Irving Fryar Irving Fryar had had an impressive and lengthy
football career. He played for the University of Nebraska, where he was an All-American. Fryar was
the first overall pick in the 1984 NFL draft, becoming the second wide receiver ever to be
taken first overall by the New England Patriots. Before Fryar, It hadn't happened since 1964.
Statistically speaking, Fryar had his best seasons when he was well
into his 30s. That's usually when receivers are winding down their career if they're
even still playing at all. He played 17 seasons and retired at the age of 39, setting many records
for longevity. He was the first player ever to score a touchdown in 17 consecutive seasons.
He caught touchdown passes from 19 different quarterbacks. He was also the oldest player
to ever score 4 touchdowns in a single game, which he accomplished when he was 34 years old!
Off-the-field As good as he was on the field,
Irving was also known for getting into legal issues off the field. In 1986, as a New England
Patriot, he had to miss the AFC Championship game after cutting his hand during a domestic
dispute with his wife, who was pregnant. He attempted to lie and cover up the incident,
but the truth eventually came out. He returned to play in the Super Bowl that year,
where he ended up scoring his team's only touchdown in a brutal loss.
A few years later, in 1988, he was arrested on weapons charges. A New Jersey state trooper
found a loaded shotgun, handgun, and hunting knife in Fryar's car.
Irving's problems likely stem from his turbulent childhood. His father was an alcoholic who would
abuse Irving's mother. If Irving ever tried to intervene, he'd be caught in the crossfire.
The young Irving joined the G-Town gang and frequently got into street fights.
Orange Bowl Scandal Irving was a big gambler,
and many suspected him of betting on the games he played in. In a book titled 'Big Red Confidential:
Inside Nebraska Football,' the author Armen Keteyian alleges that Irving threw the 1984
Orange Bowl. He missed a crucial touchdown pass, and some people think it was intentional.
Nothing was ever proven, but the rumors would follow him around for the rest of his career.
When he joined the NFL, there were more allegations of Irving throwing games.
The NFL took these allegations so seriously that they launched a full-on investigation,
and Irving had to take a lie detector test. He passed,
but that didn't really get everyone off his case. Lie detectors aren't infallible, after all.
William Ouseley, a former FBI agent who led the investigation for the NFL said of Irving,
"I wouldn't doubt anything said about him." Not exactly a glowing character review.
Irving also did admit to doing drugs the night before the 1984
Orange Bowl—not something you would do if you were laser-focused on winning at all costs.
Reverend Fryar Many NFL players quietly retire and
are never really heard from again. But that wasn't Irving's style. After his notably long NFL career,
Irving became a reverend. He had grown up going to church, and his childhood home was right next
to a parish. His father was even a singer with a traveling gospel music group. His sisters,
named Faith and Hope, were also singers in the church choir. Irving's name was
originally supposed to be Hope, but his parent's changed their minds when he ended up being a boy.
The adult Irving strayed from the straight and narrow path his mom had laid out for him.
In 1990, he hit rock bottom hard. He went to a Providence, Rhode Island, club with his teammate,
Hart Lee Dykes. Around 1 AM, Dykes got into an argument with some people at the
bar about the Patriots. He ended up in a full-on brawl with them outside the club,
getting beaten with a pair of crutches that one of them happened to have.
Irving went to his car, got his gun and hid it in his shoe, and then came back to help Dykes.
Before he could do anything, somebody hit him with a baseball bat. When the cops showed up,
Irving got arrested for carrying a gun without a Rhode Island permit. He spent the night in jail,
but the charge was dropped soon after because he had a Massachusetts license.
Irving would later say that he was arrested for saving his friend's life, which
isn't necessarily true. However, Irving wasn't the one who started the fight.
The worst part of the arrest for Irving was that nobody came to get him out of jail.
Nobody he knew seemed to care. The cops also didn't really care. They came in and visited
him to get an autograph but took their sweet time finding someone to stitch up
his bleeding head. Irving had to wait until the following day to get eight stitches.
Irving was alone and depressed. He later wrote that during this time, not only did
he consider retiring, but he considered ending it all. Then, one Sunday four months later,
he happened to visit a little church called Greater Love Tabernacle near Boston. Irving
said that church hadn't really meant much to him before that visit. He didn't like the hypocrisy he
saw from Christians growing up. People would act a certain way in church and a certain way at home.
