A Real Tough Lesson in the Manley Art of Self-Destruction

Dexter Manley named a son after his favorite football player (himself) and a daughter, Dalis, after his least favorite football team (Dallas). The two children climb into his bed every night, grabbing for any available knee or elbow, tickling any bare skin, and Manley has particularly admired a bumper sticker sent to him anonymously in the mail.

“It Is Better To Build Children Than To Repair Adults,” it said, and Manley slapped it on the rear of his Bronco truck.

Manley’s own unsettling childhood, which included his being locked periodically in a closet and ignored in school, left him with the deepest of insecurities, and he has spent a good portion of his adult life immersed in personal reconstruction.

When drafted out of Oklahoma State in the fifth round by the Washington Redskins 8 1/2 years ago, Manley had no sacks, no books, no wife, no culture, no cash, no couth. Today he has pretty much obtained all of the above, but now he has no football.

On Saturday, Dexter Manley, 31, was banned indefinitely by the National Football League because of three violations of the league’s substance abuse policy, the last for testing positive for cocaine. He may apply for reinstatement in a year, but for now, he seems to have reached a personal denouement.

Based on his track record, he seems likely to clench his teeth and attempt a cleansing revamping of his life style. It will not be his first comeback from crisis. He has yearned for public acceptance from first grade on, and has taken great lengths to make himself a better person in the eyes of others.

Manley recently thought it would make sense to take up tennis. In a tight Lacoste shirt and shorts, he could cover the court well enough but would usually mis-hit his makeshift topspin strokes.

In the showers of his tennis club, he met a mortgage banker, Chris Applegate, so tennis had served its purpose. Applegate offered him a job at his mortgage company, where Manley would help attract clients through his contacts in professional sports and--as a bonus--learn the art of closing a deal.

What drove Manley toward a non-football job? He said he had come to the realization that if his career ended, as Joe Theismann’s had so suddenly, he’d better know something other than a pass rush stunt. He’s said that’s why he decided to learn to read at age 28.

His father, Carl, who died in 1977, was a man sturdy as can be, about the same size as Dexter today at 6 feet 3, about 250 pounds. Dexter was the youngest of four, and if he was naughty he would be led to a closet, where he’d be trapped beneath the trench coats. For fear of retribution, he never told his father about his high school marriage.

When he was arrested here in 1982 for impersonating a sheriff’s deputy and altering a license plate, he said: “I come from a good family life, but maybe if my father was still here he’d be on me a little more. When he died, I had to learn right from wrong on my own.”

School, for Manley, was like a jail cell. An undiagnosed learning disability left him unable to comprehend teachers, who eventually banished him to a special-education class. He remembers being teased--but of course not bullied--and says the catcalls of “You dummy!” have left scars that ache today.

By high school, his wonderful talent for football was noticed and cheered by all, and Manley gathered his self-esteem. By his senior year, he also found that some good could come out of lies and deceit. For instance, he has admitted wearing custom-made suits as an undergraduate.

“I’m not gonna say how I got them,” he said. “It was my senior year in high school, so you put it together. I had 37 scholarship offers. So, that’s how it works.”

In college, his rage peaked. His brother, Reggie, was shot and killed in Houston over a money dispute, and he contemplated an all-out search for the killer. He was unable to do so because of a football injury.

By the time his professional career began, he found a new source for attention--the media. His colorful quotes were splashed all over the sports pages and broadcast over the airwaves.

Now that he’s out of the game, there is concern whether he can function with no one listening and recording. With all that publicity came fame and a million people offering advice. He trusted almost no one and is now on his fourth agent, Boston attorney Bob Woolf.

With his wealth and popularity, and the almost inevitable hangers-on all around him, there was the opportunity to drink and dabble with drugs.

What led to his third violation of the league’s substance abuse policy is unclear, but there were problems at home, he said, that led him to stay out all night four days before he tested positive the third time. Still, teammates wonder if he knew a positive test meant banishment, how could he succumb?

He didn’t mean to.

He said before this season: “The older you get, you get a broader vision of what you can do. I’ve been playing football eight years, going into my ninth, and it’s like I don’t want to mess anything up because I want to take what I have and run with it. It’s now that I’m beginning to appreciate what I do.

“When I was young I wasn’t appreciative because I knew I had the ability, but now I appreciate it because it could be over like this (snapping his fingers).”

This latest failure was not about foolishness. Manley attended Alcoholics Anonymous programs for two years straight before his relapse. He had a “guru,” Pham Chopra, who served as a guide and alcohol counselor. Manley carried around a frayed book called “One More Day,” which contained sayings for every calendar day. On March 1 of this year, it said, “A man without a plan for the day is lost before he starts.”

Now, he needs a new plan. But what becomes of the children?

Dalis has been in a leg cast since birth, born with no bone between her kneecap and ankle. Her father cries about it.

The other day, as television trucks waited outside Manley’s house hoping for interviews, Dexter II, 5, played with a few of the cameramen. He had no idea why they were parked there, but inside the house, Dexter I was hurting badly.