Down Lineman

The night of January 15, 2005 was a typical Saturday at the Playwright Irish Pub on the corner of Washington Avenue and 13th Street in the South Beach section of Miami Beach. The bar was filled with rowdy Anglo-Irish rugby fans cheering on their favorite teams, whose games were being beamed via satellite to the bar's many televisions. The pub's owner, Eamon Guilfoyle, 31, a native of Kilkenny, Ireland, wandered through the bar glad-handing his compatriots, chatting in the Irish brogue he hadn't lost even after 11 years in the States. The bartenders were pouring pints of Guinness and shots of Jameson, and the waitresses were hustling orders of corned beef and cabbage to chef Adriano Visentin, a slightly built 27-year-old Italian, in the kitchen. The bar was so raucous that Visentin almost didn't hear the rear fire-exit door open at 8:23 P.M. Ordinarily that door would be locked from the outside, but on this busy night it was unlocked so the pub's busboys could throw out garbage in the alley trash bins. But Visentin did hear the door open, so he went to have a look. What he saw was frightening.

The man was monstrous--six-foot-three, 380 pounds. He wore a black T-shirt over his huge gut and baggy camouflage shorts. He was barefoot, and his thick biceps, forearms and massive legs were covered with tattoos. Even his neck was abnormally thick, wider than his small head. He had long, wild, sand-colored hair, a scraggly beard, an earring and small, blue-gray, unblinking eyes.

At first Visentin thought the intruder might have been a rugby fan who had ventured through the wrong door. But those fans were always animated and rowdy. This man's face was without emotion, without life, even, except for his crazed eyes. His demeanor was so scary that Visentin was afraid to approach him. The chef said to him, "You can't stay here." The man held up a cigarette and asked for a light. Visentin again told him to leave. The man made a move to enter the kitchen, but Visentin tried to stop him. For some reason, the huge man didn't t barge past Visentin, who is barely five-foot-eight. Instead he went up the fire-exit stairway to the second-floor mezzanine and the pub's office.

Visentin hurried to the bar to get Guilfoyle, who at six-foot-one and 175 pounds is considerably taller than the chef. The pair rushed upstairs, where they found the intruder slamming his shoulder into the locked office door. "He was trying to break into my office," Guilfoyle says. "I told him to leave, and for some reason he did. He went up the fire-exit stairs. I went into my office and called the police."

While Guilfoyle dialed, the man climbed the concrete stairway to the flat roof of the two-story building. He stepped through the fire-exit door onto the roof on a warm south Florida night. The blue-gray sky was dotted with stars, and a faint breeze blew in from the ocean three blocks east. To his left was a door. He went through it, down another narrow concrete stairway to the ground floor and back outside to the alley where he had started. Before the door behind him shut and locked, he saw two plainclothes Miami Beach detectives, Michael Muley and Mark Schoenfeld, coming toward him. He turned, caught the door before it closed and hurried back up the stairway. The two detectives caught the door too and hurried after him. A uniformed officer, Colin Pfrogner, entered the building from the front and was coming up another stairway.

When the intruder reached the second floor, he went through an open door into a blue-carpeted hallway. He heard the detectives coming up behind him and the other officer approaching from the front, so he ducked into the ladies' room. When the three officers reached the hallway, no one was in sight. It was 8:28 P.M. Pfrogner went into the men's room to clear it, and Schoenfeld and Muley went into the ladies' room. It was tiny, barely big enough for the two officers, neither of whom weighed more than 180 pounds. They searched the first of three bathroom stalls, then the second, then the third. The man was sitting on the third toilet, his head in his hands. The officers identified themselves and ordered the man out of the bathroom. He complied wordlessly, almost robotically. He was so huge they couldn't flank him as he moved through the bathroom into the hallway.

At the same moment, Pfrogner came out of the men's room. He ordered the man to put his hands on the wall so he could be searched for a weapon. When the man saw Pfrogner's uniform, he charged him like a football lineman, driving Pfrogner back against a wall. The man began to beat Pfrogner with his fists, laughing as he did so, until the officer fell to the floor. The two detectives jumped on the man, kicking and punching him while shouting at him to stop resisting. Their blows glanced off the huge intruder like flies off an elephant. The man picked up Schoenfeld in both hands like a rag doll and slammed him into a wall, then into another one. Schoenfeld slipped to the floor, semiconscious.

