My last two stories were about 2 people. One was a kind old lady who was wronged but didn't let that change her perspective on life. The 2nd one was about a man who was headed down a dark path and because life and law intervened, was one of the few people I can think about whose life was reformed to the point where he made an actual life for himself and as far as I know anyway, ended up getting a family, a job, and an actual reason to live beyond just getting high at any cost.
My next story is about a guy who just completely threw his life away despite doing something that so many people can only dream of and why did he do it? Because he thought he was untouchable. I was in one class with him and was in a group project in a class in college.
His downfall is so tragic but it is also entirely his own doing. Why? I can only assume it was greed.
Wow! look at that! That's a guy playing for the Cleveland Browns and he must be making tons of money right? Well, he kind of was, but he was overshadowed early in his career where I met him in a speech class in the 90's and we never really became friends, he was just a useless member of our team that never had to do anything because he was a star football player and they never have to do anything involving actual academics.
His name is Richard Alston
Richard Alston was a legend in Greenville, North Carolina when the ECU Pirates who at the time that I was in school there, he was a quarterback. But the story gets better because it was a situation that not many NCAA teams ever tried to implement because it mostly doesn't work, but it did for ECU for a few years.
I can't find pictures of it online easily because ECU has scrubbed Alston's pictures and name from their records but I was there and remember it.
ECU would put two quarterbacks on the field at the same time. Alston and the other quarterback David Garrard would both be in the "hike" position for any down, but the defense couldn't know which of them the ball was actually going to be given to on any down.
you see, both Richard Alston and David Garrard were "running quaterbacks" which was an emerging style at the time. Both of them could be a running back, receiver, or a passer at any point in time so this really threw off the defense of any team they were playing because nobody really had a playbook on how to defend against this.
Many times trick plays would head one direction chasing the guy the defense thought had the ball but it was actually the other guy who had it and he would run the ball many yards and sometimes for a TD completely untouched. It was very exciting to see as a fan who didn't have to pay for tickets and it was one of the only times in NCAA history that a team had ever employed this sort of strategy.
It was a sight to behold. Just imagine any sport where someone is meant to be the captain but they put two of them in that place and did it in a sneaky way so that the other team was always kept guessing as to what was going to happen next. That was ECU in those years and in two of them they ended up in the top 25 in the nation which was unheard of for a small and relatively unknown school like East Carolina University. We loved it. I was a bit starstruck when he ended up in my speech class team in the late 90's but then I kind of started to hate him because he didn't participate in anything and didn't have to because athletes don't actually have to go to school.
Let's fast-forward a bit because other than watching Alston on TV I didn't have a great deal to do with him in school or in the town. He didn't do so well as far as getting drafted to the professional leagues and he ended up in Europe playing in an American football league that nobody really cares about, then to Canada, and then he got his shot playing with the Cleveland Browns.
What compelled him to do what he did next is something that just defies all logic to me.
While not exactly Joe Montana or anything he had finally made it. he was getting tons of money to not really even play that much and was likely going to continue to get a ton of money to mostly sit on the bench.
Alston, apparently not satisfied with accomplishing any football player's dream of making it to the top league in the world, decided to get involved in drug trafficking but he wasn't as clever as he might have hoped.
Feds were onto him almost immediately and and got a search warrant for one of his apartments (he was well off enough to have more than one residence) and they discovered over 40 lbs of marijuana and nearly $400,000 in cash. Using a now busted and compliant Alston who probably made a plea-deal they intercepted another 440 lbs of pot that was headed to him.
Upon further investigation they discovered that he had also been involved in millions of dollars in money-laundering and because the government hates dodging taxes more than really anything else, that is likely when they decided to throw the book at him. After a lengthy trial in North Carolina, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Alston was never going to be the MVP in the NFL... But he was on the field and had a career with teams making tons of dough... but it wasn't enough I guess and he gambled, perhaps thinking that his fame was going to get him past all of that and now he will not see the outside of a prison until he is well over 50 years old.
This is just so tragic to me. The guy didn't need to be the best did he? And I think he realized that he wasn't going to be but rather than just look for other business opportunities he decided to try to become a druglord. It didn't work out for him.
Now this man who is around my age and I had a class with in college and followed his career on TV as as sort of fan is just going to rot away in prison. With good behavior I guess he could be out of prison by 2034 or so.
Isn't that just so sad to you? I mean, the guy already had hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, was still playing pro ball for a lot of money but now... well now nobody is going to want to have anything to do with him.
There are some out there that will remember how he was involved in one of the strangest offenses that ECU football,or the NCAA as a whole, has ever seen. Even fewer people will remember being in a class group with him where he did next to nothing other than sign his name on a piece of paper. One thing is for sure though, his legacy will simply be erased because now he is a felon doing a long stint and for what? A little bit of money that he would have made anyway if he had just kept playing the sport that he presumably loved.
I would like to call this tragic but this guy had a chance and he blew it, big time.