Was reading something that reminded me of this irritating dumb jock guy* who lived in the dorm room across from me during the one and only (painful) year of college in which I lived in the dorms. He had an unusual name, and was a semi-notable football player at UM**. Hence, he was easily Google-able. I was curious if his post-football career had gone anywhere. This is sort of the subject of another post because it’s an interesting topic in itself, but the short version is that I knew he’d been granted a cushy sports merchandise marketing job right out of college, the kind of thing that boosters give the barely-graduating footballers who are too dumb to find their own real jobs. Sixty seconds of internet research resolved that he’s not in the cushy marketing job anymore, but is a real estate agent. Oh well, not sure what I hoped to find out anyway. That he’d become some collegiate merchandise baron? Why did I care again? I honestly barely remember the dude.
Anyway, rapidly losing interest in this particular workday tangent, I did one more quick related search for one of his compatriots, whom I will call Mr. Compatriot, another semi-notable UM football player with an unusual name, making him similarly easy to dig up news on. Actually, Mr. Compatriot is in some ways more of curiosity to me since he happened to have been part of my high school graduation class***. But don’t misunderstand–this was not an old pal. He was even more on the dumb jock track than the first guy. I barely knew him but knew enough to genuinely not like him. For one thing, he was a complete louse to a nice girl I knew that had no business hanging out with him. And no kind of friendship evolved during dorm time****. In fact, once I got to college, after getting over the annoyance that this high school lunkhead was actually going to continue to pop up in my life, in however small a role, I was surprised to learn that Mr. Compatriot was there because he was a relatively good football player. As in, one of the few UM players that later signed on with an NFL team. He wasn’t drafted or anything, and never ultimately appeared in an NFL game, but he did merit enough attention to get a small free agent contract. That had been the last I’d heard of him since the last time I might have been curious enough to find some information, maybe five years ago or so. Searching today, I turned up three newspaper articles on Mr. Compatriot. Let’s catch up, shall we?
1. Last I left his story, he was on the extreme fringe of making the NFL. And as such, he was drafted in the XFL supplemental draft. (Recall, the XFL was a one-year experimental football league run by the WWE guy, so it was somewhere between the NFL and wrestling. It failed miserably and hilariously.) Actual XFL players were marginal NFL players. So one might infer that people drafted in such a league’s supplementary draft (i.e., not the main draft, but an extra one used to fill out rosters) are marginal marginal players. That gives you an idea where Mr. Compatriot fit into the pro football world. Not to denigrate this–I mean, good for him. Unless you’re a natural behemoth of a human, you have to work pretty hard to be a pro football player. And he was at least a small part of that competitive landscape. So at this point I was thinking: wow, he actually came pretty close to being an NFL player. A couple of breaks or getting into the right situation, he might have made it.
2. Last summer, someone from my hometown paper wrote a rather flattering article about him. After his pro career petered out, he caught on with a local Montana arena football team (I guess you’d call it semi-pro?), initially as a player, later as a coach and marketer. The article detailed how he had transitioned away from being a player into someone putting in 12-hour days of extracurricular work for the team. And even though he missed playing, working for the team in other capacities made more sense at his age. Wow, I though, this guy I thought of as a dope has reinvented himself as a grownup. I found this to be a pleasant surprise. How about that! Local dumb guy makes good! Until…
3. He was convicted of cocaine trafficking. Uh, wow. Never mind. Seriously–just a few months after the “look how great this local guy is handling his post-football washout years” newspaper profile, he was sentenced to federal prison for cocaine trafficking. I guess we know where he was finding all the energy for those long days at the office. Or maybe the moral is, dumb guys tend to make bad drug traffickers.
*Not all jocks are dumb. But he was.
**”M” being Montana, mind you; “the University of Michigan” is properly referred to as “Michigan”, which I have absolute authority to declare because I attended them both.
***This was an in-state school, mind you. Not really that unusual that someone from my high school was there. But still, something I had in common with him.
****The only particular interaction I even remember with him was one evening when he randomly knocked on my door to ask, “Got some beers, man?” I remember thinking: “Yes. As a broke, underage dorm resident, I logically must have have been able to obtain a wide selection of beer for my miniscule cubic dorm fridge. And if I did, I would certainly give it freely to near-strangers panhandling for it.” Instead I probably said something like, “Uh, no.”
