Sharpe Did Cocaine at Coliseum

It was Dec. 11, 1983, and Luis Sharpe was in familiar territory doing a familiar thing under stimulation that was becoming familiar.

He was in the Coliseum, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals in a 34-24 victory over the Raiders on a field where he had played four football seasons with UCLA.

He and a teammate snorted cocaine just before the game and again at halftime.

“I felt like my heart was gonna burst right through my chest and start bouncing around on the Coliseum turf,” he says in the Phoenix news weekly New Times.

“Luckily, I played terrible or I might have gotten used to it.”

The football field became the only place where he wouldn’t get high, Sharpe said. Sentenced to probation on May 22 for drug offenses and now in rehabilitation in Minnesota, Sharpe said he was turned on to cocaine shortly after signing his first NFL contract. He gave his money, house, family and nearly his life to crack.

“Let’s start with this: I smoked crack when I was making millions as an all-pro, and then I smoked crack on the streets of Phoenix for a year straight,” he said in a jailhouse interview in Phoenix. “. . . I’m a drug addict who . . . up his life.”

In 1994, his wife, Kathi, filed for divorce, and he retired from football because of a knee injury. To cope, he said, he smoked crack almost daily from Christmas 1994, until two months ago.

The Betty Ford Clinic hadn’t deterred him in 1992. Nor did a bullet in his shoulder, fired outside a crack house last November.

After recovering from the gunshot, Sharpe said, “I went back to get more drugs, man.”