The Ecstasy and the Agony : Grant, Faulkner Are Two Rams Who Don’t Butt Their Heads Against Drugs Anymore

Cocaine, the high-profile drug of the ‘80s, has trapped its share of athletes, as a quick scan of any sports page will show. Most who try it figure they can handle it. Many come to realize that they can’t.

“I found out it’s not for me,” said Otis Grant, a wide receiver with the Rams. “Not if I want a career in the NFL.”

Grant sees the problem in purely personal terms. He figures he is standing alone, stigmatized. He tries to close the door on his past addiction, but it keeps creeping through the keyhole.

“I’ve been through so much,” he said. “Most people can go through it real quiet, but athletes. . . . “

Athletes get their names in the paper. The latest jock-junkie jokes are told about them.

But Grant isn’t alone, not even among the Rams. Two others went through drug rehabilitation programs last year.

At training camp this week, he and tight end Chris Faulkner agreed to talk about it, and how they went wrong.

Faulkner, 25, is an Indiana farm boy. He grew up on his family’s 400 acres.

“I worked my butt off,” he said. “My older brother and I are really close. We’d get up and plow the fields, repair the tractor or slop the hogs, feed the horses, feed the chickens--everything imaginable--pick rocks up out of fields, mend a fence.

“That’s where I got a lot of my discipline with football. I was brought up on 50-cents-an-hour work and learned how to earn my money.”

Then he got a football scholarship to the University of Florida and learned how to drink beer.

“Started as a freshman and got right into the main swing of the social atmosphere,” he said. “Going to frat parties, country-western bars, getting loud and drinking beer--that’s where it all started.”

Faulkner was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys in the fourth round in 1983, was released on the last cut, then joined the Rams. By then, his habits were in high gear.

“It was alcohol, it was cocaine, it was marijuana,” he said. “All through college, drinking beer was the thing. You get into a group of people that would smoke marijuana, you’d be smoking marijuana and drinking beer. Every once in a while that same group of people would snort cocaine, which is something I never did to an extent in college--maybe seven times.

“Then when I got this money, it was readily available, and it’s so easy to become addicted to it.

“People kind of gravitate to you. They want to be your buddy. If they get wind that you do it, they’re gonna have other friends that have it so they can do it with you.”

At the peak of his addiction, “I could spend $500 a night, easy,” Faulkner said.

His average outlay for drugs was just short of $100 a day, he added. “That’s addiction.”

Between practices in his dormitory room at camp, Faulkner watched a soap opera.

‘That’s my favorite one,” he said. “ ‘All My Children.’ I’m addicted to it.”

He popped a can of snuff and stuck a pinch in his lip. “Tobacco--that’s as deep as I get now,” he said.

There’s no rush now, no mood swing. But after a while, even with cocaine, Faulkner said, it wasn’t the same.

“You never can get as high as the first time you do it,” he said. “And then you’re constantly striving and spending more money and doing it more to get there, when you’ll never succeed.

“I remember some of the times I really didn’t feel all that wonderful, but I’d still do it. I’d get to a point where I’d get so high and I couldn’t get higher. It was a frustration. I want to remember those times and how sick it was, and that will help me keep sober.”

The Rams drafted Grant, now 25, in the fifth round from Michigan State in ’83. He showed flashes of promise early in his rookie season, then seemed to slip.

He had an answer for that. Cocaine, he said, changes your behavior, your work habits. “You don’t care anymore,” he said.

Dr. Toby Freedman, the medical director for Rockwell International who has been on the Rams’ medical staff for several years, said tests with rats given cocaine supported Grant’s statement.

“Once they get that first dose, they’ll keep trying to get another to the exclusion of eating, drinking, sex, everything,” Freedman said.

Grant said: “Drugs, you have a good time with them, and they’re part of the generation phase that a majority of adults and teen-agers go through. They have to experiment to find out if they like it or not.”

Peer pressure? No such thing, said Grant, who grew up as a three-sport star in Atlanta.