By this time Pfrogner was standing again and reaching for his gun. The man slapped it out of his hand. Behind him Muley was screaming at him to stop resisting. When he didn't, Muley pulled out his gun, a .40 caliber semiautomatic P226 SIG Sauer. He threatened to shoot if the man didn't comply. The man grabbed Muley's face in one hand and shoved his head into a wall. Laughing like a man possessed, he then grabbed Muley's forearms in an attempt to get his gun. Muley fired five shots. One hit a door, two hit a wall, one entered the man's chest at his heart, and the other penetrated his lung. The man dropped to his knees, then uttered his first words since he'd entered the Playwright pub. He said, "Fuck you!" and sat on the floor like a bad child.

"I heard three loud bangs," says Ernie Ewert, a local businessman who was in the building at the time. "They didn't sound like the gunshots in the movies, but they were very loud. Then I heard a shout, 'Man down!' " The paramedics arrived and tended to the semiconscious Schoenfeld and the wounded man, who was still scuffling even as they began to address his injuries. Finally, as Ewert puts it, "they must have gotten him sedated."

The following morning the Miami Beach Police Department identified the assailant. A spokesman said that if the officers had known who he was, they might have called a crisis prevention team. But they didn't have time. A few days later Barret G. Robbins, then 31, of Englewood, Colorado was charged with three felony counts of attempted murder. His lawyer, Edward O'Donnell, immediately disputed the charges, saying, "It looks like blatant insanity to me." O'Donnell could only guess at what had motivated his client to attack three officers, since Robbins was still unconscious in intensive care at Jackson Memorial Medical Center's Ryder Trauma Center, where a corrections officer was guarding his door. The only thing anyone who had known Robbins during the past 31 years knew for certain was that the incident was sad and, more important, predictable.

Barret Robbins had been an all--Southwest Conference football player at Texas Christian University and, in 1995, a second-round draft choice for the then Los Angeles, now Oakland Raiders of the NFL. Robbins was the Raiders' starting center for seven of eight years; he was a Pro Bowl selection in 2002, and both Bill Parcells and John Madden, two of the greatest NFL coaches, called him the best offensive center in football. In January 2003, when he reached the peak of his career, Robbins was beloved by his coaches and teammates ("He was terrific, a real good guy, fun-loving," says Bruce Allen, a former senior assistant coach with the Raiders); well paid (he was making more than $3 million a year by 2003); the husband of a beautiful, loving wife, Marisa; and the father of two sweet daughters. He was about to play in the biggest game of his life, Super Bowl XXXVII, between Oakland and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. His coaches and teammates credited him with getting the Raiders to that game. Bill Callahan, Oakland's head coach at the time, said, "He's our air traffic controller. He lands the plane and makes the right calls." (continued on page 144)Robbins(continued from page 120) A few days before the Super Bowl Robbins talked about how important the game was in his life. "It's awesome," he said, "an unbelievable feeling to get to that game. I strived and worked hard to achieve this. I'm anxious to find out what it's going to be like on Sunday." But he never did find out what it would be like to play in the biggest game of his career. Two days before Super Bowl XXXVII Barret Robbins suffered the most famous mental meltdown in sports history.

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Robbins was raised in Sharpstown, an inner-city area in southwest Houston. Friends describe the place as "not the nicest part of town. Not River Oaks." Furthermore, they say the Robbins family did not have a lot, although Robbins's mother, Kaye, always made sure her son's clothes were neat and dean. His high school football coach, Bobby Plummer, says, "His mama babied him. Whatever she said, he did."

As an only child, Robbins liked to go to his parents' bedroom at night and beg them to let him sleep with them. Often they let him, and he thanked them with glee. His father, Dean "Rob" Robbins, is described by a family friend as "an east Texas drinker, a big guy, six-foot-two, 220 pounds, laid-back." When Robbins was a child his father used to give him sips of beer. Robbins's half brother Scott has been quoted as saying, "All the men on our side of the family love to drink."

