In August 2017, then-Ravens tight end Darren Waller was away from the team, serving a yearlong suspension for a violation of the league’s substance abuse policy. His issues were far deeper than that. He was mired in a serious drug addiction.
As he would later describe to HBO’s “Hard Knocks,” Waller was “getting high, literally, every day. Whatever I could get my hands on. Like opiates first, like oxy pills, stuff like that. Xanax, cocaine. Not caring about anything, any kind of consequences or anything like that.”
At the time, football seemed unlikely to be even a part of his life again.
“The first six months of my yearlong suspension I didn’t even wanna go back,” Waller said on Glenn Clark Radio Feb. 18. “I wasn’t even training. I tried training and then I got hurt a little bit while I was training and then it was just like, ‘Forget this.'”