But for Irving, this little church in Roxbury was different. He went back the next week and
bought the church a new organ—and that was just the beginning. Irving became
a minister and got a Ph.D. from the North Carolina College of Theology.
His younger teammates called him "Rev." He totally turned his reputation around and went from being
someone the NFL had to investigate to one of the NFL's good guys. He donated a lot of money
to youth programs and started visiting sick kids in the hospital. It was a complete 180.
Irving later founded his own church in his hometown and kept trying to
help out the younger generation by coaching high school football.
His basic message for the kids was simple: don't do what I did.
In 1996, the NFL gave Irving the Bart Starr award. The Bart Starr award is for players
who demonstrate great character and leadership outside of football. It's a pretty big deal,
and has since been won by some big names like Eli Manning and Aaron Rodgers.
Fraud But Irving's
change of heart didn't last all that long, if he ever really had a change of heart at all.
In 2009, he got his own mom to help him pull off a huge bank fraud scheme. But it wasn't a strict
family affair. He also had some help from a few other shady characters. Oddly enough,
it was most likely Irving's dentist who introduced him to the world of bank fraud. His dentist,
Alfred Dennis, had carried out a similar scheme with his wife and defrauded banks of
nearly a million dollars. He got 3 years in prison when his plan was uncovered.
Dennis was also the one who introduced Irving to a man named William Barksdale.
Before the fraud scheme went down, Barksdale had actually helped Irving pay off a tax lien
on his New Jersey mansion. The mansion, while huge and beautiful, was a big financial problem
for Irving. There was a 2006 federal tax lien on the mansion for 76,000 dollars. The property
was foreclosed on in 2007, and Irving's mom had to buy it back from the bank in 2009.
One of Irving's former teammates, Mario Henry, said that Irving was particularly
attached to the mansion. He wanted to keep holding on to it at all costs,
even though it was causing him so many issues. Irving was actually a spokesman
for Mario's mortgage business for a while, but Mario decided that wasn't a good idea
after Irving's bank fraud trial. It's not really a good idea to have the celebrity
spokesperson for your financial company be involved in a serious financial fraud case.
Playcalling Irving had his mom,
who was 68-years-old at the time, visit five different banks. She closed on home
equity loans at all of them. This isn't inherently illegal. But here's where the fraud part comes in.
She used the same house as collateral for all of the loans, which is very illegal. She had to
lie and tell all these banks that she was not using the house as collateral for any other
loan. The two of them used one house valued at 140,000 dollars to get five different loans
which added up to 700,00 dollars. The banks could have avoided the entire scheme had they
done their due diligence. However, no protocols existed to combat this situation. It's not like
banks regularly called each other and asked if a collateral property was being used multiple times.
The technical term for this crime is second-degree conspiracy and theft by deception. A theft by
deception is slightly different than a run-of-the-mill theft, legally speaking.
It's essentially a con. Theft by deception happens when someone obtains property that
belongs to someone else using deceptive tactics rather than violence or breaking and entering.
Another example of theft by deception would be selling a house but hiding all the problems it
has from the buyers. It's punishable by up to 10 years in prison in the state of New Jersey,
which was where they were at the time. Irving and his mom were both indicted on those charges.
The prosecutors alleged that his mom knew what she was doing but that Irving was ultimately
the mastermind behind the whole thing. Irving, and his lawyers, have offered
up a different version of events. They claim Barksdale was responsible for everything. He
tricked Irving and his mom into defrauding the banks, and they didn't know what they were doing.
Back in Jail The court didn’t
go along with this, and Irving ended up back in jail. On October 2nd, 2015,
Irving and his mom were convicted of mortgage fraud. Irving got a five-year prison sentence,
but it could have been a lot worse. His mom got off with probation and never saw jail
time. John Hoffman, the attorney general who oversaw their case, said that he felt that the
crime was made even worse because Irving had the resources to succeed but chose crime instead.
On December 7th, 2015, a judge delivered even more bad news for the two of them.
Irving had to pay 615,000 dollars worth of restitution to five different
lending institutions that they had cheated in their scam.
Irving lucked out and didn't serve most of his prison sentence,
only doing eight months before being let out. Because he was a non-violent offender,
he was granted his freedom so long as he was placed under New Jersey's Supervision Program.
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