I DON’T KNOW why it was so difficult for me to find a male role model when I was growing up. Living in a maternal society seemed to be endemic to the African American community. I was not immune. After my biological father, Marvin, abandoned us, I found out that a total of sixteen other children called him father. He was dad to Tamela, Moses, and me, and over the years I met Marcus, Michael, Sheena, Tina, President, Marvelous, Marcella, and Christopher. There are six others, all very young. I don’t know what to tell you, except that it’s nuts. I have no animosity. They’re still my brothers and sisters.
Sam, who next came into our lives, couldn’t keep moving over and over again with my mother, and he eventually dropped away. Tom, as I have said, was a con artist, and because of him Mom turned Moses and me over to my grandparents to raise.
I loved my grandfather George Lofton dearly, but he was so negative and unsupportive that in all the time I lived with him, I don’t recall him ever uttering an encouraging word.
Grandpa was a seaman. All his life he traveled on boats, working on container ships and seeing the world. He’d be away for months at a time, sometimes for as long as a year. When he was home he’d say to me, “I don’t care about your playing sports. Get an education. I’m going to have to pay for you to go to school. All I care about is that you get that piece of paper,” meaning a diploma.
During my entire four-year high school career, he never came to one of my games.
I begged him and begged him. He would always leave me the same phone message: “I don’t care about you playing football. All I care about is your getting an education.”
I would be so mad at him.
As a high school kid all I heard from him was “You can’t.”
I spent my entire high school career proving him wrong.
“You know what, Pop,” I’d say. “You won’t have to pay for anything. I promise you that. I’m going to get a scholarship to go to college.”
IT WAS BECAUSE of my grandparents that for the first time in a long time I had some stability in my family life, but I also continued to pursue the street life that allowed me to live better than the average ghetto resident. Because the streets were controlled by gangs from the various neighborhoods, I often carried a gun for my protection. Everyone had them. You didn’t go to Dick’s Sporting Goods to buy your piece. You didn’t go to a pawnshop. You knew someone who had a gun for sale, and you bought it sight unseen without knowing the gun’s history, whether it was ever used in a crime. Your gun was your last line of defense in case someone tried to rip you off in a drug deal or rob you on the street.
You also had to protect yourself from drive-by shootings. If a gang from another neighborhood drove into our territory and shot it up, we’d duck and run, and then we’d go and shoot up theirs. I did that a couple of times. I don’t think I ever hit anyone, although I never waited around long enough to find out.
Life in the ghetto could be short, in part because there were so many guns around. In high school I lost a friend who was murdered by one of my closest friends. My cousin Black got into an argument over a football jersey with my friend Carlos, and when Black threatened him, Carlos pulled a gun and shot him dead.
Whenever you went to someone else’s neighborhood, you took your gun with you. I lived in the Fifth Ward, and my friends and I were wary if we saw someone we didn’t know walking our turf. That person might be an undercover cop or someone selling drugs who wasn’t supposed to be doing that in our territory.
Likewise, if I was walking down the street in another ward and saw a group of guys standing together on the corner, I’d turn the corner and walk down an alley. If they saw me, they’d want to know, “Where are you from?”
I wouldn’t answer. I’d just keep walking, faster and faster.
“Hey, hey, hey,” they’d say, and you’d look back and break into a jog. The jog would turn into a sprint, and then it would become a full-out run. Fortunately, I was faster than just about anybody in Houston.
In the part of the city where I was growing up, I would wonder, Is there anyone I know not selling drugs? Who are the positive role models working a regular job? Who has a degree?
Until I was about eighteen I couldn’t think of anyone except for my grandparents—my grandfather worked in shipping and my grandmother worked in a hospital—and my mom, who had been a security guard. And my teachers.
Looking back, I realize I easily could have ended up six feet under. My brother Moses and I turned out to be among the lucky ones.
AFTER I MOVED in with my grandparents, I went to Milby High School, an inner-city school in southeast Houston. The middle schools I attended had mostly African American students. Milby was 95 percent Hispanic, the rest African American. African Americans and Hispanics were wary of one another.
I got into a lot of fights at Milby. When I arrived there as a freshman, I asked myself, Do I really want to be here?
It was one of the crossroads of my life. I could have gone either way. It would have been very easy for me to drop out of school and turn to selling drugs full-time. But I had two things going for me. I was a good student, and I was an exceptional athlete. I could run like the wind, and I could jump higher than just about anyone in the school.
