Justin Blackmon Still Hasn’t Found His Way Out Of The Darkness

He never returned from the Bye-week back in 2014

On a cold night in December 2015, Justin Blackmon went to visit an old friend who he knew a little too well. It was Jennifer Miller, owner of a bar in Ardmore, Oklahoma. As usual, Justin put round after round on his tab; he drank and drank to the point of excess.

He wasn't an angry or belligerent drunk. He would talk to Jennifer about her kids and how business was going, probably making a joke about how he was keeping her open.

He listened intently, truly engaging in the conversation. He was pleasant and kind, and the people in the town loved that about him so much that they were hesitant to speak against his excessive drinking.

Hours after entering, Justin closed out his tab, and a bartender asked him, “You're not driving, are you?” Justin looked shocked and answered something like, “What? Of course not.” Then he walked out wearing a red Nike hoodie and grey sweats.

A few minutes later, this video was taken…

I can innately feel that this life has a purpose. I believe that at certain times, it’s supposed to be hard.

I also believe we were given things to help us experience beauty and happiness. But we have to be careful to use things correctly, and not lean too heavily on them.

They’re meant to enhance a good life, not fix a bad one. Hardships can’t be overcome with the use of a substance.

How you deal with these hardships, struggles, and tragedies will significantly influence the quality of your life.

If you ONLY seek an escape or distraction from your issues, those issues have free rein to multiply and formulate an attack that gets stronger and stronger.

Problems are kind of like a federal case. They are perfectly happy to work in the background. They lay low and let you have a little fun for years at a time, as they build a case so strong that when you are charged, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever see the light of day again.

You need to address these issues while they are manageable and take your time rebalancing yourself before they throw the book at you.

Justin Blackmon’s been charged by his affliction, an indefinite sentence into a life of darkness. But, darkness itself is not a physical thing; it’s technically just the absence of light.

So, no matter how dark a room gets, or how long it stays pitch black, it's always just a spark away from once again being filled with light.

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A Dark Seed Takes Root

Justin Blackmon was born in Oceanside, CA. When he hit 2nd grade, his dad, a former marine, accepted a new position that required the family to move to Ardmore, OK.

Justin was highly upset about the move and told his parents he wished they had left him back in California.

But as time would go on, he would become so attached to his new home and the people there that later in his life, once it became clear that he had a problem, they insulated and protected him from everybody but himself.

Justin seemed to have perfectly balanced parents: a retired Marine and a kindergarten teacher. Discipline and toughness from his dad. Patience and nurturing from his mom.

If you were drawing this up on paper and power-ranking parents based solely on profession, Justin’s parents would come out near the top. But, that’s on paper; you still gotta play the game.

We don’t have many details from the Blackmon household. So I’m not sure if it was something there that would trigger Justin’s later struggles. If and that’s *IF either of his parents had issues with alcohol, that would make him more susceptible.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse reports that as many as 60% to 80% of people who are treated for alcohol abuse report experiences of childhood trauma, which is why it doesn’t make sense to just rule that out. But with that said, all childhood trauma doesn’t happen in the home, and for Justin Blackmon, the two biggest traumatic events that we have record of from his childhood actually happened away from the house.

When Justin was just a Freshman in high school, one of his best friends passed away in a car crash. A couple of years later, when he was Jr, he lost yet another friend to a car accident.

Maybe this planted the seed, maybe it was something else. Maybe it was a combination of these factors and more. But something took root inside of Justin, and he’s been trying to drown in it for decades now.

Mama Don’t Play

As an 8th grader, Justin nearly quit playing the game that would one day put millions into his account. He got frustrated with the coach and stormed out of the weight room. He walked straight home, like, I ain't doing all that.

But the coach called his mom, so when Justin got home, she was waiting for him, arms crossed, foot tapping on the floor. She put him in the car and took him right back to the weight room. Only 15 minutes had passed since he walked out. She busted through the door, pulling Justin by the ear, and she made him apologize and finish his workout.

