There are downward spirals when it comes to professional athletes, and then there’s Lawrence Phillips to go along with Aaron Hernandez‘s headlines.
Phillips was an immensely-talented but decidedly troubled running back at Nebraska, one whose prolific production on the field was trumped by off-field issues that included assault charges in March of 1994 and, most infamously, dragging his ex-girlfriend down three flights of stairs during the 1995 season. Tom Osborne took much-deserved and pointed criticism for allowing Phillips back on his Cornhuskers football team following a shockingly-short suspension -- “I imagine by suspending him, I took several million dollars away from Lawrence Phillips. He’s paid a price,” Osborne said at the time -- with the criticism of Osborne, a current College Football Playoff committee member, trumped a few months later by the St. Louis Rams using a sixth-overall pick on the volatile back.
Phillips’ NFL career encompassed a total of three seasons, after which he bounced around NFL Europe and the CFL and the AFL. His playing career officially ended in 2003 with a stint with the CFL’s Calgary Stampeders; less than two years later, Phillips was charged with multiple felonies after allegedly trying to run over three teenagers with his vehicle following a dispute during a pickup football game in Los Angeles. In 2008, he was sentenced to 10 years in state prison on those charges; while serving that sentence, Phillips in August of 2009 was accused and ultimately convicted of assaulting a former girlfriend, and given a sentence of 31 years.
Phillips is currently incarcerated in a California prison, which brings us to the latest development in his descent into the prison system abyss:“Phillips, currently in prison on a number of criminal charges, is now accused of killing his cellmate, according to media reports out of California.
Officials at Kern Valley State Prison in Delano, California, said they found 37-year-old Damion Soward unresponsive in his cell around 1 a.m. (PST) on Saturday. He died Sunday evening at a hospital.”As much as some want to villify coaches -- “Osborne coddled Phillips because of his talent; Urban Meyer did the same with Hernandez” -- sometimes bad people are just that: bad people, regardless of how athletically gifted they are. And regardless of how much their sports coaches contribute to their sense of entitlement.