I played sports because of my older brother Moses, who was one of the most kindhearted, compassionate guys I’ve ever known, especially when it comes to family. When I was a kid, Moses, who was a year older than me, was my hero. He was the guy I always wanted to be like. Since I didn’t have that father figure, he was the one I always followed. If he went somewhere, I wanted to be with him. If he played a sport, I wanted to play the same sport with him.
Moses was the first one to play football. I wanted to play because he played it, and of course my dad had played it. And when Moses started to play basketball, I wanted to play it, too, because I wanted to follow in his footsteps.
My brother Marvin was one of the best high school basketball players I ever saw. He probably would have gone to the pros, but then at Milby High he broke his leg. After that he lived his dreams through me, and I lived my dreams through him, because of the relationship we had. We have a bond that will never be broken. Right now he’s a lieutenant on the staff of a state penitentiary in Texas.
Sports gave me purpose and allowed me to graduate with a degree and go on to bigger things. When I was a little kid Moses and I ran for the Wings AAU track team. In high school I high-jumped, long-jumped, triple-jumped, and ran on the relay team. I was pretty fast but I didn’t become world class until I got to college.
In baseball I was an outfielder and swung the bat pretty good. I’d get on base, and then steal another. In basketball I was the varsity center because even though I was only five foot ten, I could jump higher than anyone else on the team. The Milby basketball team made the playoffs the four years I was there. My teammates played college ball at some of the smaller Division IAA and Division II schools. I did set one Texas high school record: I was responsible for fifty-three charges in one season. An opposing player would run into me as I guarded the basket, I’d hit the deck, and a charging foul would be called on him. I doubt that record will ever be broken.
It was in football that I really shone. My freshman year I was a running back on the junior varsity, but when the varsity team made the playoffs head coach Mike Truelove brought me up as a wide receiver. It was a smart move on his part. I only weighed a hundred pounds, but I was so fast no one could catch me. In a game against Austin, I was open and would have scored a touchdown, but I had no experience and dropped the pass. I should have caught it, but I never even touched the ball. It was a lesson: I needed to learn how to catch the football.
My biological father helped me do that. One of the side benefits of playing football was that it gave me the chance to reconnect with my dad. I was living in his parents’ home, and so my dad would come and visit periodically, and he and I’d go out back and play catch. Dad had had a bunch of kids with different mothers, and he was trying to be a father to them, so I appreciated his taking the time to spend time with me.
I derived a great deal of joy from having dad throw the football to me in the backyard. He still had a great arm, and it gave me the opportunity to practice catching bulletlike passes from a quarterback who could really wing it.
My dad and I never had as loving a relationship as I would have liked, but we always had a bond through football, and it continued all the way through my college career.
• • •
EVEN AS AN adult, I am conflicted about my relationship with my father.
We’ve had rocky times, but I will always support him. In 2008, he was harassed by police officers in Houston. No one knows exactly what happened.
My father said he was at my grandmother’s house. He was getting ready to leave—but he saw the police. So he decided not to leave and pulled the car back into my grandmother’s driveway and planned to wait until they left. The police came anyway. They asked him for his identification and all that. Why? No one knows. Keep in mind, most of the Houston police know who my dad is and know my family pretty well. My family sold drugs throughout my childhood; we were all dealing drugs or stealing cars. My dad, uncles, aunts, cousins. No one in my family besides my grandparents worked a normal job; everyone else was in the streets.
So the police came after my father. I don’t know if they asked him if he had anything or what. They said he was resisting arrest; he said he wasn’t. He said they hit the top of his head when they threw him in the back of the squad car. He said he barely remembered anything after that, just that he was floating in and out of consciousness. He remembers the cops took him to a store, and, according to my dad, made him take some crack cocaine. They were trying to stuff it into his mouth—that was the story he gave me.
My dad is a diabetic, and everyone said by the time he got to the police station, he was unconscious. He had completely blacked out in the backseat. That’s why he was rushed to the hospital. Doctors got him breathing and put him on oxygen. Of course, while he was in the hospital they said my father had crack cocaine in his system, and that he had put it there.
The thing is, my dad had never taken drugs before—so why would he put crack cocaine in his system? Everybody had their side of the story.
