LP has a story to tell, a damn fantastic one, and it has to do with a bathroom, a minor league, a mother, a Barry Sanders video and a hotel overlooking a Barcelona topless beach. Problem is, he won't tell it, not today, not tomorrow, not in the book friends tell him to write. It's the "orphan" in him that keeps him quiet. Or it's the police record in him, the assault and DUI and barroom arrest in him, that keeps him shaking his head. Or it's the Nebraska in him, the 3 a.m. Nebraska phone call in him, that keeps it all locked up inside. He is alive and well and on the NFL radar screen again, but LP has a book to read and a coach to thank and vegetables to eat and sprints to run and a Sabbath to observe. And, besides, he doesn't trust the world yet. Not enough to let it all out.

Which is a shame, because this LP has reinvented himself, to the point that he was '99's NFL Europe Offensive MVP, that Green Bay wants to interview him, that he's back to his college weight, that he's quit drinking rum. He was out of football for six months, but careers have an odd way of coming full circle. In nearly three years he went from first-round pick of the St. Louis Rams to 10th-round pick of the Barcelona Dragons, and if that isn't free fall, nothing is. But a funny thing happened on his way to the post office wall. LP woke up.

He speaks of his resuscitation in vague terms, because he can't get the Heisman or the signing bonus he blew, or fix his childhood, and he isn't over all that yet. He never knew he had one iota of discipline until this very moment. It has been a lot to take in, and he knows that he is not yet out of the woods. He survived Sitges, Spain, and the discos there that were open from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m., the discos that were 40 paces from his balcony. But as soon as he signs his new contract, he is going to be asked again about his anger management and he's not going to want to talk about it. And they're going to say he hasn't changed, and he's going to have to keep cool, keep going to Bible study. "Well, if they ask me about my past, forget it," Lawrence Phillips says. But his friends, the friends who in high school saw him quit cigarettes and type midnight term papers, want his story out there. If he won't tell all, they will, and they do it for his sake, so he can go to the NFL in peace. They do it because they have something they are glad to report: Their LP has grown up.

***

He wasn't supposed to mature, not this decade anyway. Not with the household he grew up in. His father left when Phillips was an infant and his mother, Juanita, worked at a bank to put herself through college. In her spare time, she was a pianist who played for pay at churches around South Central Los Angeles. She'd bring her son along sometimes, and he'd read on the bus ride over. But there wasn't enough cash flowing in, so when LP was 10, Juanita invited her boyfriend to move in. The boy was mortified, partly because less love was coming his way, but also because he thought this man was lazy and a bully. The boyfriend tried telling Phillips what to do, and when he objected, the man took a fist to the boy. Things got so bad that Phillips stopped going to class when he was in sixth grade -- and stopped going home, too.

He was an 11-year-old truant and the court placed him in MacLaren Hall, which was essentially an orphanage where Phillips was surrounded by teenagers with police records and probation officers. He began smoking his pack a day, and bucking authority, and when a foster parent named Barbara Thomas wanted to rescue him, the MacLaren officials warned her not to. "Well, the ones they warn you about, those are the ones I want," she says.

She brought this 12-year-old to the Tina Mac group home in West Covina, Calif., named for owner Tina McElhannon, and she registered him in every sports league she could find. He excelled in football, which made him the Big Man on Campus, but also in track, where he did not lose a race for several years. Then, when he was finally defeated, he pasted a picture of the boy who'd beaten him on his bedroom wall. And he began throwing darts at this picture and waking up at 4 a.m. to train for their next race. "That's when I first saw it," Thomas says. "Saw something different about him."

Teachers at Baldwin Park High considered him academically gifted, and it had to do with the books he read with his birth mother. But Juanita wasn't much in the mix now. She'd enrolled at the University of Arkansas to earn a degree in computer science, and although she would telephone weekly, she visited only four times a year. He wished it were more, and he would fume about it and have his scrapes with authority. But he would still beam when she showed up, and when she arrived for his high school graduation, says Ty Pagone, the school's vice principal, "Lawrence lit up like a Christmas tree."

But there were still scars from it all, and at Nebraska, after he was suspended from the season opener for a fistfight his freshman year, Juanita -- who had graduated by then -- moved temporarily to Lincoln to see how she could help. But she left with their issues unresolved, and no one mentioned her name again until that September night in 1995, the night Lawrence Phillips dragged his ex-girlfriend down three flights of steps by the hair.

Phillips had found her in the company of Nebraska quarterback Scott Frost late that night, and the dime-store analysis from his coach, Tom Osborne, was that Phillips had been abandoned by his girlfriend just as he'd been by Juanita -- and snapped. But the people who knew Phillips seethed about the part of the story that wasn't told. They said he'd been asleep in bed that night, that his phone had rung at 3 a.m., that a woman who'd had a crush on Phillips had called to say, "Do you know where your girlfriend is?" This woman -- who remains unidentified -- then sent a car to take him to Frost's apartment, and that's when his Heisman vanished. That's when he was suspended for six games, and that's when his football career was mangled forever. At least that's what his friends say.

