Dexter Manley's incredible story: 'I broke down and started crying … how did I get through school when I couldn't read?'

Ebony, Oct, 1989 by Laura B. Randolph

After his children were born, Glinda would ask him to read them a bedtime story. The answer was always the same: "Not tonight. I'm exhausted." "I wanted so much to read Dr. Seuss to them. I used to struggle with it and it just didn't sit well with me. It really bothered me inside."

The lies were endless. At practice, he'd show up with a Wall Street Journal tucked underneath his arm, then sit quietly in a corner of the locker room pretending to read it. When he dined out with friends, he'd pretend to study the menu, secretly waiting for someone else to order so he could parrot their selection.

On the surface, life looked so sweet for Dexter Manley. He had a lovely home, a gorgeous wife, three beautiful kids and he was a star. But deep inside, he knew it was a house of cards and that knowledge slowly began to eat away at him. Finally, the lies became too much for him. To chase away the demons, he started drinking. Heavily. Excessively. To his credit, he checked himself into the Hazelden Foundation, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in Minneapolis, to get help. During his 30-day stay, he experienced one of two events that would change his life forever.

"I was writing Glinda a letter and I was trying to spell the word 'about.' I will never forget this. I was struggling because I couldn't do it, and I broke down and started crying. I thought, How did I make it? How had I gotten through school when I couldn't spell 'about'? I began to remember all of that. It was so painful."

The second event happened on national TV when Manley witnessed close-up the gruesome and untimely end of Redskin quarterback Joe Theismann's career. When Lawrence Taylor, the New York Giants' defensive star, snapped Theismann's leg like a wishbone, Taylor knew he'd probably ended the quarterback's career. But what Taylor didn't know, what he still may not know today, is that he'd also helped to salvage Dexter's.

Like everyone else, Manley grieved the untimely end of his teammate's career, but he was also a realist. He knew Joe would be all right. He was, after all, famous, White and rich in America. But Manley -- who in 1985 had signed a reported four-year, $1.6 million deal with the Redskins -- had a more immediate concern. What if, God forbid, it happened to him? What if, like Joe, he sustained a career-ending injury? How would he make a living? He had no marketable skills to fit into the "real" world. No education. He couldn't even read and write.

"When Joe broke his leg, I said I have to go back to school. I was still running, still hiding it, still faking it," he says. "But what could I do if I couldn't play football? I couldn't do anything unless I learned how to read and write."

At season's end, he enrolled in night classes at Washington, D.C.'s, Lab School where he met tutor Sarah Hines, who diagnosed his problem as poor auditory memory and helped him gain confidence to begin the process of learning how to read and write.

"When Dexter came here three years ago," says Ms. Hines, "he read on a second-grade level. We had to start from the very beginning. Today, he can read anything he wants."