Reading through his story, this is one of the only times he was truly held accountable early in his life. The coach never had another problem out of dude, meaning this tough love from his mom was highly effective. But the better Justin got at the sport he had just tried to quit, the less accountability others seemed to impose on him.

Justin’s Gift/Curse

As an athlete, you play against different archetypes, and you start to realize that athletic gifts don't all look the same.

Being the biggest, fastest, or jumping the highest is cool, and they all have advantages. But they usually come with drawbacks as well.

The fast guy is usually injury-prone, can't move well laterally, or can’t stay out of trouble. The big guy might be faster than you'd expect, but his stamina often has major limitations, and easy as it is for him to put on muscle, it‘s just as easy to put on weight. If he ever gets injured, for once he stops playing, he’ll put on weight seemingly overnight.

Justin was the type of athlete who wasn't the biggest or fastest; he wasn’t picked first when he was younger. But he had sneaky traits that went unnoticed until later in his athletic career. He had long arms and big hands, and he never got tired. These are just things he was naturally blessed with.

At the start of practice during sprints, he would be in the middle of the pack. But at the end of practice, he would smoke everybody. He didn't run the fastest, but he could run all day. When you face off against somebody like that, it can be intimidating because you know you'll slow down before they ever do.

He took losses hard… way too hard. Each loss, he would break down and cry uncontrollably. With a personality like that, it's not hard to imagine how difficult it would have been for him to cope with losing two friends or to cope with life in general. I’m reading into this, which is kind of the point of these articles, trying to glean personality traits for a written story. But often truths lie within seemingly ordinary facts; you just have to open your mind and heart to discern them, or pick them out.

Never getting tired allowed him to hone his skills as a receiver and play offense and defense. With so many full-speed reps, he got better and better and went from a nobody to a respectable 3-star recruit.

Justin Goes to College

Justin committed to Oklahoma State. He redshirted his first year but played a little as a redshirt freshman.

20 receptions, 260 yards, and 2 touchdowns weren't bad. The next year, however, he would dwarf those numbers in just his first three games of the season.

After just three games of his redshirt sophomore year, he had 24 receptions, 431 yards, and 8 TDS. He would go on to finish that year with 111 receptions, just under 1,800 yards, and 20 TDS.

The three-star recruit won the Biletnikoff award, meaning he was the nation's top receiver.

On 3rd and long, there was no question where the ball was going or what the outcome would be.

His coach Mike Gundy marveled at his ability to go full speed all the time. “He could just go and go and go,” says Gundy. “Play and play and play. It’s late in the game, and he’s got 14 or 16 catches, and the defense is bent over, exhausted, and he just keeps coming.”

This was the year he started to show glimpses of his future.

Both his short-term and longer-term future.

Blackmon Begins

Remember I said he finished “just under” 1,800 yards?

Well, he would have easily gone over it if not for a one-game suspension. Midway through his award-winning sophomore season, Justin found himself in a place that would become quite familiar.

One night in October 2010, Justin and three teammates drove from Oklahoma to Dallas to watch their former teammate Dez Bryant play for the Dallas Cowboys on Monday Night Football. On the way back from the game, they got pulled over because Justin was doing 92mph in a 60mph zone. He failed the sobriety test and was arrested for a DUI.

When Justin got back, nobody was waiting with arms folded and foot tapping on the ground. The award-winning receiver didn’t get the tough love from his childhood; maybe that could have altered how his story ends up.

Justin's charges were reduced to underage alcohol possession, a far lighter charge than his original DUI. To be clear, I have no issue with leniency being shown to first-time offenders of nonviolent crimes. My issue comes as this pattern continues to build later. This is just the point where I want to begin to establish the pattern.

So his charge gets reduced, and his coaches take it pretty easy on him. Here’s a quote from his position coach at Oklahoma State. “When it happened, I was thinking, ‘When I was in college, I probably would have done the same thing.’ You know? It’s a situation where, ‘Hey, I’m down here watching my buddy play in the NFL. There’s a crowd.’ … It’s not like they were at some wild party. They just met at a restaurant and stayed too late, hanging out with friends. If anyone says, ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ you’re lying.”

