Koren Robinson is a man with a pockmarked past. An overall top 10 draft pick by Seattle in 2001, he loved the sauce. He loved it so much he put it before a lot of other things. According to Mike Holmgren, Robinson had been given “many chances, gave many apologies and promises, and never came through on them.” After he’d burned through those chances like a cheap bar matchbook, after he’d been suspended for four games for violating the NFL’s substance abuse policy, the Seahawks gave him a pink slip.

But because he was talented, the Minnesota Vikings quickly snatched him up like a girlfriend who believes she can change her man.

She couldn’t, and Robinson took his million dollar Minnesota contract, soaked it in alcohol and burned it up like the Drambuie Statue of Liberty play* when he was caught by police driving drunk on Minnesota streets at Mach .29. The Vikings threw in the booze-soaked towel and cut him loose.

Ted Thompson, the cock-eyed optimist who drafted Robinson when he was still Holmgren’s boss, thought Robinson deserved chance #26, and took him under the umbrella of the big G before the start of the 2006 season.  But the NFL decided he shouldn’t play for a year because of his alcoholic recidivism. This week that punishment is up, Robinson has been reinstated by the NFL, and he’s available for the upcoming MNF game against the Denver Broncos.

A nice side story - with all the things Brett Favre has been through with his addictions, he’s been actively trying to be a life coach for Robinson; counseling him in person and by phone, turning him on to the same trainer Favre uses.

But here’s the thing. When I’m hiring people, I hate hearing the prospective employees who have such a multi-faceted sob story of why their lives didn’t turn out the way they planned, be it gambling, drinking, drugs, violence or whatever. They beg to be “just be given a chance.” I had an employee that had had some legal troubles in his past, but appeared to walk the talk of a changed man. Respectful, on time to work, hard worker.

Then one day he told me about his new stripper girlfriend. A few days later he told me about the menage a trois he had with his new girlfriend and one of her coworkers. A few days after that, he didn’t show up for work.  But I did get a call from his father: he’d been busted for drugs, and because of the terms of his parole the arrest meant he was not passing Go, instead going straight to the slammer for a hard 10 (years).**

Here’s the part that should be put on the Koren Robinson bulletin board:

Koren, you sound just like this kid I had working for me. Nice kid. Good kid. But you’ve earned the kind of stripes you can’t change. After a few weeks or months you’ll be thinking that old drunk-problem-stuff is behind you, and it’s OK to have just a drink or two. Next thing you know, you’ll be laying next to a slump-buster with the room spinning, get in your car and see if you can’t drive fast enough to make the earth spin backwards and turn back the clock on the last few hours. Except you’ll end up with a Mercedes hood ornament where your front teeth used to be. Or worse, you’ll end up turning some Green Bay kids into dead piles of flesh.

You can’t make this comeback. I hope you can. But you can’t. We’ve all seen it too many times: coddled superstar gets more chances than 15 regular people would, only to dash them to the rocks like Bailey’s in a tumbler.

Just please, don’t get anyone in this close-knit Green Bay community hurt while you’re tearing down your own life.

*The Statue of Liberty play when drinking is simply dipping your right index and middle finger into a shotglass of Drambuie, lighting said fingers on fire, then holding them up like the Statue of Liberty while you quickly down the shot, then blow out your fingers. No blowing out fingers until shot is gone. Obviously, the goal is to sink the shot as fast as possible.

**Sadly, this story is 100% true.

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