The former Raiders quarterback’s career was shortened by off-field issues. In his new book, he looks back at a complicated life
Marcus Allen knew, and tried to help. So did Howie Long. But many of Todd Marinovich’s teammates on the Los Angeles Raiders of the early 1990s had no idea their young quarterback was using drugs.
Marinovich had come to the Raiders from USC, where he had guided the Trojans to a Rose Bowl victory as a freshman. By that time, he had accumulated two nicknames: “Robo Quarterback,” after the legendarily demanding training regimen instilled by his father, former Raiders player and assistant coach Marv Marinovich, intended to foster excellence in athletes. The other nickname was far more unflattering: “Marijuana-vich,” for his pot-smoking, which became a taunt from opposing fans in high school. When Marinovich reached the NFL, it wasn’t just marijuana he was abusing.
“I couldn’t lift my head after another bender with ecstasy, cocaine, and liquor,” he writes of one inauspicious morning in his new memoir, Marinovich: Outside the Lines in Football, Art, and Addiction. “My body felt like the Tin Man.”
Who got him up in time for practice that day? It was “a bug-eyed Marcus Allen who impatiently examined his watch,” then “returned to his idling red-hot Lamborghini.”
