Wikimedia commons/Robert W. Gordon. |
Sam Hurd. |
Former NFL wide receiver Sam Hurd is going to jail likely for the rest of his life for cocaine trafficking, accused by the feds as being the kingpin to a major narcotics operation. Hurd, now in his late-20s, faces sentencing later today.
Apparently now with little left to lose, he’s coming clean about his days in the NFL – including how pervasive cannabis actually is in the league.
At least half of the NFL smokes cannabis to some degree or another, Hurd tells Sports Illustrated. And Hurd was apparently the man to know among NFL tokers. As he puts it:
“Whatever was considered the loudest [best and stinkiest]weed in California–I wanted a notch above that,” Hurd told SI’s Michael McKnight from prison. “I had educated myself on different strains and potencies and growing techniques. I was very selective. It was like wine.”
Hurd says he smoked most of what he imported – sometimes more than a half-pound at a time. But occasionally Hurd would sell it to teammates at cost. “I’m in the NFL, and I’m gonna ask people for a few hundred dollars on top of what I paid for it?” Hurd explained. “Nah. Slide me what I got it for and take it. Enjoy it.”
Sounds like a solid dude to us.
Hurd says he started smoking marijuana regularly in 2008 when he went out on an anke injury. After returning, Hurd says that he smoked with at leat 20 of his former teammates while he was with the Dallas Cowboys. SI details texts from Hurd to his dealers in California urging them to send more ganja out so he could hook up his NFL teammates before the 2011 lockout began.
He says he would fly to California and have growers stop by a “marijuana broker” with samples of the finest sticky-icky in the state to sample. Hurd would buy ounces of various strains and then move on to the next vendor all while sitting in the California sun by a pool.
His favorite strains? King Louis XII OG. Boom. Dude has some taste, too.
But Hurd’s interstate drug trafficking wasn’t done with just cannabis, which led him to his alleged attempt to buy cocaine.
By that time, he was under investigation that led to undercover agents setting up the cocaine deal that now threatens Hurd’s freedom. He pled guilty to conspiracy to traffic narcotics back in April.
Read the entire well-written and excellently-reported story over at SportsIllustrated.com