When Robbins was in elementary school his parents split up. His mother never remarried. "Barret became a mama's boy," says Max Knake, his TCU roommate, "but she was the sweetest little lady and such a hard worker." But like her husband, Kaye was a drinker. "She was probably an alcoholic," says a family friend, "but she was sweet and always flustered. She spoiled Barret because his daddy wasn't around."

When Robbins entered high school, Plummer remembers, "he fit in with all the kids. He was smart, and his teachers loved him. He was just a big old teddy bear." He was also a very talented teddy bear. Despite his size--six-foot-three, 297 pounds in his senior year--he could run the 40-yard dash in five seconds. He was his baseball team's starting catcher, and his coach, Dick Janse, remembers a time when the huge Robbins beat out a bunt for a single and then stole second base. "Oh, he was so happy and good-natured," Janse tells me. "His mama came to all his games, but I never saw his daddy."

Both Janse and Plummer claim they never saw any signs of mental problems in Robbins. Janse says he never knew Robbins to drink, but Plummer tells me he assumed Robbins drank in high school in a normal way, "like all the other kids." A friend of Robbins's tells me that Robbins and a high school buddy, Jimmy Newell, got in the habit of drinking together because "they both had the same family situations. But that Newell, he was a punk, a leech and a bad influence on Barret."

During his last years in Sharpstown, Robbins volunteered for a special-education program for children with physical and mental disabilities. One of the special-education teachers, Nan Grawe, remembers that "the children were drawn to him by his personality, not his size or his sports achievements. I remember two little boys running to him and hugging him. They loved him. They called him Big Bear."

As graduation approached, Robbins had difficulty getting a college football scholarship. Plummer called coaches at TCU and told them, "I've got the best football player I've ever had here." After one of the school's scholarship players left the program, TCU offered Robbins the spot. Despite his size, which was huge for high school, he was not a particularly big or strong college player in his early years. To make up for his lack of strength, a relative says, Robbins began taking steroids at TCU. "It affected him," the relative says. There were also rumors about his drinking and what Jack Hesselbrock, the associate athletic director, called rowdy behavior, though it was not a concern. All he had to do was mention his mother. Said Hesselbrock, "He didn't want to let her down."

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Shortly after the shooting in Miami, I call Knake, who was also the team's quarterback. He's 32 now, married and an executive in a consulting firm.

"My first impression of Barret was he was a stand-up guy," Knake says. "We became friends because we had the same interests. I'm from Chicago; he's from Houston. We weren't small-town Texas guys. We liked jazz and blues. We were city guys with different interests than most of the players."

Knake attributed a lot of Robbins's success to his intelligence. "He was a very sharp guy, street-smart. He could see the whole picture. We'd get to the sidelines after a play, and he'd say, 'We can run this play because I own this guy.' He knew which players he could take advantage of both mentally and physically. Nobody on the team ever questioned him." Knake tells me the other reason Robbins was so talented: For a big man, he was unbelievably agile, "with quick feet and the ability to move laterally. He could even play Ping-Pong gracefully. The man had some rhythm. We'd go to clubs, and he could dance. He had more rhythm even than a lot of brothers. But most of all the man had heart. He wouldn't quit."

They became roommates in 1993, and Knake learned a lot more about his teammate. Knake says, "We'd go out to dinner with his mama after a game, and you could tell when he was around her he felt protected. At the time I didn't notice any mental problems or his taking steroids or having a drinking problem."

By the time Robbins was a senior and Knake a junior, Knake tells me, he began hearing rumors about episodes--about police finding Robbins unconscious in a car. His personality began to change, Knake says, but he attributed that to Robbins's realization that he was on the verge of being a high NFL draft pick. "You know, money can change your outlook," Knake explains. "We stopped talking after he left for the NFL."

As a rookie with the Raiders, Robbins was described as a good guy and a regular drinker who at times became surly, which was why his teammates would nickname him the Asshole. Throughout his career, when people talked about Robbins they seemed to be talking about two different people: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a good guy and the Asshole. "There were red flags all over the place," a close friend of his tells me. "Psychotic episodes. He was self-medicating with alcohol."