The police internal affairs investigators didn’t know exactly what happened, and my dad’s attorneys tried to challenge it. I told my dad I would help him to find out the truth. The thing that got me about the whole thing was that the police were coming after me—through my father.
I jumped on a private plane with Tina to fly down there. The media was waiting at the airport but I continued on to my dad. The doctors took the breathing tube out of his mouth so he could breathe on his own again. He told me that one of the cops said, “Yeah, I didn’t like your son anyway.” My dad said this cop, whoever he was, had gone to school with me and he didn’t like me. He was telling my dad that—as he was beating him up. My dad said that was one of the last things he remembered before they bashed his head against the car and he passed out.
A day later I went back and looked after my dad. He was still in the hospital but was improving. However, his story changed. It became “The hospital had me all drugged up from different things.” That was when I thought, Okay, maybe Dad doesn’t remember things exactly the way they happened.
The thing is, my dad didn’t want me to spend money to find out what the truth was, so he decided to just drop the case against the police. And that’s about where we left it. He was never found guilty. The way it stands now, I still have my questions. I’m going to believe my father. Of course I will. He could be telling the truth. To this day, he says he remembers the cops giving him crack cocaine and the police mentioning my name when they were beating him up—because the cops didn’t like me.
It’s not the only time that my past life, and what I did in my youth, have come up. Sometimes it makes life very, very complicated.
MY MILBY HIGH SCHOOL football team made the playoffs my freshman and sophomore years, but we were never a powerhouse the way we were in basketball. My junior year we didn’t win a single football game, and we finished 6-4 when I was senior.
We had a handful of great players, but as a team we weren’t very good. Our quarterback was Andre Credit, whom I was close to all through high school. Andre and I made for a devastating combination. He would throw it up, and I would leap or dive or run to catch it.
We scored a lot of touchdowns, especially in our last year together, when I was a junior and he was a senior, but it still wasn’t good enough for us to win games. I was one of the top pass catchers in Texas football my senior year—in one game I caught three touchdowns—but we weren’t the sort of team that college coaches would come and scout. No one came to look at me that I can remember.
My grandmother has a scrapbook full of clippings of me making diving catches and scoring touchdowns, but I have never looked at it. I had caught twenty touchdown passes my senior year, but it didn’t occur to me that I was a great athlete—that didn’t happen until I made it in the NFL. All I cared about was making my grandfather happy, using sports—football, basketball, or track—to gain a scholarship to college. My goal was to be the first child on my father’s side to go to college, but my intention was to get there because of my education and not because of sports. Oh, like most kids I could dream. As far back as middle school, when I ran track for the Wings track team, I thought about becoming a track star and taking my family out of poverty. When I got older, I heard about the possibility of getting drafted by the pros, but I didn’t know how possible that really was. I wasn’t that big into football when I was in high school. I played it, but I didn’t study it. A lot of kids today watch sports, sports, sports all the time on TV or their iPad. When I was a kid I wasn’t a big TV watcher. I was always in the streets.
Different guys in high school would ask me, “What are you planning on doing?”
“What are you talking about?” I’d ask them.
For me sports was a means to gain an education. I figured I’d graduate from college and work for one of the big accounting firms when I graduated.
Maybe one day I’ll own a big accounting firm, I posited.
That was where I was heading. In high school I never thought seriously about playing in the NBA or in the NFL. But I could dream. Yes, I would say to myself, Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. If the opportunity comes, I’ll make the best of it. But in high school I was using sports to get that scholarship to go to college so I could say to my grandfather, “Yeah, I told you so. You’re not going to have to pay to send me to college. And I will have a degree.”
It was only after I got to college that I got serious about my education. I played football in college, and I dreamed of making it in the pros, but I also knew that dreams don’t always come true. I knew that if I got a great education no one could ever take that away from me.
UP UNTIL THE fall of my senior year of high school I suffered deep disappointment because it appeared that no college was interested in recruiting me except Alcorn State, an all-black college located somewhere in Mississippi. Andre Credit, my quarterback at Milby High, had gone to Alcorn, and he had told the coaching staff to come down and look at me, which they did. The head coach and offensive coordinator drove to Houston to meet with me and my grandparents.
The coach, Carnell Jones, gave me a booklet about the Alcorn State football team. Quarterback Steve McNair was on the cover.
