Cleveland Hopkins Airport is a Mecca for misbehaving NFL players. It’s the Mos Eisley spaceport, transplanted from Tatooine to Cleveland, but with more weed and SUVs.
The airport has been a wretched hive of scum and villainy ever since the Leigh Bodden Parking Catastrophe of 2007, and the airport’s mean and hazy reputation got even worse today.
In a story which, to my knowledge, first appeared on Scout’s Ravens site, it was learned that Baltimore cornerback Derrick Martin smuggled three baggies of kickass weed unaccountably had a small amount of an unidentified, and possibly evil, leafy substance in his luggage on Saturday night.
Very likely, the plant material is simply part of the heralded Ravens project into the use of natural substances in the treatment of pain, inflammation, arteriosclerosis and osteoporosis.
The long-standing off-season research effort has shown promising results in treating patients with an irrational fear of bald authority figures and those with wrenching back pain created by fleeing law enforcement officials.
Other than a suddenly buzz-less Baltimoron, the OBR Newswire confronted us Sunday with stories about cornerbacks looking to get back into the action.
A couple of these hope (or hoped) to replace the aforementioned Bodden, sent packing to Detroit after his parking fracas caused racing pulses and inexplicable photoshop activity at local tabloid news departments.
Here are the idling corners who made the news:
I don’t know how many times I’ve read stories like these. The injured player who believes he’ll return better than ever, the aging warrior who vows to have one last hurrah, and the promising athlete who gets derailed with the promised land in sight.
In many cases, if not most, stories like these do not end with storybook finishes.
As wonderful as it must be to have the physical ability to play this incredible game at its highest level, you can’t follow it for long without realizing how expendable players become when fate or time takes their skills away. For every player smiling with a lei around their necks at the Pro Bowl, hundreds lie discarded in a scrap heap out of sight of the public.
It is such a fine line. Gridiron glory can be frustratingly close until a sharp pain announces that the dream may have been shattered in an instant. Other players can attain the summit, only to find that their moment disappears far too quickly.
At some point, for every player, the ability to excel at the highest level moves forever out of reach, never to return.
Maybe one of the three men listed above will move back into the spotlight. The odds against them are always long.