Marinovich Project: ESPN Special Reveals Perils of Sports Obsession

With the debut of ESPN Films' "The Marinovich Project," sports fans will once again be exposed to the tragic story of Todd Marinovich and the lessons we can all learn about the pitfalls on the presumed path to greatness in any endeavor—sports included.

Once upon a time, Marinovich seemed destined to be a football star. His father Marv, a lineman on and a captain of the USC football team that won the national championship in 1962, practically bred his son to be the perfect football player. After an NFL career cut short by overtraining and weight lifting, Marv went about pioneering a new way of athletic training, becoming the league's first strength and conditioning coach with the Oakland Raiders.

Marv made it his goal to raise the perfect athlete under ideal conditions, using his son Todd as his first test subject by instituting a strict exercise and diet regimen for him from birth.

What he ended up with, other than an extraordinary athlete, was a man who was never allowed to be a kid, whose childhood was spent devoted to fulfilling his father's hopes and dreams of NFL stardom. 

He'd created a monster, a kid who could never live up to his father's expectations and, as a result, spiraled into a life of drug abuse and destitution. Marinovich fell into substance abuse starting in high school, a habit that intensified at 'SC and even more so in the pros. He left the Trojans after his redshirt sophomore season, when he feuded with head coach Larry Smith and was arrested for cocaine possession.

The Raiders snatched Marinovich with the 24th overall pick in the 1991 NFL Draft. Marinovich's problems only worsened from there, to the point where he was abusing harder drugs.

By 1993, Marinovich was out of the NFL, never to return, though he did bounce between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and the BC Lions of the Canadian Football League and the Los Angeles Avengers of the Arena Football League.

The Robo QB turned out to be a bust, in large part because of the intense pressure to succeed that he endured from Day 1 and the lack of practical reasoning that his football upbringing had kept him from.

He was a great football player but not a fully-formed person, an individual with great field vision but an ingrained inability to put things in perspective.

A tragedy, to be sure, but not because his football career turned out be such a bust. Rather, it's what kept Marinovich from actualizing his full potential as a human being—the desires of his father, the lack of leeway to decide what he wanted to do for himself—that makes his story so sad.

Marinovich's story reminds us that there is so much more to sports than just what we see on the television screen or from the stands. These are human beings we're witness to, people with hopes, dreams and flaws all the same.

And it's those who lack that humanity, or aren't allowed to develop it, that seem to fail so spectacularly for all to see.

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