NFL, family doesn't mix for Reid
Posted: Friday, November 02, 2007 12:09 PM
The problem with holding people you don’t really know as paragons of virtue and clean living was driven home on Thursday in a terrible way in a Pennsylvania courtroom. Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill sent Eagles coach Andy Reid’s two sons to prison for drug violations, and described the Reids as “a family in crisis.”
According to the Associated Press, O’Neill told one of the sons, Britt Reid, “It sounds more or less like a drug emporium there with the drugs all over the house, and you’re an addict.”
This is not an indictment of Reid, a man for whom we can only feel pity. But it is an object lesson in the facile judgments we make about people based on nothing more than the Cliffs Notes versions of their lives.
Reid is a Mormon, and I remember reading a lot of stories over the years about his devotion to family and his aversion to all things intoxicating. As an example of his virtue, the stories would always say how he refused to use the Anglo-Saxon epithets that are the lingua franca of the locker room.
I always felt a bit ashamed of myself when I read those stories. Here was a football coach who was a better family man than I was despite the much greater demands his job put on his time. It was enough to make you wonder how he could do it.
Apparently, he couldn’t. He raised two sons and both became not just drug abusers, but dealers, as well. If the judge is to be believed – and I think he probably can be – Reid’s house was free of street drugs and strong drink, but it was chock-full of prescription drugs.
This is from the AP story:
O’Neill apparently based his remarks on Britt Reid’s statement that he once mistakenly grabbed a Vicodin tablet instead of health supplements out of a pill drawer at the home.
He said both boys had been overmedicated throughout much of their lives and that Britt got hooked on painkillers when he suffered a football injury in high school.
I can understand how it happened. We’ve got this idea in this country that if a doctor gives you drugs they’re good, and if a guy you meet on a street corner gives them to you, they’re bad. Pain killers are more addictive and destructive than marijuana, but because they’re legal, if you’re hooked on them it’s not as bad; it’s not evil. That was Rush Limbaugh’s story when word got out that he had an OxyContin habit the size of Texas. He could beat up on coke heads because they were using an illegal drug. But he was just the victim of a legal prescription that got out of hand.
There is no logic in this, anymore than there is in Mormonism, which swears off coffee, tea and hot chocolate but has no problem with drugs that didn’t exist when the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, was drawing up his list of shalts and shalt-nots in the early 19th century.
So, while illegal drugs are not a huge problem among Mormons, the prescription variety are. Five years ago, in fact – and I doubt things have changed a great deal since – a national study showed that no state uses more antidepressants per capita than Utah, home of the Latter Day Saints.
Andy Reid does stand for a lot of good things, and as far as I’ve ever seen, he lives by what he believes; he is not a bad man. But we kid ourselves when we assume that anyone has found the secret to successfully managing an all-consuming career with a healthy family life.
During the off-season, when Reid’s sons were arrested, the coach took a five-week leave from his coaching job to deal with the family’s tragic problems. Then he came back and has declined to discuss it, which is his right. I can’t think of many people who would want to talk about it, and I don’t blame them.
But, clearly, five weeks can’t repair the damage of a lifetime. Clearly, even a coach dedicated to family can’t notice the things going on under his nose. Clearly, there were gaping voids in the lives of his sons that flew under the family radar until they were headed to prison.
I don’t know what I’d do in his shoes. Quitting my football job would pass through my mind, but that might be my only escape from the horror I unwittingly helped to create.
We used to think he had a perfect life. We’re going to have to think again.
If prayer’s your thing, say one for him. And say two for his wife and sons.
