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.”
For a while, the rising star’s drug problem was a well-kept secret. Until it wasn’t, when a third unsuccessful urine test the next season, in 1992, landed Marinovich off the team.
“I had been watching these guys my whole life – now I was their peer,” Marinovich says of Raiders teammates (and fellow ex-Trojans) Allen, Long, Ronnie Lott and Riki Ellison. “I did not want to let them down. However, I had things to do that I could not share with them.”
Although he would have a brief career rebirth in the Arena Football League as an all-rookie team member, his once seemingly charmed life spiraled into further drug abuse and its consequences under the law: “I quieted my inner loathing with a range of drugs over the next three decades, including ecstasy, acid, cocaine, heroin, crack, and meth at deadly doses to disconnect from the misery inside,” he writes. The memoir is co-written with author Lizzy Wright, who sees it as far more than a sports biography.
“It’s the type of story that has so much to it,” she says. “It’s so complex.” She cites Marinovich’s emotional awareness and his longtime passion for art – one of his paintings appears in the book.
Wright’s husband, Steve, is a former NFL player himself. In fact, he was an offensive lineman who protected Marinovich on the Raiders. Lizzy Wright helped her husband write his memoir. It went so well that Steve Wright recommended her to Marinovich as a collaborator.
Now the book writing is over, Marinovich says, “It’s almost like talking about another life.”
In college, a dramatic USC win over Washington State prompted a phone call from then-President Ronald Reagan. Marinovich’s Raiders years were marked by R-rated, drug-fueled nights in LA. His youthfulness came to the fore when he started under center in a 1991 NFL playoff game – the first rookie to do so for the Silver and Black. During this period of his life, the quarterback partied with celebrities such as Flea and Charlie Sheen.
“Thank God for Lizzy,” Marinovich says. “She did all the heavy lifting. She made it easy for me, [did] what a next-level teammate does for me: Help, assist you, bring the best out of you.”
“Todd’s rise to fame is remarkable,” Wright says. “He was the best athlete coming out of high school in the country. A Rose Bowl victory as a freshman. The first sophomore in history to declare for the NFL draft. He had to have his own combine because he was too young. This is the Doogie Howser of football.”
Yet, she adds, there was “so much pressure,” and “to need the drugs to survive that, it becomes that vicious cycle. How do you get out of this? How do you unravel it? It’s practically impossible.”
Long after Marinovich’s comeback in the Arena Football League, he got another shot at football in 2017 at age 48 – first coaching quarterbacks and then suiting up at signal-caller to throw seven TDs in a semipro game. He let the game be billed as his first drug-free matchup in 33 years. In fact, he writes, he was still using: “The moment the drugs hit my system, I was fucked, losing another round in the dogfight to stay clean.”
Throughout the book, Marinovich doesn’t spare the details. You’ll learn all about how he faked drug-test results in the NFL by using other players’ urine samples – and about the time he wore blackface while appearing as Jimi Hendrix one Halloween, for which he now expresses regret.
That said, there are also sweet moments – including Marinovich’s love of art, which he says helped save him. His paintings now adorn the Raiders’ art gallery – yes, the Raiders have an art gallery – in their new home of Las Vegas.
Marinovich laments squandering the patience of longtime Raiders owner Al Davis, who died in 2011. Seeking to atone, Marinovich sought out Davis’s son, current Raiders owner Mark Davis, at a Palm Springs restaurant. Mark Davis warmly welcomed Marinovich back into the Silver and Black alumni family, and put his celebrity portraits on display at Allegiant Stadium. The reader is treated to one image, of a cigarette-smoking Johnny Cash. Marinovich has also done portraits of Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra – and his old teammate Allen.
Wright calls art one of the “outlets where you can almost be removed from yourself, and at peace. There’s a freeness that happens with art. I think it’s something interesting to touch on.”
Art helped mend another, more personal relationship. In Marv Marinovich’s final years, as he battled Alzheimer’s, the once famously competitive father and his son bonded over artistic collaborations. Marinovich says his father did not quite recognize him once the disease set it, but was aware that they had a special partnership.
“A lot of people do not know Marv was an enormously creative painter and sculptor,” Marinovich says. “We got to create together, two artists doing what we did. There was not a lot of talk, just a rhythm to it that was better, and he loved doing that with me … Who would have thought that art would really almost bring us to another level?”
Other parts of the narrative were harder for Marinovich to discuss with Wright. That includes his multiple arrests over the years.
“The last thing I want to do to start the day is talk about the arrests,” Marinovich says. “It’s embarrassing. I know it was not easy on my family.”
In 2000, Marinovich was arrested for sexual assault – a district attorney later decided not to charge him, and Marinovich denies the allegation in his book. Years later, in 2016, he was arrested for drug possession while naked. Marinovich writes that the reason he was naked is because he was skinny-dipping in what he thought was his in-laws’ pool. It wasn’t.
“From my perspective,” Wright says, “to write about the arrests, my perspective is just, be honest about everything. Some books try to minimize the bad, focus on the positive” – an approach that she calls “not real-life or honest.”
Marinovich says he’s in a good place now. Based in Hawaii, he’s watching his own children grow up, while making the art that has been his anchor and speaking about the dangers of drugs in hopes of helping the next generation.
“I’m trying to find a balance,” he says. “I’ve got to practice every day – practice doing the right thing, being honest, helping somebody else.”