“You know,” Jones said, “McNair is up for the Heisman. We’re a passing school. If you come to us, we’re going to get you the ball a lot.”
He also offered me a full scholarship.
One day not long afterward I came home from school and noticed my grandmother going through the mail. For our extended family Grandma was the central post office. Uncle Bubba, whose real name was Marion, had his mail sent to her address. Uncle Winston had his mail sent to her address. Aunts and uncles, too. A lot of the family’s mail went to her.
“Quickie,” she said to me, “I keep getting all these letters for Donald Driver. I don’t know this person. Who is Donald Driver?”
I was taken aback.
“What did you say, Grandma?”
She held up a stack of envelopes two inches thick.
“See,” she said. “Donald Driver, Donald Driver, Donald Driver.”
“Granny,” I said, “I’m Donald Driver.”
“Your name is Quickie Jerome Driver,” she said.
My whole life she had never called me anything but Quickie. No one else called me Donald, either. I was known by everyone as Quickie.
“Granny,” I said, “my given name is Donald Jerome Driver.”
In a box was a stack of letters from college coaches inquiring whether I would be interested in accepting scholarships. There were letters from some big schools—the University of Miami, Texas A&M, and the University of Michigan—plus actual scholarship offers from schools like the University of Arkansas, Arkansas State, Western Missouri, Blinn Junior College, and other small schools and junior colleges.
I had had my heart set on going to the University of Miami, but Miami hadn’t offered me a scholarship.
February 2 was the signing date. It was also my birthday. Miami didn’t call, but Alcorn State did, and I agreed to accept their scholarship offer.
Not long afterward I got calls from Miami and Texas A&M offering me full scholarships.
I wanted to go to Miami very badly, but I had already told Alcorn I was going to go there. I was still considering Miami when my grandfather said to me one day, “Son, I want you to go to a black college. I’m not sure how you’re going to be treated if you go to an all-white school. Make my dream come true. Please go to a black college.”
Grandpa had been kind enough to let us come live with him, and I didn’t want to let him down. I spurned Miami and accepted the scholarship to Alcorn State. In the fall of 1994 my grandmother and my uncle Winston drove me to Lorman, Mississippi, the home of Alcorn State University, a country school in the middle of absolutely nowhere. How country was it? There was not a single McDonald’s or Burger King or any other fast-food restaurant in the entire town. If you wanted groceries, you had to drive fifteen minutes to Port Gibson.
Because of her work schedule, my grandmother dropped me off at my dorm two days before the rest of the freshman football players arrived. Fortunately, Andre Credit, my old QB at Milby, was there, or else I’d have been the loneliest kid on campus. Andre had grown up with me at Milby, and Goree White, who played football with me in high school and was also on the Alcorn team, grew up with me in the Fifth Ward. Goree and I would room together throughout my college career.
When practice began, I was privileged to play on the same team with Steve McNair, who at the end of the year was drafted in the first round by the Houston Oilers. During practice, Steve threw me a pass that I caught, and as the defender was coming up to tackle me, I pointed as though I were instructing one of my offensive linemen to block him, and when the defender went for the ruse, looking to see who was coming, I made a spin move, got around him, and scored. I was amazed the move worked. It also gave me an idea I could play on the college level.
The fall of my freshman year was also when I went bald. It wasn’t my choice—at first. It was the week of freshman hazing for the football players. One of my freshman roommates was a linebacker and he had been growing his dreds since he was a baby. The upperclassmen didn’t care. They shaved it all off. When they came for me on receivers’ night, I was helpless to do anything. They grabbed me, held me down, and cut off all my hair.
I would walk around campus, and the students would see my bald head and say, “You’re obviously a freshman.” But I got a positive response from the girls on campus. They liked it.
“You look cute with your bald head,” a number of girls said to me.
I’m not stupid. I’ve been bald ever since.
FRESHMAN YEAR I also fell in love. We used to have fraternity dance contests called step shows, and I was walking back to my dorm from one of these step shows when I ran into a very beautiful coed named Alandra, who looked like Betty Boop. When you fall for someone so attractive, you sometimes think she’s the right person. We started dating, and she could be a terrific person, but there was something wrong with her. She could be happy one moment, and five minutes later she’d just turn mean.
Being what I considered to be a good man, I was thinking I could fix it.
