Long After His Retirement, Morris Still Making Claims

"To litigate against us!" he shouts. "To litigate against us!"

'Simply Not Relevant'

There was that period after his career was over in 1977 when Morris admits he "went crazy." Two years after football, he began freebasing cocaine, which was popular then. He began to use it more after his spinal surgery in 1980, and even though he didn't realize it, by August 1982 he was in deep. So much so that he ignored all the warning signs that screamed at him and agreed to be the middleman in a cocaine deal with his gardener, who claimed Morris owed him money for yardwork and wanted to get even.

The deal was a setup that Morris believes was the result of a television investigation that attacked the state of Florida for lenient cocaine sentences. He is convinced his resulting arrest in a sting operation was in large part to nail a high-profile athlete.

He refused to plead guilty or reveal names of football players who used drugs, either of which might have kept him out of prison, he said. Instead, he was convicted of trafficking cocaine and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

It was a huge story at the time, a football superstar going away for much of his adult life. And Morris was no ordinary prisoner. He conducted interviews, agreed to do speaking engagements, told everyone the experience had erased any desire for a life involving cocaine.

All the while, he and his lawyer Ron Strauss appealed the conviction to the Florida Supreme Court, which ruled in 1986 that key evidence was suppressed when the jury was not allowed to hear testimony from the government informant who helped to set up Morris. The conviction was overturned and a settlement was reached, and Morris was released.

Morris spelled out the details in his book "Against the Grain," published in 1988. And while he often gave speeches on his experience and has freely spoken about the trial and prison within the context of his entire life, he is not comfortable with it arising in a discussion of his work now. Because, he feels, to talk about his conviction without the full accompaniment of his life experiences is to strip him of his intelligence, the hours spent pursuing his benefits and everything else he has accomplished the last 20 years. He will not stand for this.

"It's simply not relevant," he said, icily.

'It's the Principle'

Morris knows the moment he broke his neck. It came on a "Monday Night Football" game in 1973 when he was tackled by the Steelers' Mel Blount on the hard artificial turf in Miami. He landed with his body twisted back and Blount falling on top of him. Years later, when doing an interview at the NFL Films headquarters, one of the producers found a tape of the game and Morris got to see it for the first time -- the awkward collapse, the way he hit the turf. They even gave him a DVD showing his neck breaking for posterity.

That night, the Dolphins' team doctor took X-rays and told him he had a sprained neck -- an injury through which he played the rest of the season. It wasn't until after the season was over and he had to take a thorough physical in San Diego for the Pro Bowl that the doctors noticed something was wrong. The AFC coach, John Madden, was the one who had to tell him he had two cracked vertebrae in his neck.

The California doctors told Morris they would have put him in a halo when the injury first occurred, he said. They told him he had to wear a neck brace for six weeks or face serious long-term problems. But when he got back to Miami the doctor told him the Pro Bowl physicians had overreacted and he didn't need the brace at all, Morris said. Conditioned by years of treating team doctors' word as gospel, Morris took off his brace and left it in the doctor's office.

Six years later, he finally would have surgery on the broken neck. Then, in 1986, he tried to get line-of-duty disability benefits from the NFL retirement plan that would pay him from $9,000 to $19,000 a month as opposed to the $2,500 or so he is eligible to receive. But after sending him to a plan-approved doctor, he was turned down when the doctor said he did not meet the qualifications of a line-of-duty disability, citing language in the plan that say a player must have had "surgical removal or major functional impairment of a vital bodily organ."