Robbins's first public episode with the Raiders (which the team tried to cover up by calling it a case of influenza syndrome) occurred on December 14, 1996 in a Denver hotel. Bob Padecky, a sportswriter for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, was checking into his room when he noticed Robbins following him down the hallway. In a column he wrote for the Democrat on January 29, 2003, Padecky claims the look on Robbins's face "confused me. He was awake. His eyes were open. Otherwise there was no sign of life. His arms, legs, torso, nothing moved. His eyes were distant, like he was having an out-of-body experience." When Padecky entered his room, he turned to see Robbins standing in front of him, wearing a goofy grin. "He appeared to be a little boy, lost."

Padecky got Robbins to follow him down to the lobby. He told Robbins to stand mere and someone would pick him up. "I figured someone would have to notice a six-foot-three, 320-pound guy in the lobby," Padecky tells me. "He wasn't threatening. The lights were on, but no one was home."

(Even more strange was that Padecky kept news of his encounter with Robbins to himself. He did not tell the Raiders nor did he write about it until six years later, three days after the January 26, 2003 Super Bowl.)

When the Raiders finally reached Robbins in that Denver hotel, he was so confused he didn't know what city he was in. The team sent him home on the day of its game with Denver and reported to the press that Robbins had the flu. Marisa, at this time his girlfriend, had to meet him at his connecting flight in Salt Lake City because he had lost his wallet She says of that meeting, "He had peas in his ears from the meal the night before. He was saving them for me. He recognized me for an instant and said, 'I knew you would come to save me.' The next moment he was talking to me like I was one of his college teachers. 'How about mat test today?' Then it was like I was his friend Jimmy Newell. 'What are we going to do today, Jimbo?"' Marisa says that when they reached Oakland and she was driving Robbins home, "each time we'd get to a stoplight he'd open the door and say, 'Thanks for the ride,' and try to get out"

Barret Robbins on that day was nothing like the man she first met, Marisa tells me when I call her a few months after her husband was shot. She answers the phone with her daughters, Madison, seven, and Marley, four, screeching in the background. She is pleasant, almost happy, and very direct about her life with Robbins. "I met Barret in L.A. in 1995," she says. "He helped me and my girlfriends get a table at a restaurant. Oh, he had wonderful manners--very gentlemanly--a beautiful smile and a happy, jolly laugh." She laughs. "And his Texas drawl, I just loved it."

Shortly after the Denver episode Robbins was admitted to a Berkeley psychiatric facility, where he stayed for two weeks, missing his team's last two games. By the time he was released he had been diagnosed as clinically depressed and given his first medication.

Robbins's mother had warned Marisa about his episodes at TCU. "She prepared me for what happened in Denver," Marisa says. "Something was happening in his brain." After the Denver hotel incident Robbins was given medication "through his team doctors," she says. "But he wasn't told to take it every day, just when he felt bad, like an aspirin for a headache. That's what led to his self-medicating. He'd smoke marijuana and medicate himself with alcohol. I told him marijuana wasn't good for him, but he loved it. He said it eased the pain from his bad knees."

Not until July 1997, a month after he and Marisa were married, did Robbins announce to the media that he suffered from clinical depression. "It's a battle with in your head," he said. He claimed he was winning that battle thanks to his medication. Joe Bugel, then the offensive-line coach for the Raiders, said he could see Robbins was "so much better now. He has that gleam in his eyes."

Robbins had good reason to have that gleam in his eyes. In 1998 he was making a million dollars a year, and his personal life was stable with Marisa. Then, in 1999, his mother died at the age of 52. "He squalled like a baby," said his half brother Scott. Robbins said, "A big part of me went with her."

"She died in a botched cosmetic-surgery operation," a friend of Robbins's tells me. "There was a deep wound there that wasn't going to heal. You know, Barret loved only two things in his life, football and his mother, and he lost both."

Robbins began drinking more, Marisa says. He had long periods of depression that were alleviated by the arrival of his daughters. Robbins loved children, and even as a grown man there was something of the child about him. Marisa tells me, "Our daughters were a comfort to him. He'd shoot hoops with the girls and put Marley on his shoulders so she could make a basket. He loved to watch animal videos with them and take them to Chuck E. Cheese's for pizza. They were a big part of his life."

