Katelyn Baker
Well-Known Member
The memory of what he did to Joe Montana haunts Leonard Marshall 25 years later.
The former Giants defensive end, still celebrated by Big Blue fans for his crushing tackles and big-impact plays, hit Montana so hard in the fourth quarter of the January, 1991 NFC Championship Game that he cracked the legendary 49er's ribs, bruised his stomach and sternum, and broke his hand, knocking Montana out for the entire 1991 season.
At times, Marshall felt so strong he worried he'd actually kill an opponent and get charged with committing murder on the field. Now 54, Marshall has mellowed some. He is a family man, a youth football coach, an entrepreneur - and a vocal advocate of cannabis.
Marshall is part of a budding movement among retired NFL players pushing the league to remove marijuana from its banned substance list and permit weed as an alternative to the dangerously addictive painkillers players use to numb their chronically injured bodies. Marshall and the other players want the NFL to fund research into marijuana's potential as a neuroprotectant that can prevent or minimize traumatic brain injuries.
"It's very simple for me," says Marshall, citing cases of painkiller abuse and addiction among retired athletes. "Opioids have killed hundreds of thousands of people. I've never seen that plant kill anyone."
Marshall, who has lived in Bergen County for three decades, recently partnered with Hometowne Rx, a small pharmacy chain that has positioned itself to serve customers with cannabis-derived medicines when the wave of legalization sweeping the nation finally arrives in New Jersey and neighboring states.
"We're watching the trends," says Aisha Bhatti, Hometowne Rx director of pharmacy. "We would be the first in the market to provide a product or develop one with Leonard."
Marshall has especially embraced cannabidiol, or CBD, an extract of marijuana that is neither mind-altering nor addictive. He takes it daily to fight the debilitating headaches he suffers from thanks to the countless head injuries he received over the course of a 12-year career in the NFL.
"Within a few days of using it, I found some significant relief," he says. "My headaches are gone. I used to have a bunch of headaches in the course of a day."
Marshall, who retired in 1994, underwent brain scans and clinical evaluations in 2013 at UCLA, where researchers told him he's at risk for CTE, the devastating brain disease afflicting unknown numbers of former NFL players. (A definitive diagnosis can only be made after an autopsy.)
He thinks back now to Giants' summer training camps under Bill Parcells where Marshall and his teammates sparred in one-on-one blocking drills for 20 minutes at the start of every practice, colliding repeatedly in 30-second stalemates that left Marshall feeling foggy - though not as foggy as he feels now, he says.
"It's like two bulls, 350 pounds each, having a massive collision," says Marshall. "There's a certain break point."
That break point was his body, the ruptured vertebral discs in his neck, the short right leg that contributes to "a debilitating hip injury that down the pike will have to be addressed." Bones in Marshall's ankles have been fused, and the cartilage in his knees was all but destroyed, he says, from playing on Astroturf for 12 seasons.
But it's the trouble upstairs that Marshall is most worried about: Depression, memory loss, headaches, sensitivity to light and sound. He is among the thousands of players who have sued the league for downplaying the danger of concussions and repetitive hits to the brain.
"What the hell is this?" he recalls asking himself around 2007, when he began to notice memory glitches, changes in his behavior, and sleeplessness. He spoke to old colleagues struggling with early dementia and rage episodes.
"OK Leonard," he says he told himself. "If it's happening to them, it's going to end up happening to you. You had just as many collisions if not more than they had."
Marshall says the headaches were "daily and constant" despite various drugs and even hyperbaric chamber sessions. Then, earlier this year, a friend sent him CBD, which he now gets from a Miami company called Miracle Smoke. On a typical morning he'll use a dropper to take a 500-milligram dose of CBD oil. Later in the day he will inhale more of it from his vaporizer.
Marshall says he never used marijuana recreationally growing up or while he was in the NFL. He worried that pot, and alcohol for that matter, would harm his body, which was the source of his livelihood. He predicts the NFL will eventually have to loosen its ban on marijuana as more NFL players embrace it for pain relief.
"If you were to poll players who use marijuana as a substance, eight out of 10 would tell you if they could get the same treatment without the mind-altering effects, they would do it," he says. "Many of them would tell you the mind-altering effects of THC are what prevents them from using it altogether."