I really care about her, I thought to myself. I can make her change.
She would talk to me about the abusive relationships she had had, and I suppose because I was a football player, she figured I’d be abusive, too. But I wasn’t one of those men who hit women. I suspect it was what she wanted me to do, but I never would give in to her.
She would pick fights, but I would never engage her. If she tried to hit me I’d hold her down until she calmed down.
The summer after my freshman year she came home with me to Houston. We lived at my mom’s house.
One day Alandra became angry.
“I’m tired of this,” she said. “I’m leaving.”
“Okay,” I said. “You can leave if that’s what you want.”
“Why aren’t you mad?” she wanted to know.
“I’m not mad,” I said. “If you want to go back to Mississippi, go back to Mississippi.”
She swung at me, and I held her down on the bed until she calmed down. My mom ran in to see what the commotion was all about.
“My son is not going to hit you,” she said. “If you can’t deal with that, then you need to get out of this.”
Alandra left and went to stay with one of my mom’s friends for a week. We worked it out and got back together.
“I’m not the type of guy you’ve been with,” I told her. “I’m not going to hit you. I’m not going to degrade you. That’s not me.
“You found a good man,” I continued. “If you don’t want that, you have to make a choice.”
It wouldn’t be too long before Alandra made that choice.
I CONTINUED TO deal drugs at college, and here’s why. The summer after my freshman year, I’d briefly worked at the Family Dollar store, earning minimum wage, and then I went to work in a factory on an assembly line. I made pipes, putting on a coil, screwing it in, and painting it. I worked from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon at this mindless task, and for my efforts I was paid a grand total of eight dollars an hour. At the end of the week I was lucky if my paycheck amounted to two hundred dollars after they took out taxes. By the end of the summer I had made up my mind that I no longer could do a job like that. I realized that working a normal nine-to-five job was not something I wanted to do. When a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to work at the Burger King down the street from my grandmother, I thanked him but firmly told him no.
After freshman year I returned to the streets, continuing to sell drugs and to steal cars until it was time for me to return to college for my sophomore year. I was no longer selling for J.R. I was working for myself.
I realized that the drug of choice at Alcorn State was marijuana, so I switched to selling that, and I was glad I did. If I had gotten caught selling harder drugs, I would have faced real time. The penalty for marijuana wasn’t nearly as harsh, though it wasn’t exactly light, either.
I felt differently about dealing drugs in college than I did in high school once I became a varsity athlete. When I was in high school I knew that if I got caught with drugs, I was only going to a juvenile facility. Maybe I’d have done a year or two. When I got to college and became a star athlete, I realized I could seriously jeopardize my career if I get caught with marijuana or alcohol or was arrested for drunken driving. As a result I was more afraid in college than I was when I was in high school or middle school. I went to great pains to make sure I knew whom I was selling to.
I WENT INTO a partnership with Goree White, my friend and roommate, and another friend, Benny. We’d buy a large supply of marijuana, and after we sold it, we’d split the money three ways.
No one in my family knew I had money. My dad gave me five hundred toward the purchase of a beat-up Oldsmobile. I put up the other five hundred, and then I spent a grand on tires and rims. I put an expensive sound system inside it. I bought nice clothes, and I threw parties for my teammates and friends. As fast as the money came in, that’s how fast it went out. Drug dealers don’t put their money in the bank, buy stocks, or open an individual retirement account.
I only tried using marijuana once in college. I smoked a joint and afterward all I wanted to do was eat! And sleep.
Is this what it does? I wondered. I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was.
I never smoked it again.
But I sold it. Pounds and pounds of it.
I was never arrested—never even close—in college, but I did get robbed a couple of times. One time I went into a club and someone broke into my car and stole all of my stuff, including my stash of marijuana.
Another time two guys came to my dorm room and knocked on my door. I had just gotten back from Houston, and I was bagging up the marijuana. I opened the door.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Hey, man, you got something for us?” one of them asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your name is Quickie, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t have anything,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I didn’t know them, and I wasn’t about to be caught in a sting. I closed the door and they left.
Twenty minutes later they knocked again and I opened the door.
“Goree told us this is where we can come,” one of them said.
Goree was my roommate, and I figured Goree had sent them, so stupidly I let one of them in. I told the other guy to stay outside. I turned my back to my prospective buyer when I went to lock the door, and when I turned around the guy had pulled a gun on me.
