I didn't realize that anything like this was going on with former UT QB Ainge. Makes more sense now why he didn't turn into the star that a lot of people anticipated.
http://sports.espn.go.com/new-york/columns/story?columnist=cimini_rich&id=6267822To sum up, he started doing drugs at age 11. His drug of choice has changed over time from the standard (marijuana in middle school) to hard drugs (heroine and coke) to pain killers (said he was taking 25 percosets ever 5 hours which is almost unbelievable to me) while at UT and then to alcohol. He is now 8 months sober.
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It got worse in high school and even worse in college. By the time I was a senior in college, I was an addict. I played my whole senior season with a broken finger on my throwing hand. It was really badly broken. Just taking the snap, throwing the ball, handing it off, getting tackled -- everything that goes along with playing quarterback -- it was very painful.
Throughout that process, I became hooked on pain killers. I got them from the team doctor. I went through the prescriptions pretty fast. After he had been giving them to me for quite a while, he said he couldn't give them to me anymore.
I was hooked on them and I was playing football, and there was no way I was going to cancel my senior year by going to rehab. I started getting them from people, buying them, getting them off the street. I wasn't the only player on the team that was doing it, so we knew people. It wasn't, like, super sketchy or anything. We knew people who had them, and we were Tennessee football players, so they pretty much just gave them to us.
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