A friend who frequently stayed with the Robbins family remembers, "After dinner he'd often get on the floor, this big mountain of a man, and his little daughters would climb over him like monkeys." Robbins also exhibited his love for children through the charities he supported, such as the Boys & Girls Clubs of Oakland. He often showed up at those clubs to play basketball with the kids. "But that got lost when he started to have problems again," his friend says.

His behavior before Oakland's AFC Championship game in January 2001 was so erratic that Jon Gruden, the Raiders' head coach at the time, had to pay him a home visit to straighten him out. But it wasn't until 2003--two days before Super Bowl XXXVII in San Diego--that Barret Robbins began to unravel.

He had been having problems all season. He came to team meetings late and often made a spectacle of himself with inappropriate comments. "He was struggling with something," said Sam Adams, a defensive tackle and friend of Robbins's.

Marisa tells me her husband stopped taking his medication long before the Super Bowl. "He was worried he wouldn't be able to play," she says. "He said he felt antsy on his medication and that he'd fix himself. 'I got this, babe,' he told me. 'I'll be fine.' He was also shooting up his knees with painkillers every day before the Super Bowl because he was worried he would let his teammates down if his knees didn't hold up."

The week before the Super Bowl, Robbins seemed distant and withdrawn during practices and meetings. On media day, the Tuesday before the game, he appeared dazed, his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes so he could avoid eye contact with reporters.

On Friday, January 24, two days before Super Bowl Sunday, Robbins made the team's 11 P.M. bed check at its hotel in La Jolla and then slipped out to a bar, where he met a Raiders fan named Cartier "Network" Dise, the owner of Down Low Customs in San Leandro. Dise knew Robbins and a lot of other Raiders players because he customized their fancy cars. Robbins bought Dise a drink, and then, according to Dise, "he began buying rounds for everybody, shots of tequila, and it was pretty crazy." During that night, Dise said, Robbins's moods alternated between depression and euphoria. He was happy "one minute, and the next he was crying." He told Dise the Super Bowl pressure was getting to him. "He said he was letting everyone down," Dise said days later. "He was crying and totally depressed about his life and the pressure he was under. The guy was messed up." At one point Robbins told Dise he was thinking of killing himself. Finally Dise left the bar. Robbins ended his binge in Tijuana. He didn't return to San Diego until after he had missed his team's final practice on Saturday. By the time he made the team's final eight P.M. meeting that night, Raiders head coach Bill Callahan described him as incoherent and "not capable of knowing where he was." Callahan was so furious with his Pro Bowl center that he dismissed him from the meeting and announced to the team that Robbins's backup, Adam Treu, would start on Sunday. The following morning Callahan announced that Robbins wouldn't be allowed to suit up for the game and then ordered him to leave the team hotel, but he had trouble catching a flight back to Oakland because he couldn't find his wallet. On the day of the Super Bowl Robbins checked into a San Diego hospital for psychiatric evaluation. He was on suicide watch as the Raiders were routed by the Buccaneers, 48 to 21. Two days later he was released from the hospital.

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Three days after the 2003 Super Bowl, Padecky wrote a column about his bizarre Denver hotel encounter with Robbins in 1996. When I ask Padecky why it took him so long to write that column, he tells me, "I gave the players latitude for being flaky. This is the NFL. It's not a sane sport. You know, the Raiders didn't give out a lot of information about Robbins being in a psychiatric facility. For the most part the Raiders kept it quiet."

Another reporter who covered the team during those years tells me, "The Raiders must have been working overtime to keep Robbins on the field. I heard Jon Gruden spent a lot of time keeping Barret on the straight and narrow."

Gruden, now head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, didn't respond to repeated requests for an interview, and Callahan, now head coach at the University of Nebraska, refused to speak about Robbins. It is strange that Robbins's coaches now refuse to talk about a man who helped advance their careers. Of all the Raiders personnel during Robbins's time with the team, the only one who would speak about Robbins on the record is Bruce Allen, now general manager of the Buccaneers. Allen tells me that during his days with Oakland he saw no hint of the mental problems that foreshadowed Robbins's Super Bowl behavior. However, Allen also told USA Today in a February 2005 article that the Raiders were "aware of everything. In this era it's almost impossible to get away with running a stop sign."