That's one reason Marshall has gone into business with Hometowne Rx, which in addition to regular retail outlets also operates as a compounding pharmacy, which means it works with patients and providers to make personalized medications using FDA-approved substances.
If CBD receives FDA approval for epilepsy treatment, Hometowne Rx and other compounding pharmacies will be able to legally provide it to other patients for off-label use as determined by any prescribing physician. In theory, they could have the whole supply chain in place if or when the law catches up to demand.
A native of Franklin, La., Leonard Marshall was an MVP at Louisiana State University when the Giants selected him in the second round of the 1983 draft.
Over the next 10 seasons, he helped the team win two Super Bowls, was twice selected to the Pro Bowl, and recorded a team-record 660 tackles. His 79.5 sacks in the regular season places him third on the Giants' all-time list behind Michael Strahan and Lawrence Taylor. Marshall also played for the Jets in 1993 and Washington in 1994 before retiring.
In retirement, Marshall wove himself into the fabric of his New Jersey community. Armed with an MBA from Seton Hall, he has worked in mortgage lending and charity work, and served as brand ambassador for The Original Soupman (the "Soup Nazi" made famous on "Seinfeld"). He runs a youth football camp in Florida, where he spends part of his time, and will be the defensive line coach at Paramus Catholic High School this fall.
He is asked if he ever worries he's leading kids into a sport where they'll be vulnerable.
"I think about it," he says. "But the techniques and the tackling the way we are teaching the game is a lot different than what we were taught. We're not using the same techniques."
Neuroscientists warn that the smaller, subconcussive hits that are intrinsic to football can be as bad as concussions and knockouts. Still, most high school players don't experience anything like the hits that Marshall used to dole out.
"Once I get my body down to 285 pounds, nine percent body fat, bench pressing 500 pounds, squatting 800 pounds, just think about it," he says. "You get hit by me and you're 210 pounds, you're liable to have to go and see if everything's in place."
He admits he is troubled by the famous hit on Montana and other players.
"(There were) collisions with receivers in games where guys would hold up the receiver and we'd come running and take the top of our Riddell and put it right in his ribcage," he says. "That bothers me."
Given that Marshall is the all-time Giants leader in tackles, it is odd that the team hasn't inducted him into their Ring of Honor, the pantheon of the team's great figures whose names are displayed above the club level at MetLife Stadium. His old teammates and friends Lawrence Taylor and Phil Simms are there of course, along with 40 others. This year's inductees are former general manager Ernie Accorsi, former coach Tom Coughlin, and defensive end Justin Tuck, who had 60.5 sacks and 318 tackles in his nine-year career with the Giants.
Such honors and distinctions matter to retired players, whose earning potential typically drops off as their names fade from memory and become unfamiliar to younger fans. Marshall's 2010 memoir, entitled "When the Cheering Stops," challenges the common misperception that NFL retirees swim in pools of cash. "If there's 50 players on a team, 10 of them make most of the money," he says. "Those 10 guys, most of those guys retire with a wife, a nice house, membership at a golf course, kids in private schools. That doesn't happen to most of the NFL players."
For most, Marshall says, leaving NFL football is like a "divorce without alimony."
"You're going to leave with some form of career-ending injury or something that's going to take the lion's share of your money to care for," says Marshall.
Marshall was particularly disturbed by the 2011 suicide of his friend and teammate Dave Duerson, the four-time Pro Bowl safety who became a successful businessman after his NFL career ended, only to lose everything to neurodegenerative disease.
"He was good at not showing you that," Marshall said of Duerson's symptoms. "Most players are like that. Most players I came to know, they didn't show it. I didn't know Harry Carson had the problems he had...it's been an unspoken thing among my friends."
When Marshall encountered his own symptoms, he got proactive. The relief he has felt from CBD - and he's not alone - has convinced Marshall it can help others.
"It made me want to seek both legal consolation, and look at what I had gone through as a player, and what others had gone through as players, and try to see if I could do something to either find a solution, receive the proper care, or make somebody pay for it," he says.
