I wasn’t so, I guess, inclined to go grab that bottle, which I think in hindsight was a benefit to me. It kept me from going down that road of potential addiction or whatever. Cannabis really just did it for me. And I can’t say that for everybody, but for me, that’s really what got me through those moments of injury, especially in the middle of my career when I started getting hamstrings. I knew exactly what I needed to do: just calm my mind and get through it. That’s what I did!
The other thing is, for you, it clearly worked. I mean, you’re in the Hall of Fame! That gives you a level of credibility. During your career, as guys started to hear “Oh, Champ uses weed as a recovery method or to manage his pain,” did you have players coming to you and trying to figure out if it would work for them?
There’s several little stories, but there’s one that sticks out. One of my teammates, he loved to drink. He was dealing with pain as much as I was, or more, because he was in the trenches. I just never forget. I recommended, “Hey man, you need to try something else in your downtime.” Drinking kept getting him in trouble. That was almost 20 years ago. Fast-forward to now, that’s his [go-to] choice: to maybe grab a joint or take an edible to calm his body. Now he’s post-career, it’s like, dang, man! That was the best decision he ever made, making cannabis a choice over drinking. Now, I don’t think he had any issues with pills, but I know he was taking a lot just to get through practice.
It happens more than you think, but a lot of guys still won’t come forward and talk about those things. It actually took me a while to get to that point. But I’m encouraging everybody to tell your story because we need more guys, and women, to understand that there is a better way to deal with those illnesses, physical or mental. It’s helped me, it helped my boy that was dealing with what he’s dealing with, and post-career, what he’s dealing with now. I mean, it’s been great for him.
When I think of weed use in the NFL, Ricky Williams, who missed a whole season of his career due to drug-policy violations, was kind of the face of all this. People really made him out to be a villain! For what? He was balling! It wasn’t like he was going out there and fumbling three times a game.
Balling! 10,000 yard rusher! That kind of baller. You know how consistent you have to be to rush for 10,000 yards? This is a dude that played at the highest level, and all he wanted to do was smoke his cannabis and go to work. Now he’s probably the face of what it looks like to achieve at a high level, or set your goals and reach them, but still have this [drug] that he was using as a means to calm his mind and his body. I mean, he’s the perfect example.
I think about Randy Moss too. The whole reason he ended up at Marshall University was essentially because he got caught smoking weed. You have one of the best wide receivers of all time playing in Division I-AA. For what?
Yeah, man. Look, those old-school methods need to die. But it is what it is. We got some progress to make and I think we’ve made some. But it takes a lot of us, people like myself, to tell these stories.
No, no, no. I’m a joint guy. Keep it simple. Like I said, I’ve tried it all different ways, but for me it was always about what worked for me. It was more like an experience to smoke and sit back, relax, the calming effect of it. That’s what I do. But I’ve seen people…some people can’t smoke! I know a few guys that can’t smoke, so all they do is take edibles. It’s one of those things, man, that’s the beauty of it. There’s so many ways to get it in your system nowadays. You don’t have to be a smoker, but that’s just my choice.