After the Raiders were blown out by the Buccaneers, Robbins's teammates laid the blame at his doorstep. Guard Frank Middleton said what Robbins did to his teammates "was like spitting in our faces." Guard Mo Collins said, "Whatever fucking rock he came out from under, he can stay there."

When Robbins left San Diego he checked into the Betty Ford Center, where he remained for 31 days. While he was being evaluated, the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that the Raiders had been aware of Robbins's mental problems since the 1996 episode in Denver. Reportedly the team knew he had been on medication, but in that article Allen claimed that because of psychiatrist-patient confidentiality laws, the Raiders were not allowed to know what medication he was taking. However, Marisa Robbins says the Raiders' medical staff had been prescribing medication for clinical depression since the Denver episode, and according to the Chronicle the team had been monitoring him through Super Bowl week, when it became obvious that Robbins had stopped taking it.

But what made him stop? A close friend tells me, "Barret didn't like the effects of the medication. It made him feel dull. He said he didn't want to feel like he was barely alive." The fact that he might be feeling dull on the eve of the most significant day of his life might have motivated him to go off his medication. How could he muster the aggression he needed if he was taking medication that muted that very impulse? But there was another reason Robbins might have stopped taking his pills. During his 31 days at the Betty Ford Center, Robbins was diagnosed not with clinical depression but with bipolar disorder. For six years he had been taking the wrong medicine.

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Ely Pelta is a clinical psychiatrist practicing in Coral Springs, Florida. There is no couch in his office. The days of Freudian psychoanalysis are gone, he says. No more long sessions with a patient lying on a couch, dragging up painful memories.

"We just prescribe medicines now," says Pelta. He's a tall, wiry man in his 50s, casually dressed in a T-shirt, jeans and a baseball cap. "Clinical depression," he says, "is a pervasive sadness that lingers for longer than two weeks. It doesn't have to have a trigger--a failed marriage, a lost job--although a loss of some kind can trigger it. We call it a state of anhedonia, a lack of pleasure. It's accompanied by crying, loss of energy, a sense of hopelessness and even thoughts of suicide."

Pelta says the cure for depression is medication such as Prozac that can elevate a patient's energy level and motivation, but, he admits, "It may make a person agitated." The problem with most clinical-depression diagnoses, he explains, is that they are often misdiagnoses of bipolar disorder. Bipolar patients fluctuate between pervasive sadness and heightened euphoria. However, since the euphoria is often pleasing, patients don't consult psychiatrists when euphoric, which is why they're often diagnosed as clinically depressed.

"When bipolar patients are euphoric," Pelta says, "they have boundless energy. Their minds are racing, thoughts flying. They go on shopping binges, become promiscuous, exhibit inappropriate behavior in public. They can be the life of the party. They have delusions of grandeur, which can be a pleasant sensation for rookies with the disease. It's like being high. Their perceptions are heightened, and their ranting monologues are brilliant. But it's a roller coaster to hell. Veterans of the disease know the crash to depression is coming."

Pelta tells me bipolar disorder can be inherited from one's parents, but it's not always so. (Robbins claimed in 1997 that both his parents suffered from depression.) It can also be brought on by psychological stress--separation from a spouse, a lost job--or a stressful event, such as the Super Bowl.

"Bipolars need two kinds of medication," Pelta says. "A mood stabilizer, such as lithium, to bring them down from their mania, and an antidepressant, such as Prozac, to bring them up out of depression." He says even antidepressants would put a football player like Robbins, on the eve of the Super Bowl, into "a mellow, indifferent, nonaggressive state that might impair his ability to perform. They would make him apathetic."

Before I leave Pelta's office, I ask him what would happen if a bipolar athlete were taking steroids and drinking, on or off his medication. Pelta says, "You add liquor and steroids to the mix, it's like pouring gasoline on a fire. A bipolar personality may think he's Superman and a cop's bullets can't penetrate him. That might explain why Robbins was laughing during the altercation. Either he felt impervious to the cops' blows and bullets, or he was trying to commit suicide by cop."