Since Justin was a first-time offender and the rest of his personality doesn’t seem to point to a deeper issue, the coach’s response here is measured and reasonable in my opinion; I’m not judging them. But we can learn from the gift of hindsight, and this seems to be a point where something could have been done differently that may have affected the tragic outcome.

Justin would continue to see this leniency from many of the people around him, despite continuing to betray their trust; everybody was afraid to upset the local star.

Word of Justin’s partying and drinking started to spread, but coaches were hesitant to read into it. He wasn't missing practices or classes, and his performance on the field hadn’t dropped off. So, maybe it was just a case of a college kid being a college kid, and there was nothing to worry about.

Eventually, though, word got back to Justin's high school coach regarding his excessive partying. He coupled this with the fact that he’d seen Justin when he'd come home buying rounds of drinks for large groups of people, and he worried about him.

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Question:

If you've ever known somebody who you suspect has a problem, how did you approach the situation? Did you ask them directly? Did you hint a little bit? How do you ask without turning the situation hostile or eroding all the trust that the person has in you?

I think that’s where his high school coach and many of Justin’s close circle were getting tripped up. How would you handle this?

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Justin’s college coaches claim they never saw any real signs, as Justin's junior year was just as impressive as his previous season. If he had a problem, could he have just back-to-backed the Belitnikoff award like he did?

Head coach Mike Gundy did admit that he had seen a change in Justin over the last few weeks on campus. He noted that Justin’s demeanor was different, but he chalked it up to nerves associated with the upcoming draft.

NFL scouts, however, saw the signs very clearly. And because they didn't have a relationship with Justin, didn't (yet) need him to catch TD passes, and didn't care whether or not he considered them a friend, there was nothing separating them from the truth of the matter.

The Buccaneers sent a scout to Stillwater, Oklahoma, home of Oklahoma State. And it didn’t take long for him to pick up the scent of Justin’s drinking problems.

Here's what the then-Bucs Director of Pro Scouting, Mark Dominki, revealed in a later interview.

“We found out there was a bar called the Cricket Inn, or the Cricket, which was a popular bar there at Oklahoma State. And so (the scout) would sit there for a week. He sat there for one week, went in every day and stayed till 11 o’clock at night. That was his job. And when we checked: How many times did Justin Blackmon come in? And he came in too many times. And we took him off our board.”

They were only in town for a week and got to the bottom of Justin’s issues, while the people who saw him every day refused to see it. Sometimes when you're so close to a situation, you actually have the worst seat in the house.

You ever sat in the front row at a movie theater? It sounds good at first, but once you get there, you realize your so close that you can’t see shit.

D.U.I. Drafted Under the Influence

Thanks to the hard work of that scout, who got to chill at the bar for a week, the Bucs took Justin off their draft board and traded the fifth overall pick to the Jacksonville Jags, and the rest is history.

Now the Jags were also privy to the same type of information, but chose to ignore it and burned their pick. They sat with Justin's high school coach, who loved him dearly and struggled to come to the obvious conclusion.

He’d seen things and heard things that were all red flags, but Justin used to babysit his kid. He loved him like a son and wrestled with the obvious truth, but eventually it pinned him down on the mat. When he sat down with the Jags scout, here’s what he said. “You know,” Dombek told the Jaguars scout (via The Ringer), “I think Justin might have an issue with alcohol.”

The Jaguars (still) selected Justin 5th overall, ignoring the warnings that were right in their faces. Justin was the highest-drafted player from Oklahoma State since Barry Sanders two decades earlier.

Two months later, he was arrested again.

I’d bet Justin at this point wanted to put the bottle down, but was likely distraught when he realized he couldn’t. His underlying issues, whatever they were, had gone ignored for way too long. They had built up an army and were attacking full force. Justin fought back but was severely outmanned.

