Josh Gordon Made $10K A Month Selling Weed At Baylor: Report

WACO, TX — Josh Gordon has flirted with disaster ever since roaming the halls of Mirabeau B. Lamar High School 10 years ago. As a sophomore he got high every day, drank vodka in class from juice bottles, got drunk before playing varsity football games and packed heat as a wannabe gangster.

From his early days in Houston and onward to Baylor University and most recently the Cleveland Browns, the beleaguered football star has been suspended so many times it's almost hard to keep track. Getting ready to make a comeback this weekend with the Browns, the Houston native sat down for a deep, personal, in-depth interview with Sports Illustrated to detail his drug abuse and sordid and gangster lifestyle.

"If I was going to be a thug or a gangster," Gordon said in the interview, "I was going to be the best gangster out there."

Gordon told the magazine he'd been thrown out of two middle schools for stealing electronics from other students, and that he started smoking marijuana in seventh grade and taking Xanax the next year. However, his athleticism and basketball prowess helped land a basketball scholarship to the private and prestigious Westbury Christian School. He was thrown also out of there in 10th grade — for smoking marijuana.

He really began finding his gangster legs during his sophomore year at Lamar when he sought mentorship for the Six Deuce Harvard Park Brim Bloods, an offshoot of the South Central L.A. gang. Gordon would stop by a nearby tattoo parlor each morning to pick up a small .38 Special, which he kept in his pocket or backpack all day and return once school was over that day.

The budding football star dodged bullets in his neighborhood every weekend, he said, and he only shot back in defense to get out of the situation. He stole cars to get where he needed to go and sold weed to make money for food, he told Sports Illustrated.

He and the gang got involved in counterfeit money as well. They'd spend $100 in real money to get $2,000 in counterfeit bills, he said. Gordon would go to McDonald's to purchase five $1 cheeseburgers. He'd pay with counterfeit bills to get real change in return.

And when the gang needed to break in a home to steal electronics, they turned to the pistol-packing Gordon.

"Whenever [the gang] could use you, exploit you on anything that puts you in danger of going to prison," he says, "[I’d] be the guy."

Sports Illustrated descriptively summed up Gordon's time at Lamar in one paragraph.

Gordon says he smoked marijuana every day at Lamar and drank vodka from Minute Maid bottles during class. His junior year he started drinking codeine syrup mixed with soda—or “lean”—every night. Whenever someone offered, he’d pop Xanax, hydrocodone, oxycodone. Before football games he’d chug Mad Dog 20-20 straight out of the bottle just to see if he could play drunk. He was arrested for felony credit card theft five days after his 17th birthday and, no longer a minor, spent 35 days locked up. “You get shot, you go to jail,” Gordon says. “These are progressions in this lifestyle.”

Gordon didn't stop after leaving high school and playing for Baylor — he couldn't attend any schools outside of Texas because of his supervised probation on the credit card arrest.

In Waco, Gordon said he often received shipments of marijuana from Houston, and he would drive up to 200 miles — up to Dallas or down to Austin and San Antonio — to sell the weed that profited him about $10,000 a month all while attending the private Baptist University.

In 2010 he was indefinitely suspended for, once again, failing a drug test. He sought transfer, and schools like USC, UCLA, Utah and other ganja-friendly states like Oregon wanted his services. He continued to smoke weed and pop Adderall, and then he started snorting cocaine in Utah, where he decided to play.

Gordon decided to take a stab at playing in the NFL, where he was drafted by the Cleveland Browns.

"I figured, I’ll find out if I have what it takes to play in the NFL," Gordon said. "Give that s--- a shot."

Gordon had 50 catches, 805 yards, and five touchdowns in his 2012 rookie season to finish among the top receivers. In the summer of 2013, the NFL announced Gordon would be suspended for the first two games of the upcoming season for violating the NFL's substance-abuse policy. In December of that season, he became the first wide receiver in NFL history to have back-to-back games with at least 200 receiving yards. He earned his first Pro Bowl that season.

In the summer of 2014, he was arrested for a DWI in North Carolina and subsequently suspended for the entire season — it was later reduced to a 10-game suspension. He played five games with no touchdowns before the Browns suspended him the final game for a violation of team rules.

The NFL suspended Gordon the entire 2015 season for violating the league's substance abuse policy, and then denied his requests for reinstatement for 2016 and most of 2017, which leads him back to the field at the Los Angeles Chargers this Sunday.

To read more of the lengthy Sports Illustrated profile and rowdy behavior of Gordon, follow this link.

Image: Josh Gordon of the Cleveland Browns walks of the field after beating the Atlanta Falcons at Georgia Dome on November 23, 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia. The Browns won 26-24. (Photo by Scott Cunningham/Getty Images)