and Black alumni family and displayed his celebrity portraits at Allegiant Stadium. The reader is presented with one image of Johnny Cash smoking a cigarette. Marinovich also painted portraits of Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and his old teammate Allen.
Wright calls art one of the “departments where you can almost detach yourself from yourself and find peace. There's a freedom associated with art. I think it's something interesting to tap into.”
Art helped forge other, more personal relationships. In the final years of Marv Marinovich's life, as he battled Alzheimer's disease, the once famous rival father and his son were involved in a creative collaboration. Marinovich says his father didn't quite recognize him when the illness struck, but knew they had a special partnership.
“Many people don’t know that Marv was an extremely creative artist and sculptor,” Marinovich says. “We got to create together, two artists doing what we did. There wasn't much talking, just the rhythm was better and he liked doing it with me…Who would have thought that art would actually almost take us to another level?”
Other parts of the narrative were more difficult for Marinovich to discuss with Wright. This includes his numerous arrests over the years.
“The last thing I want to start the day with is talking about arrests,” Marinovich says. “It's awkward. I know it's been hard on my family.”
In 2000, Marinovich was arrested for sexual assault—the district attorney later decided not to charge him, and Marinovich denies the allegations in his book. Years later, in 2016, he was arrested for drug possession while naked. Marinovich writes that the reason he was naked was because he was skinny dipping in what he believed was his relatives' swimming pool. This is wrong.
“From my point of view,” Wright says, “to write about arrests, I think you have to be honest about everything. Some books try to minimize the bad, focus on the positive,” an approach she calls “unrealistic and dishonest.”
Marinovich says he's in a good place now. Living in Hawaii, he watches his own children grow up in the arts that have been his mainstay and speaks out about the dangers of drugs in hopes of helping the next generation.
“I'm trying to find a balance,” he says. “I need to practice every day—practice doing the right thing, being honest, helping someone else.”