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In spring 2003 Robbins's teammates were still ambivalent about his Super Bowl meltdown. "He always seemed fine to us," said teammate Frank Middleton. "Is it true he had mental problems, or is his agent doing some covering up?" Nevertheless, Robbins announced his intention to return to the team. He thanked the organization for giving him a second chance (the Raiders cut his salary from $3.2 million to $1 million) and then went on ESPN to explain what had happened to him during Super Bowl week. He said that during his episode he felt as if he "could read people's minds. I didn't know what to do. What I did was start drinking, to medicate. Drinking was going to make it go away." After that, he said, the next two days were a blur of drinking and wandering around with his "brain shut down." He also said that after his stay at Betty Ford, when he was diagnosed as bipolar, he felt as if he'd "gone to the bottom" and now was sober for the first time in 15 years.

In June 2003 Robbins reported to the Raiders' minicamp. He spoke to his teammates in a closed-door locker room meeting that, Allen tells me, "was apologetic and tearful. It was hard for him to come back." After that meeting Rich Gannon, the team's quarterback, said, "He shared some very personal things, and the players were receptive to it."

Robbins arrived at minicamp overweight, and he was put at the bottom of the team's depth chart. He worked his way up until he took his starting position in the Raiders' fourth game that year. He started nine games, then missed the last four with a knee injury. But everyone who knew him was hopeful because he had not suffered any episodes.

"After the Super Bowl," a close friend says, "Barret told me, 'This will never happen again.' He meant it. But the disease is a liar. It tells patients they're okay, and they go off their meds."

During 2003 and 2004 a series of stressful events occurred in Robbins's life that would lead him to that building in South Beach. In the fall of 2003 he tested positive for the steroid tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG. His name, along with those of about a dozen other athletes, including baseball players such as Barry Bonds, was found in the records of BALCO, the steroid company run by Victor Conte in the San Francisco Bay area; the revelation inspired an upheaval that led to congressional hearings. In October 2003 Robbins was subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury about his possible steroid use.

Shortly after that subpoena, in February 2004, Robbins underwent a graft operation for cartilage in his knee. In July of that year the Raiders released him.

Without football for the first time in about 20 years, Robbins no longer had "a real purpose and passion for his life," said Robbins's former teammate Steve Wisniewski. A friend of Robbins's tells me, "He had trouble adjusting to life after football. He began drinking, gained weight and went off his meds," which, at the time, included Depakote for mood stabilization, Risperdal for manic episodes and Well-butrin for depression. Also around this time, his marriage began to fall apart.

The THG incident crushed him, says Marisa. "He started talking a little faster, driving faster," she says, "listening to his louder hard-core rap music, spending more--$7,000 on a sound system and TV in his Mercedes."

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Although he tried to start businesses--a home-building firm and a recording studio--Robbins couldn't make anything stick. He began to argue with his wife, loud arguments that terrorized his daughters. At one point, one of his daughters told her father, "Don't yell at my mama." That must have devastated Robbins, who lived for his daughters. In some ways, they were his only link to sanity and the innocence of his past.

His behavior worsened to a point at which "a few times I was afraid for my well-being," Marisa tells me. "It wasn't like he came at me, but it was physical contact brought on by his manic moods. He'd be asleep, dreaming, and he'd wake in bed mad at me and confused. Sometimes he'd be dreaming that he was playing a game, and he'd wake and start pummeling me like he was fighting a defensive lineman. I'd try to block his blows and calm him down and sometimes just leave the room. The next day he'd say he was sorry, but it was hard for him. He was devastated, ashamed."

Finally Robbins couldn't bear the pain he was putting himself and his family through. He asked Marisa for a divorce. She describes it as a moment of clarity for her. Shortly afterward she fled to southern California. Rob-bins began to call and argue with her over the phone. If she didn't answer, he spewed obscenities into her answering machine. Yet sometimes when he called, he was pitiful. "He'd call," Marisa says, "and say, 'I can't keep going on. Tell my girls good-bye.' One night he sounded like a little kid. 'I'm scared, Marisa. I'm scared of my thoughts.' " Marisa asked if he was going to hurt himself. He began to cry, then said, "Yes, I am."