In June 2012, before he had played a single game in the league, Justin was pulled over for driving 60 in a 35 and veering onto the left side of the road.

By the time the season rolled around, Justin may have been drowning behind the scenes, but he still performed pretty well on an NFL field. As a rookie, he put up 865 yards on 34 receptions and scored five TDs. He did this, mind you, with Chade Henne and Blaine Gabbert as his QBs, so this was a really solid rookie season.

The next year, Justin wanted to get off to a fast start. But for him, the offseason was one of his greatest opponents. Now, out of college, with money, no classes to attend, just a grown millionaire with nowhere to be for several months, it’s hard to imagine what Justin was fighting when nobody was around.

Justin opened up the next season serving 4 four-game suspension, but when he came back, he showed a glimpse of what he could be, if he could ever break free from the bottle. In his first two games after the four-game suspension, he combined for 19 catches and 326 yards.

I think more people are familiar with Josh Gordon, another hyper-talented WR who was drafted the same year as Justin. They both landed with bad organizations and struggled with substance abuse. Gordon was more visible in the NFL and was more heavily covered by sports media. But Blackmon was easily the better college player, and they had nearly identical rookie seasons in the league. There’s no real reason to believe Justin couldn’t have a year like Josh Gordon had in 2013 if he could have stayed on the field. Either way, the game of football lost out big time as these 2 talents battled demons that kept them off the field.

The Longest Bye Week Ever

After two amazing games and an okay game, the Jaguars traveled to London to play the 49ers at Wembley Stadium.

Following that game, the Jags had a bye week.

Justin never returned to the field after that bye.

During that bye week in 2014, Justin was suspended indefinitely from the NFL after once again violating the substance abuse policy. Before he was eligible to apply for reinstatement, he was arrested again, this time for possession of marijuana.

This would continue until this very day, DUI arrest, possession arrests, so on and so on, again and again.

The other day, I thought about Justin kind of randomly and typed his name in to see if he’d gotten himself together. I figured maybe there was a redemption story there. Unfortunately, all I found was that a few hours earlier, the dude had been arrested again for the same reason he'd always gotten arrested, and then my mind clicked.

I covered Justin years ago and have gone on with my life. I’ve had my own triumphs and failures over that time. We all live our separate lives, fight our own battles, and then check back in with each other periodically. We’ve probably all had days where we think, “Why me? Why am I being subjected to all of these problems?”

But then you think about a person like Justin, a person steeped in constant darkness for well over a decade. Given his most recent arrest (which we’re about to discuss), many of us start to realize just how blessed we’ve actually been.

The Absence of Light

A few days ago at 1:32 am, somebody reported a large black man lying on the ground. When police got there, Justin had gotten himself up but was still super unsteady on his feet. The officers say he was under the influence of alcohol, and his clothes were wet at the time of the arrest.

The officers said that due to his body size and the width of his wrists, they actually had to use two sets of handcuffs. They also say they couldn't fit him in the back of the car and had to call for a larger vehicle just to get him to the station.

It seems like years of alcohol abuse have taken a major toll on his body, but whatever that took the toll on his mind and heart that led him to this point is the real culprit here.

It's sad to see Justin still in this state of darkness, and he's got to be the one to take the steps to get himself out of it.

Still, if you're religious, send prayers; if you're spiritual, send energy; if you believe in people, send hope. Anything to help one of our human brothers find their way back into the light.

It's interesting to me that, as far as he’s slipped, he still doesn't have accusations of violence that I’ve seen. This indicates a good heart that’s still there, but he’s drowning it in alcohol in the process of trying to drown something else.

There’s a monster inside of him that's eating away and tearing him down from the inside out. I pray that he can find it, cast it out, and begin rebuilding the 2nd half of his life.

He’s only 35 years old, though he seems much older. So, there's hope that he can recover and get his life back.

If you’re in a dark place, you HAVE to find a spark, and use that glimmer of light to find your way out.