In the long, sad, anguished history of draft busts, there’s a checklist of common problems. Jordan struggled with most of them, from drinking and drug use to injury and ambivalence. Hence his plummet from promising young talent to football pariah in two seasons.
Jordan cops to all of it. He didn’t take his career seriously enough. He ignored anyone who warned him. He prioritized bad habits. He hung around the wrong friends. And he was distracted by South Beach and all that Miami glamour. As a rookie in 2013 Jordan had just 19 tackles and two sacks, playing in all 16 games as a Dolphins reserve. “My production was directly related to what I was doing off the field,” he says. “I put nothing into it. I was just showing up.”
He was 23 then, rich—his four-year contract was worth roughly $20 million—almost famous and living in Miami. He deserved to have fun, he reasoned, and he could handle it. He dabbled in molly and ecstasy and smoked marijuana. Mostly he liked to drink. He preferred hard alcohol and consumed all kinds. He told himself he’d party only on some weekends. That became every weekend, and that became every weekend and some weeknights. Eventually, he says, he could drink all night without blacking out. “It becomes exhausting,” Jordan says. “Because every day you’re trying to chase that feeling you had yesterday.”
