When news broke about NFL player Sam Hurd being one of the biggest drug dealers in one of the biggest cities (Chicago) in the United States, the instant reaction seemed to be shock and awe.
Hurd is not a big-time player, being signed as an undrafted free agent in 2006 by the Dallas Cowboys and earning a salary of over $1 million per year. Actually, his base salary with the Chicago Bears this season was $4.15 million. It makes you wonder whether Hurd was so overconfident and filled with greed that he wanted to jeopardize his entire life with such illegal activity.
He has a wife and a daughter and was making millions of dollars playing in the most glorified league in this country. Now, he has been waived by the Bears and currently has no idea what his future holds.
"This is just very shocking to me,'' Roy Williams said Thursday to the Chicago Tribune. "And I'm kind of pissed off at him, too, because it's a really selfish act. He has let us down in the wide receiver group, in which we were so close. He let down the wide receivers coach, the head coach, the Bears organization and the city. But that's my boy, too.''
Williams isn't the best teammate there is, but at least he understands what it takes to make the NFL and stay there for a number of years.
The story has some deeper fingerprints, too, because Hurd is rumored to have dealt illegal substances to other players in the NFL. Whether or not that is true is yet to be determined, but it does add a whole other element to a story not often seen in professional sports.
It really makes outsiders question what goes through the minds of athletes sometimes. When an athlete is playing at the highest level in his or her given sport and takes advantage of that opportunity, it shows a great lack of discipline and composure. Fans would kill to make millions of dollars playing a sport they loved, but players like Hurd obviously wanted more. A lot more.
What led him to make such horrendous life choices is something I can't answer.
I've never had the luxury of having that much money and probably never will, but we see this happen in sports all the time. An athlete gains a feeling of invincibility, as if he can not be touched by anybody else. The sad part is when these athletes lose everything they made because of stupid, ill-advised decision making. It's even worse when an athlete has a family that relies on him and he lets them down, which seems to the case with Hurd in this instance.
As more details emerge, the situation should start to clear itself up and provide more clarity for those—like the Bears' organization and Roger Goodell—to see how it all began and, maybe more importantly, why it began.
But at this point, this is the oddest story in the NFL this season.