"It wasn't like Lawrence had gone looking for the girl, but he's been vilified around here more than O.J. Simpson," says Nebraska assistant coach George Darlington. "Listen," says Pagone. "If that phone never rings at 3 a.m., his life changes. If it never rings, he's not suspended, and he has his Heisman. It never rings, and he has none of this."

A few months later, the Rams practically apologized for drafting him. Due to the 3 a.m. incident, Phillips pleaded no contest to misdemeanor counts of assault and trespassing and got one year's probation, a probation he promptly violated. Phillips was driving in L.A. with childhood friend Shyaam Butler when he was picked up by the police for DUI, although Butler says LP had only 1 1/2 drinks in him. The timing was horrible, less than eight weeks after the draft. It was another red flag, and the Rams wrote him an ugly contract. He was the sixth player picked overall, yet the team didn't offer a signing bonus, insisted he enter counseling and drew up a social agreement that alienated him before he ever played a down. Phillips had an 11 p.m. curfew, could consume only two alcoholic beverages a day and had to leave all out-of-control parties.

He was 22 years old, but he felt 11 again, felt like his mom's boyfriend had just moved in again. "I was with him in St. Louis," says Troy Drayton, now a Dolphins tight end, "and I'm telling you, LP didn't know who to trust. People there would say, 'Come on, LP, open up, tell me if you went drinking last night,' and then they'd go running to tell Dick Vermeil or Rich Brooks. If you're LP, you get to the point that you don't care anymore. They babysat the guy. I don't think that would have sat well with me, either."

An immature Phillips rebelled, of course. He ballooned to 240 pounds and was fined approximately 50 times for being late and overweight, says team president John Shaw. He never trusted the Rams and vice versa, and the DUI didn't help. The probation violation earned him 23 days in a Nebraska jail, 23 days he won't talk about. Football clearly wasn't his priority now, and he was heavy and slower for his second season. He had knee and toe injuries that lingered, and he was accused of coming to practices hung over. The Rams finally demoted him, and when he skipped a team meeting the next day, Vermeil called him in and said, "What am I gonna do with you?" His answer was, "Coach, I'd cut me." So, on Nov. 20, 1997, the Rams waived him.

Miami's Jimmy Johnson picked him up two weeks later, but Phillips kept tiptoeing to the line of scrimmage. The Dolphins asked him to lose weight, but instead he lost face. Before training camp in June of '98, he was accused of punching a woman at a bar in Plantation, Fla., after she refused to dance with him. According to the woman's complaint, he told her, "Don't you know who I am? I'll break your jawbone and pull the weave out of your head."

Phillips ultimately pleaded no contest to the charges and was given six months' unsupervised probation. The Dolphins determined that the circumstances surrounding the incident were murky, so they kept him. But clearly, alcohol was a growing issue. "I'm not saying we'd wake up and bring the bottle out," says Phillips' former roommate at Tina Mac, Thomas Penegar. "But once you drink alcohol, anything will tick you off. And when he'd go to clubs, he'd have a drink, probably one too many, and that's when things would happen."

By training camp, Phillips still hadn't trimmed down enough, and he was low on the Dolphins' depth chart. His pride was injured, and then he fumbled on the first two days of full-squad workouts and was humiliated in front of his teammates by Johnson. Then he was cut. "He wasn't run out of here, he walked out," says Dolphins team security investigator Stu Weinstein. "I thought he was just being immature about it." He talked to Kansas City, but they didn't want him. And so out of the NFL he went. "He was done," says one personnel director. "He'd had too many chances. You figure if anyone can get him going, Jimmy Johnson can. He didn't seem to want to do what it takes. When he came out of school, he was the most talented player in the draft. But now he was done. As far as I was concerned, he'd never play again."

***

He went running to the strangest place -- to Mom, the same mom Tom Osborne had blamed. He had bought her a home in Atlanta, and he needed her now, the way he'd needed her when he was 11, only this time she was game. He moved in with her, and when she totaled her Toyota Camry, he went out and bought her a Lexus. She told him that was too slick for her, so he bought her a new Camry, and even though he threw in a Ford Explorer, too, she kept driving the Camry. And he laughed at that. "They got a bond going," says Penegar. "He needs to be with his mom. It's best for him to be around her." She had a job as a computer programmer, and she would drive off to work in her Camry while he would scan the football news. "I would watch the games," Phillips says. "Because I knew a lot of guys. I just watched, I just watched."

What finally got him off his backside was a video of Barry Sanders, a video that made his blood flow again. He was getting a haircut at his home and was watching Sanders tilt in and out of traffic, and he kept rewinding it. "I'll never forget it," Penegar says. "He said, 'The only running back better than me is Barry Sanders. Look at those moves.' And then he went out for a run."

