Marinovich Draws Hope From His Sketchy Past

Another good-looking quarterback showed up at USC training camp at UC Irvine Thursday.

Tall, reddish-blond hair, great arm--but out of eligibility.

Todd Marinovich.

Only months ago, Marinovich was just another inmate at the Orange County Jail in Santa Ana, serving three months of a six-month sentence for marijuana cultivation.

“The end of January, I went in, and got out 90 days later,” said Marinovich, who was allowed to spend the final three months in a private recovery program in Costa Mesa. “It’s something I definitely don’t want to experience again.”

The gifted player who was raised to be a quarterback but ended up failing with the Raiders after a stellar and tumultuous USC career is 29 now. And, he says, wiser, after a sojourn into a world where he found he could identify with many of the people he met. Interestingly, it was a place where he was welcomed.

“There are definitely a lot of Raider and USC fans in there,” Marinovich said, laughing.

With his hair close-cropped now, Marinovich looked like just another surfer kid watching the Trojans practice, not the former first-round draft pick whose unpredictability baffled both the NFL and the people closest to him.

But he was happy and at ease Thursday, signing autographs for the few people who noticed him and asked, and chatting with new USC Coach Paul Hackett.

“I feel, definitely, like a weight’s off my shoulders,” Marinovich said. “The past week has been excellent. Lots of surfing. The water’s been great.”

As much for the volatile days with the Raiders, when he went from starter to third string to August roster cut in 1993, Marinovich is remembered for the flake-outs--the missed meetings, the drug arrest before the draft and constant testing, the admission he had surfed naked, and his passion for both his artwork and his rock band.

And though it sometimes seemed that Marinovich was more interested in other worlds than the one that lay at his feet, he said football is still on his mind, and that he thinks of playing again.

“God, I hear about DeBerg,” he laughed, referring to Steve DeBerg, at 44, in camp with the Atlanta Falcons.

“Oh, definitely the interest is there. I still keep in shape. I’ve been working out with my dad, doing conditioning.

“If there’s an opportunity to go to a good situation . . . [before] I ended up with the Raiders.

“But I’m not rushing anything.”

After he was cut by the Raiders, Marinovich spent a season surfing Oahu’s Pipeline, fishing in Colorado and traveling the world, then joined the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Canadian Football League, but left after hurting his knee. He won’t go back there.

“I’ve had thoughts of going to Europe,” he said. “Canada? Nah. I went up there and have bad memories. When I went up there, I blew my knee out.

“It’s not a priority. I’m just leaving that door open.”

Marinovich says his trouble was never with football, but with his situation with the Raiders, whose system at the time didn’t suit his game.

“I had guys like Ronnie Lott, Roger Craig, who had just come from San Francisco, and they said in that system, all of [Joe] Montana’s records would not have been safe if I was in their system,” he said.

He also has admitted that the frequent random drug tests after a 1991 arrest for cocaine and marijuana possession drove him “crazy.” The charges, though, were dropped after he completed a rehabilitation program.

“It was a lot of other things that went along with football that made me turn the other way,” he said. “Football, the basics of football, has always been my favorite thing to do. Doing artwork has always been second.”

The artwork is at the forefront now, though. Marinovich, who is living in Newport Beach, has done charcoal drawings of 12 famous quarterbacks, and has an arrangement to market the prints to memorabilia shops, often signed by the quarterback and the artist-quarterback, and selling for $200 a print, $300 framed.

“The first is [Ken] Stabler, of course, another lefty,” he said. “There’s [Joe] Montana, [Dan] Fouts, [Dan] Marino, [John] Elway.

“This is my first time trying to market and sell my artwork. Before, I was giving it away.”

Money is not a problem. Marinovich once had a $2.25-million contract, and he says he lives fairly simply. He also understands how much even that means after spending 90 days in jail.

“They were long, long days,” he said. “That was no fun. Being an outdoors-type person, that was really hard.”

The incident that sent him to jail occurred March 24, 1997, after paramedics and Orange County sheriff’s deputies were called to Marinovich’s Dana Point home to help a friend who was unconscious. While the friend was being treated, the deputies found a marijuana plant, a bag of marijuana, a syringe and prescription medicine that was not in Marinovich’s name. He was sentenced to six months after pleading guilty to a felony count of cultivating marijuana and two misdemeanor counts.

Before finally going to jail, he missed several court dates, and admits now he thought of fleeing, perhaps to surf away his days in Mexico.

“There were thoughts of leaving and saying, ‘This is not fair.’ I could easily have done that.

“I just looked at it as something I’ve got to do.

“I definitely broke the law, and when you break the law, [there are consequences.]

“I’m glad I [served the time] now. It’s one of those tough things.”

So a former star who came to be nicknamed “Marijuanovich” by some spent Super Bowl Sunday in Orange County Jail.

What he saw around him gave him pause.

“There were so many kids in their early 20s, some of them looking at 10 to 20 years for that new law if you brandish a firearm,” he said. “I could definitely relate. There were guys from all walks of life. There were racial tensions, and a lot of politics, like in the real world. Just everything is kind of blown up bigger in there.”

Marinovich’s life, and his days, seem smaller to others these days. Maybe they’re bigger to him.

His name still dots the USC record book, and, remarkably, he is the last Trojan quarterback to have beaten UCLA.

In that memorable 1990 game, he threw a 23-yard touchdown pass to Johnnie Morton with 16 seconds left in a 45-42 victory.

“I talk to my grandmother, and she says, ‘Every year, I get all kinds of phone calls around November, around the time of the UCLA game.’ ”

Not that he wished he could run out onto the field with USC on Thursday.

“I was never a practice player. I hated it,” he said. “But in the Coliseum, with the crowd. . . .

Those days are long gone now.

“I’m just older and wiser,” he said. “I was really young when I left school. There’s probably no way I could possibly have been prepared for what I went through.”