“Where’s the money?” he barked. “Where’s the marijuana?”
I pointed to the table.
“It’s right there, dummy,” I said.
“Bag it up,” he said.
I just looked at him. If he wanted it, he was going to have to bag it himself.
My gun was in my bag, but I wasn’t about to reach for it. I thought, You’re either going to shoot me, or you’re going to run out of here before I shoot you.
“You gotta have something,” he said.
I had four hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana already bagged up. He grabbed that and two large piles of loose marijuana that I hadn’t yet bagged.
He pointed the gun at me, unlocked the door while facing me, and walked out the door. He and his buddy took off down the hallway.
I ran and got my gun with the intention of going after them, but I realized it wasn’t worth having a shoot-out inside the dorm. I chased them, but all I could do was watch as they jumped into their car and took off.
AT ALCORN STATE I participated in football, the sport I loved, and track, the sport in which I was gifted. The track coach discovered me in the gym shooting hoops early in my sophomore year. He walked by as I dunked the ball. I was wearing flip-flops when I did it.
He figured with my leaping ability I’d be a natural in the broad jump, the high jump, and the triple jump. I also performed in the decathlon, a grueling two days of running, jumping, and throwing things like the shotput and the javelin. I was very good at all those disciplines. At Alcorn State I was the Southwestern Athletic Conference indoor and outdoor champion in the long jump, triple jump, and decathlon. I was named the outstanding field performer for the indoor and outdoor season in 1996, 1997, and 1998. No one could beat me.
My sophomore year I finished first at the Pelican Relays, held at Southern University in Baton Rouge, in the high jump with a jump of seven feet, six and a half inches, earning me the number-one ranking in the NCAAs and qualifying me for the U.S. Olympic track and field trials, which were held in Atlanta in the summer of 1995.
We should have flown from Alcorn State to Atlanta, but our coach decided to go on the cheap, and we drove the whole way, 460 miles along Interstate 20, past Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama. The good thing was I was allowed to bring my dad, my fiancée, Alandra, and my little brother Christopher along with me. Someplace in Alabama we stopped at a Pizza Hut to eat.
I was in the parking lot when I turned around to see where Christopher was, and when I turned back I walked smack on face first into the ends of a stack of wooden two-by-fours that were sticking out from a parked pickup truck. I grabbed my eye, and when I took my hand off, I was bleeding badly. Blood ran down my face in rivulets, down the front of my shirt, and onto the ground. My eye began swelling, and my vision became blurry. I was in such terrible pain that I couldn’t eat, couldn’t do anything. I feared I wouldn’t be able to perform at the Olympic trials.
My father pleaded with Coach Alecia Shields to take me to the hospital and get stitched up, but she insisted we drive on to Atlanta. I lay down in the backseat with my head in Alandra’s lap. With the help of some New-Skin that we bought at a gas station the bleeding finally stopped.
At the trials I passed my physical exam. I had a patch over my eye, but I could jump with it. I looked like a pirate.
The trials were a disaster. I had three tries at seven foot two, a height I consistently jumped. I missed on all three. Nevertheless, there was a silver lining. I didn’t get to go to the Olympics, but because I had made the trip I also avoided going to jail.
Back on campus the cops had raided my room. When I returned from Atlanta, I found my room completely cleaned out. The TV was gone. Everything.
I’ve been robbed, was my first thought.
But it wasn’t a robbery. Someone had evidently tipped the police off that we were selling drugs from our dorm room, and they had come into our room with a warrant and took everything as evidence. They busted my roomie Goree White and Benny, a mutual friend, for possession of ten pounds of marijuana. Goree was more talented than I was in football. We were both wide receivers on the football team, and we were taking summer classes. Goree, Benny, and I were also selling marijuana together.
I wasn’t arrested because I wasn’t there.
Benny took the rap for Goree. That’s part of the code of the hood. You never let good friends down. He took the rap for Goree because he felt Goree had a future in football. Benny told the cops, “My friends had nothing to do with this. It was my stash.”
Goree never did make it in pro football. Instead he found trouble. The first time he went to jail, I paid his lawyer’s fees to get him out. The last time he got out, I made sure he had decent clothes and shoes. He has beautiful kids. I hope he knows now there’s a better life for him and that he tries to strive for it.