John "The Tooz" Matuszak was just as famous in the '80s for his hard-partying, larger-than-life
persona as he was for his football game.
But even if you didn't know him for either of those reasons, you definitely knew about
his alter-ego the enormous, gentle Sloth, whose unconventional appearance was the face
of the 1985 classic The Goonies.
In a lot of ways, Sloth wasn't just the on-screen alter ego of the former football star, he
was the actual manifestation of the person Matuszak was on the inside: a lovable giant
who was also a generous friend.
After attending a few different colleges, including the University of Missouri - where
he got kicked out of for punching a guy at a party - he landed at the University of Tampa.
The NFL took notice of his 6 foot 8 frame - so much so that the Houston Oilers selected
number one overall in the 1973 draft.
Unfortunately, though, the man behind Sloth didn't get his happy ending.
During his second season with the Oilers,
Matuszak was traded to the Kansas City Chiefs, who traded him to the Washington Redskins,
who cut him just two weeks later, at the end of the 1976 preseason.
Why was his stint in Washington so short-lived?
According to coach George Allen: "Vodka and Valium."
"One for me...breakfast of champions, there."
This reputation for drink and debauchery would only get worse.
"I didn't know anything about John Matuszak other than he was supposed to be nuts."
After Washington cut him loose, Matuszak was
a free agent, and the Oakland Raiders were desperate after three of their defensive linemen
suffered season-ending injuries.
So they pretended they didn't know about the vodka and Valium and made Matuszak a Raider.
Coach John Madden told ESPN: "When he arrived, I wasn't about to talk to
him about his past.
[...] If you know too much about a guy, you tend to prejudge him, to hold his past against
him."
The gamble paid off.
In Matuszak's first season, the Raiders won their first Super Bowl title.
But afterward, he gradually began to fall back into his hard-partying ways.
He always played well, though, so he managed to get away with all the headline-making hijinks.
Matuszak's ex-fiance Stephanie Cozart recounted to the LA Times the number of times he committed
himself to rehab and then walked out before completing the program.
She revealed: "I have a little velvet box at home.
It's full of 30-day and 60-day chips.
They give those out at the [AA and CA] meetings.
His big goal was to get a 90-day chip [...] and he never got one."
In his autobiography, Cruisin' with the Tooz,
Matuszak described six separate incidents involving automobiles that each resulted in
convictions.
According to the LA Times, he had an excuse for all of them, ranging from swerving to
avoid a child to not knowing there was marijuana in the car.
In one incident, he attacked the other driver before fleeing the scene.
But he never wanted to take responsibility for his actions.
According to ex-fiance Cozart: "It was never his fault.
And it never had anything to do with the fact that he was high."
Football often leads to injuries and because
of one he sustained, Matuszak sat out the 1982 season and then decided to retire from
football altogether.
The pain and resulting medications were the final straw after years of hard partying and
drug abuse.
In 1989 at the age of 38, he passed away after accidentally overdosing on the painkiller
Darvocet.
After the coroner's report was released, his parents admitted that their son used prescription
and illegal drugs to try to cope with chronic back pain.
They added in a statement: "At the proper time, we will have things to
say about substance abuse and the scoundrels in the medical profession who recklessly dispense
prescription drugs and the parasites of society who distribute illicit drugs from back alleys
to fashionable condominiums."
In the midst of all of this, it's worth remembering
that John Matuszak had a big heart.
He was a brawler, a partier, and a guy who didn't want to take responsibility for his
actions, but that wasn't all.
"Well I'm really not mean in personality at all.
When you play the game of pro football, it's like assuming a character in a part."
He was also known for his generosity and often visited sick children.
Jeff Cohen, who played Chunk in Goonies shared: "John was really nice to me and it was fun
to work with him.
But it's funny, when I was a teenager and I would start to watch the old NFL films [...] he
would just terrify people on the field, which was totally shocking to me.
I knew him as Sloth, the nice, lovable giant."
According to the New York Times, the coroner's report also listed bronchial pneumonia and
an enlarged heart as factors that contributed to his death.
Unfortunately, The Tooz's big heart just couldn't handle all the excesses it had been forced
to endure over the far too-short life of the man it belonged to.