“All your friends are getting high, but it wasn’t peer pressure. You always have a choice. When I was in high school we had a lot of guys coming in doing drug talks. I was smoking pot and it was, like, ‘Forget them. I’m gonna have to find out on my own.’ ”

Coach John Robinson called in both players, two weeks apart, late last season.

Faulkner said: “He said that my performance level had dropped and that there were rumors I had been partying too much and asked me what I was into. I just came out and told him. There wasn’t no denying it.

“I had tried to slow down, tried to quit, a month or three weeks before they called me in, and I just couldn’t.”

The Rams had Faulkner admitted to the Life Start program at Centinela Hospital Medical Center. The cost is about $8,000 for a normal 28-day stay. Grant joined him two weeks later.

“Life Start is the greatest program going,” Faulkner said. “They don’t use medicine to keep you from drinking, and they don’t use psychology or hypnotism.

“We went to seminars. We went to AA meetings. We were busy all day trying to get in touch with ourselves and how we felt . . . things in our past that we wouldn’t want to bring up to other people, but we’d have to share these things and get them off our chests--all the trash that had built up before. Group therapy.

“We ate and slept there for 28 days. You can get a Sunday pass, but you’re tested every time you come back. You can leave, but if I left, my career’s gone. I was never tempted to leave.”

The nights were the worst, he said.

“That’s when you’re supposed to pray to your higher power,” Faulkner said. “That’s what they say.

“I heard that there had been people sneaking stuff in with candy, or they send you flowers and it’s in the potting soil. It didn’t occur while I was there. They search everything you bring in or that’s sent to you.

“I was in two weeks and then Otis came in. We talked a lot, tried to understand what our problems were and how we were gonna face it when we got out.

“The hardest part for me was to face the team, even though it was in the off-season and a lot of the guys weren’t there. I would confront ‘em individually and they seemed to really accept me. I talked to ‘em about how clean I was and how good I felt.

“I didn’t want ‘em to think I was in there just because I had to be in there, and that I was gonna come out and sneak around. I wanted ‘em to know I was getting married and I was on the right track. I just wanted it out in the open, that I was gonna be a clean cat.”

On his dresser, Faulkner had a picture of his wife, Cheryl, looking quite pregnant in a T-shirt labeled “Team.” She is the one good thing that happened in his party days, he said.

“I met her in a bar, dancing. She’s been my mainstay. She’s helped me through nine months of sobriety, and she loves me to death. She stuck with me through the hard times, and that proved to me I wanted to marry her.

“She was the one that made me realize I had such a problem. When they confronted me with it, there was no way I wasn’t gonna tell ‘em.”

Faulkner isn’t kidding himself about his recovery.

“I haven’t smelled a beer cap in nine months, but I still have to look at it like I’m still sick,” he said.

Grant said he has flashbacks of the bad old days.

“It still grabs me sometimes, like a dagger,” he said. “I don’t go around my old hangouts and people I used to have fun with. But I see ‘em on the street and they’re kind of looking out for me. ‘What are you doing here?’ They’ve got my best interests at heart.

“If I had never been caught with the junk in my system, I’d probably still be having fun, doing what I wanted to do. But my career is first.”

Sometimes Grant still feels caught in a trap.

“You get depressed a lot,” he said. “But you can’t dwell on the past, because that’s another reason to go out and get stoned.

“I feel like eyes are watching me, so my main concern is to get here early, leave late and work hard. The coaches are very fair. It’s all about showing them that I can be consistent and I can be trusted.”

Faulkner said: “We always kid each other about going out and getting a beer. But we never do it. I realize if I screw up again I’ve had my last chance.”

Grant added: “I’m totally focused this year, for the first time in a long time, with nothing in my system but good blood and oxygen. I’m ready to be alive.

“I know I messed up. I don’t need anybody to tell me that. But I think it’s gonna be all right. The sun’s gonna shine tomorrow, and I’ll be out in that sun lookin’ good.”