News Moderator: Katelyn Baker 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Former Giant Leonard Marshall Prepares To Bring Own Marijuana-Based Product To Market When Legal
Author: Michael O'Keeffe
Photo Credit: Robert Sabo
Website: Daily News
The former Giants defensive end, still celebrated by Big Blue fans for his crushing tackles and big-impact plays, hit Montana so hard in the fourth quarter of the January, 1991 NFC Championship Game that he cracked the legendary 49er's ribs, bruised his stomach and sternum, and broke his hand, knocking Montana out for the entire 1991 season.
At times, Marshall felt so strong he worried he'd actually kill an opponent and get charged with committing murder on the field. Now 54, Marshall has mellowed some. He is a family man, a youth football coach, an entrepreneur - and a vocal advocate of cannabis.
Marshall is part of a budding movement among retired NFL players pushing the league to remove marijuana from its banned substance list and permit weed as an alternative to the dangerously addictive painkillers players use to numb their chronically injured bodies. Marshall and the other players want the NFL to fund research into marijuana's potential as a neuroprotectant that can prevent or minimize traumatic brain injuries.
"It's very simple for me," says Marshall, citing cases of painkiller abuse and addiction among retired athletes. "Opioids have killed hundreds of thousands of people. I've never seen that plant kill anyone."
Marshall, who has lived in Bergen County for three decades, recently partnered with Hometowne Rx, a small pharmacy chain that has positioned itself to serve customers with cannabis-derived medicines when the wave of legalization sweeping the nation finally arrives in New Jersey and neighboring states.
"We're watching the trends," says Aisha Bhatti, Hometowne Rx director of pharmacy. "We would be the first in the market to provide a product or develop one with Leonard."
Marshall has especially embraced cannabidiol, or CBD, an extract of marijuana that is neither mind-altering nor addictive. He takes it daily to fight the debilitating headaches he suffers from thanks to the countless head injuries he received over the course of a 12-year career in the NFL.
"Within a few days of using it, I found some significant relief," he says. "My headaches are gone. I used to have a bunch of headaches in the course of a day."
Marshall, who retired in 1994, underwent brain scans and clinical evaluations in 2013 at UCLA, where researchers told him he's at risk for CTE, the devastating brain disease afflicting unknown numbers of former NFL players. (A definitive diagnosis can only be made after an autopsy.)
He thinks back now to Giants' summer training camps under Bill Parcells where Marshall and his teammates sparred in one-on-one blocking drills for 20 minutes at the start of every practice, colliding repeatedly in 30-second stalemates that left Marshall feeling foggy - though not as foggy as he feels now, he says.
"It's like two bulls, 350 pounds each, having a massive collision," says Marshall. "There's a certain break point."
That break point was his body, the ruptured vertebral discs in his neck, the short right leg that contributes to "a debilitating hip injury that down the pike will have to be addressed." Bones in Marshall's ankles have been fused, and the cartilage in his knees was all but destroyed, he says, from playing on Astroturf for 12 seasons.
But it's the trouble upstairs that Marshall is most worried about: Depression, memory loss, headaches, sensitivity to light and sound. He is among the thousands of players who have sued the league for downplaying the danger of concussions and repetitive hits to the brain.
"What the hell is this?" he recalls asking himself around 2007, when he began to notice memory glitches, changes in his behavior, and sleeplessness. He spoke to old colleagues struggling with early dementia and rage episodes.
"OK Leonard," he says he told himself. "If it's happening to them, it's going to end up happening to you. You had just as many collisions if not more than they had."
Marshall says the headaches were "daily and constant" despite various drugs and even hyperbaric chamber sessions. Then, earlier this year, a friend sent him CBD, which he now gets from a Miami company called Miracle Smoke. On a typical morning he'll use a dropper to take a 500-milligram dose of CBD oil. Later in the day he will inhale more of it from his vaporizer.
Marshall says he never used marijuana recreationally growing up or while he was in the NFL. He worried that pot, and alcohol for that matter, would harm his body, which was the source of his livelihood. He predicts the NFL will eventually have to loosen its ban on marijuana as more NFL players embrace it for pain relief.
"If you were to poll players who use marijuana as a substance, eight out of 10 would tell you if they could get the same treatment without the mind-altering effects, they would do it," he says. "Many of them would tell you the mind-altering effects of THC are what prevents them from using it altogether."