Then, on December 24, in the early hours of the morning, Robbins was arrested for punching a security guard at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco. He was released from jail on Christmas Day, and three days later he was found wandering the parking lot of a psychiatric clinic. He was admitted to the Mt. Diablo Medical Center, and shortly thereafter Marisa got a restraining order against her husband. He was furious and fled Mt. Diablo. Marisa was so terrified that she left her new home and went to stay with girlfriends.

In early January Jimmy Newell called Robbins from Miami Beach and told him the weather was great, that he should come down and party with him. Robbins flew to Miami. He arrived with only a few changes of clothes in his backpack and checked into the Loews hotel. Then he and Newell started barhopping and not sleeping. After a few days Robbins must have been getting scary even to his good friend Jimbo, because on January 8 Newell flew back to California. He left Robbins on his own because, he said, "I had no idea he didn't have his medications until the last day." Newell added defensively, "I don't feel responsible, because everyone's his own person." Then he said a strange thing--when Robbins was fighting with the cops in the hallway of that South Beach building, "the trigger might have been that he was looking for his daughters."

Without Newell, Robbins continued bar-hopping. An aunt flew out to try to get him to come home, and she found him in a dub full of scantily clad women. When she asked if he was on his medications, he said he was, but she "knew he was lying through his teeth." (Teammate Robert Jenkins was quoted as saying, "He'd tell you everything you wanted to hear.") His aunt left without him. She was the last person who knew Robbins to see him before he was taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital with two gunshot wounds.

The first person to see him afterward was Marisa. She flew to Miami and went to the hospital. An armed corrections officer was outside her husband's room. Inside, Robbins was lying unconscious on a bed. His huge stomach protruded between his head and legs, and his limbs were strapped down. There were tubes in his arms and a breathing ventilator over his face. There they were: beauty and the beast. He did not look as if he were going to live. For that matter, she thought, she wasn't sure he wanted to live. But she wasn't surprised. "I've been dreading it," she said soon afterward. "Getting phone calls that something drastic like that has happened." She just didn't know how to stop it.

Everyone who knew Robbins dreaded that phone call--everyone, that is, who cared about him. His Raiders teammates and coaches seemed indifferent to what was happening to him, especially after he ceased to be a valuable player.

When I tell Max Knake that none of the Raiders' players or coaches would talk about this last episode, he becomes furious. "There wasn't much accountability with the people around him," he says. "The Raiders didn't monitor him. They owed it to him to take care of him. All the contributions he made far out-weighed what they gave him. I'm sure the Raiders did their homework before the draft. I think they knew about his problems when they drafted him."

Knake today is bitter about his own NFL experiences. He played briefly in the Canadian Football League, then signed as a free agent with the Dallas Cowboys. He calls his brief NFL career "a bad experience. I'd never been in a situation where people were more selfish. In college I made friends like Barret; in the NFL I didn't. I couldn't relate to people in the NFL. I didn't have it in me to dumb down. It must have been a struggle for Barret, too. He was so smart. Now the Raiders want to distance themselves from him, and I don't understand it."

Marisa also tells me she found it ironic that Robbins's teammates never defended him for his Super Bowl meltdown, despite the fact that he may have gone off his medication in part because he didn't want to let them down. She attributes their lack of compassion to football players being "not very educated."

Before I get off the phone with her, I ask if she would ever reconcile with her husband. "I spent our whole relationship going back and forth with it," she says. "Now I don't see us getting back together. But I still love him dearly. I need him to be strong and on his own. I stayed up to this point for the children. The kids love him. He's the best daddy in the world. He needs to have them because without them he doesn't have much."

Marisa chooses to remember the good times. "You know," she tells me over the phone, "we had wonderful times together. The kids. Our pets. I'll never forget our days at the park with the girls on the slides." Then she hangs up.

•

By early spring Robbins was out of intensive care, and he transferred to a Houston hospital near his father's house for further treatment. But in August he was arrested in San Antonio for marijuana possession. ("We don't know why he was in San Antonio," the arresting officer said.) Robbins has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder in Miami. As of press time, a trial date is still pending.

"You add liquor and steroids to the mix, it's like pouring gasoline on a fire. A bipolar personality may think he's Superman and a cop's bullets can't penetrate him."