Dexter Manley Sacks His Career : NFL: Defensive lineman announces retirement after failing another drug test.

This was no different from that night in November 1989, when Dexter Manley, then a Redskin, got the word he was being suspended from football for a year. It’s no different than the afternoon in May of 1989 when he sat before the U.S. Senate subcommittee on adult illiteracy and tried to read his notes. It was no different from all his trips to Hazelden in 1987 or his 30-day suspension in 1988 or the other times Dexter Manley came forward to talk publicly about his private hell. He bared his soul and cried.

Thursday in Tampa, he stood in a packed room at the Buccaneers headquarters and tried to talk about “suffering a setback.” But you couldn’t understand a word he was saying because Dexter Manley’s 6-foot-5, 260-pound body was shaking as tears flowed from his eyes. You can’t imagine a grown man crying any harder, any more violently, or with any more sorrow.

Just like all the other times, he was sincere as anyone could be. But just like all the other times, to use Dexter’s words, he “underestimated the tricky and insidious nature of this disease.” And his will to fight it.

Dexter Manley’s football career ended Thursday when he “retired” after flunking another drug test. That’s four strikes, if you’re counting. As happiness and sadness are measured in sports, his is a very sad story. You can take the cynical view if you want, that Dexter failing one more drug test was inevitable, that he was too big a risk to deal with, that the Redskins were absolutely right for washing their hands of him last November after his one-year suspension following his third strike. Maybe. There’s no great moral here. This desire for drugs has consumed him more than his need for football, for his family, maybe anything. That doesn’t make him a bad guy. He isn’t. He has a problem he can’t lick. And we wonder what will happen to him now.

The excessive structure of sports tends to make the weak even weaker. Somebody wakes you up in the morning, somebody checks you into and out of the hotel, somebody signs your check, somebody pays your bills, somebody tells you when to take a drug test. Dexter always had that structure and it never helped. Now what? Nobody will ask him to take a drug test now. If football was a big incentive to stay clean, then what’s the incentive now? With nobody to pressure him three times a week for a urine sample, what’s to stop him now from caving in totally?

Perhaps, being away from football is the best thing that could happen to him. There are drug counselors who say the disease of addiction is only made worse by the additional stress of public life. The excesses of a life in professional athletics, and the temptation that accompanies them, are even more extreme. Manley talked once about how embarrassing it was to be a public figure and have to admit to his problem, of how he worried about participants in group sessions going to work the next day and saying, “You’ll never guess who’s in my session?” Of course he will still be a public figure, but the specter of having to clean himself up to get back into uniform won’t be hanging over his head.

He had already let down so many people, starting with his wife, Glinda The Saint, his children, little Dexter and Dalis, Joe Bugel, who went to bat for him in Phoenix a year ago when he was reinstated after a third strike and subsequent suspension. It’s those people, the ones who’ve blindly taken the risks to stand with him, whom you really must feel sorry for. Even those of us who have always found him totally irresistible don’t know whether to hug or curse him.

“I like Dexter. He’s a really good person,” said former teammate Gary Clark. “I’m sure there’s something there that’s such a strong force that it’s really, really hard to resist. I’m just sorry it has to end. Everyone’s lives are so public. People have to realize what he’s fighting. Unless you’ve been there, it’s nothing we can comprehend or understand. People who don’t do it know they’re not supposed to. But what happens once you’re involved? It’s tougher. All we can do is say some prayers for him and try to help him any way we can. Hopefully, he can get over this problem and get on with his life. It’s unfortunate.”

That’s the theme now, for Dexter to get on with his life. The problem for Dexter, though, is that he is addicted to the excitement as much as anything else. The people who yelled a year ago that he should never play football again didn’t understand how much he needed it. The hope was that with one more fling, he could come to appreciate what he had, while learning how to wean himself from the need to have 24-hour thrills. He sacked quarterbacks, he waved his white towel at RFK, he riled coaches and teammates, he created controversy on radio and television. This, all of this, is something Dexter Manley has to leave behind now if he is to truly get on with the rest of his life. It’s tough enough for people who leave sport on their own terms, much less somebody who freely admitted football is the one thing that gave him an identity.

Finally Thursday, when he was composed enough to read a prepared statement, Dexter said: “I recently have had a setback and the fact that it has happened, even if only once, shows me that I am in trouble and that I must renew my battle with this disease. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart that I have come here today to announce my immediate retirement from the NFL.”

Dexter Manley has to start somewhere. Again.