That's one reason Marshall has gone into business with Hometowne Rx, which in addition to regular retail outlets also operates as a compounding pharmacy, which means it works with patients and providers to make personalized medications using FDA-approved substances.
If CBD receives FDA approval for epilepsy treatment, Hometowne Rx and other compounding pharmacies will be able to legally provide it to other patients for off-label use as determined by any prescribing physician. In theory, they could have the whole supply chain in place if or when the law catches up to demand.
A native of Franklin, La., Leonard Marshall was an MVP at Louisiana State University when the Giants selected him in the second round of the 1983 draft.
Over the next 10 seasons, he helped the team win two Super Bowls, was twice selected to the Pro Bowl, and recorded a team-record 660 tackles. His 79.5 sacks in the regular season places him third on the Giants' all-time list behind Michael Strahan and Lawrence Taylor. Marshall also played for the Jets in 1993 and Washington in 1994 before retiring.
In retirement, Marshall wove himself into the fabric of his New Jersey community. Armed with an MBA from Seton Hall, he has worked in mortgage lending and charity work, and served as brand ambassador for The Original Soupman (the "Soup Nazi" made famous on "Seinfeld"). He runs a youth football camp in Florida, where he spends part of his time, and will be the defensive line coach at Paramus Catholic High School this fall.
He is asked if he ever worries he's leading kids into a sport where they'll be vulnerable.
"I think about it," he says. "But the techniques and the tackling the way we are teaching the game is a lot different than what we were taught. We're not using the same techniques."
Neuroscientists warn that the smaller, subconcussive hits that are intrinsic to football can be as bad as concussions and knockouts. Still, most high school players don't experience anything like the hits that Marshall used to dole out.
"Once I get my body down to 285 pounds, nine percent body fat, bench pressing 500 pounds, squatting 800 pounds, just think about it," he says. "You get hit by me and you're 210 pounds, you're liable to have to go and see if everything's in place."
He admits he is troubled by the famous hit on Montana and other players.
"(There were) collisions with receivers in games where guys would hold up the receiver and we'd come running and take the top of our Riddell and put it right in his ribcage," he says. "That bothers me."
Given that Marshall is the all-time Giants leader in tackles, it is odd that the team hasn't inducted him into their Ring of Honor, the pantheon of the team's great figures whose names are displayed above the club level at MetLife Stadium. His old teammates and friends Lawrence Taylor and Phil Simms are there of course, along with 40 others. This year's inductees are former general manager Ernie Accorsi, former coach Tom Coughlin, and defensive end Justin Tuck, who had 60.5 sacks and 318 tackles in his nine-year career with the Giants.
Such honors and distinctions matter to retired players, whose earning potential typically drops off as their names fade from memory and become unfamiliar to younger fans. Marshall's 2010 memoir, entitled "When the Cheering Stops," challenges the common misperception that NFL retirees swim in pools of cash. "If there's 50 players on a team, 10 of them make most of the money," he says. "Those 10 guys, most of those guys retire with a wife, a nice house, membership at a golf course, kids in private schools. That doesn't happen to most of the NFL players."
For most, Marshall says, leaving NFL football is like a "divorce without alimony."
"You're going to leave with some form of career-ending injury or something that's going to take the lion's share of your money to care for," says Marshall.
Marshall was particularly disturbed by the 2011 suicide of his friend and teammate Dave Duerson, the four-time Pro Bowl safety who became a successful businessman after his NFL career ended, only to lose everything to neurodegenerative disease.
"He was good at not showing you that," Marshall said of Duerson's symptoms. "Most players are like that. Most players I came to know, they didn't show it. I didn't know Harry Carson had the problems he had...it's been an unspoken thing among my friends."
When Marshall encountered his own symptoms, he got proactive. The relief he has felt from CBD - and he's not alone - has convinced Marshall it can help others.
"It made me want to seek both legal consolation, and look at what I had gone through as a player, and what others had gone through as players, and try to see if I could do something to either find a solution, receive the proper care, or make somebody pay for it," he says.
News Moderator: Katelyn Baker 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Former Giant Leonard Marshall Prepares To Bring Own Marijuana-Based Product To Market When Legal
Author: Michael O'Keeffe
Photo Credit: Robert Sabo
Website: Daily News