But that was only the half of it. Another friend, Butler, had moved into the Atlanta house, and one day their conversation turned to religion. Phillips had always been exposed to church because his mother played piano there, but he seemed hesitant to dive in. So Butler, a Seventh-Day Adventist, handed him a book on his religion called National Sunday Law. "He took it in the bathroom with him, and he didn't leave until he finished it," Butler says. "I mean, he was in that bathroom for an hour and a half, two hours. He asked me about a month later to go to a Seventh-Day Adventist church with him. So we went, and there was a good speaker that day, and I looked over at LP, and LP had broken down in tears. The preacher had said not to worry about what people think of you, not to let people judge you. He said the Lord knows your insides, and that the Lord will take care of it if you turn it over to him. And, man, that hit LP because he's been judged all the time. All the time."

They went to church every Sunday, and to Bible study, and to the produce department of the local grocery story. The Seventh-Day Adventist church wants its members to become vegetarians, and Phillips began eating only raw vegetables. "There was no drinking, no meat, no dairy, no sugar in his diet," Butler says. "He was eating Grape-Nuts Flakes with water. His refrigerator was all vegetables and fruits. He was a health freak."

Phillips began lifting in the morning and running in the afternoon, and his weight fell 32 pounds to 208. "He'd run until he'd throw up," Butler says. "One of his things was, 'I won't stop running until I puke.' And he got a little cocky. He'd show his stomach muscles all the time. His abs were unreal. He didn't have a six-pack, he had an eight-pack, a 12-pack. And I know God had a lot to do with his focus.

"When I went back to California, I'd call him and he'd always be home. In the past, I'd say, 'What you up to?' and he'd say, 'I'm going out to be with my homies.' But now I'd call and he'd say he was staying in to watch TV or he was about to go running." And from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, Phillips would observe the Sabbath, which meant he would stay in and read.

And this is when he knew, and his friends knew, he was ready for football.

***

The coaches from NFL Europe were told of Phillips' interest, but it had them yawning. He had too much baggage, and most were going to pass on him, including the Barcelona coach, Jack Bicknell. But Bicknell knew Darlington from their high school coaching days in New Jersey. And Darlington gushed about how Phillips had been the greatest back he'd seen at Nebraska other than Roger Craig. Still, Bicknell waited until the 10th round to select Phillips. He figured he'd fly him to training camp in Orlando and see if he was a hassle or not. If he was, he simply wouldn't take him to Barcelona.

But from the beginning, Phillips was first to every meeting and every meal, and he shocked Bicknell with his foot speed, too. Then, in practice one day, he took a late hit, and an Orlando cameraman caught Phillips flicking the ball back at the defender. A sports anchor that night said, "Phillips still can't control his anger." Phillips also walked out of an ESPN TV interview as soon as his childhood was mentioned, and that was the last lengthy one-on-one interview he would do. That's also when Bicknell knew this wasn't going away.

Nevertheless, Bicknell brought him overseas -- and noticed right away that Phillips wanted out. "The first couple of weeks, LP was like, 'Man, I don't want to be here, I want to go home,' " says Dragons wide receiver Alonzo Johnson. "So we were like, 'Come on, man, you can stick it out, man, it's just 10 weeks, stay with us.' " Here was a former first-round pick who now had to carry his own bags. And there was no whirlpool or ice tub. He was forced to drink mostly protein shakes because vegetables are scarce in Barcelona, and his salary was a meager $1,350 a week for 10 weeks.

But somehow Phillips warmed up to Bicknell, who had coached Doug Flutie at Boston College and had a fatherly, Tom Osborne quality to him. He was never too hands-on, like Vermeil and Brooks were, and he never boiled over like Jimmy Johnson did. This was college all over again, and Phillips began to unwind. "Coming in, I figured if he screws up, he's gone," Bicknell says. "I figured, there's no way I'm going to be in Spain with a pain in the ass, with a guy I don't believe in. Because we live together, and it's too tough. But, see, I also never sat him down and said, 'Lawrence, do you know this is your last chance?' Because the way I looked at it, he was too smart for that. He'd been hearing that little spiel from everybody forever. And, as it turned out, he was never late, never a problem. I never saw any bad. And I looked for it, too."

The only real concern was the team hotel in Sitges, a resort town. Phillips had an oceanfront room adjacent to topless and all-nude beaches, and he and the equipment manager, Albert Veytia, would use binoculars to get a better look. "There were a lot of temptations," Phillips says now, and it had to do with alcohol most of all. The hotel was on top of a sports pub and 40 steps from Sauce Alley, a row of decadent bars that were open at ungodly hours. "Honest to God, if he can stay clean in Sitges, he can stay clean anywhere," Bicknell says. And Phillips managed to resist. "He'd go to sleep about 9, 10," says Johnson. "He'd go walk around for a minute, shoot a little pool with us, and about the time all the people started walking in the club, he'd be gone."

On the field, he was gaining a record 1,021 yards in 10 games and scoring a record 14 TDs behind a weak offensive line. He led his team to the title game on a sore ankle and showed reliable hands and skill at picking up the blitz. "I'd never gone without football," Phillips says, "and I realized I loved it."

He was perhaps Barcelona's most disciplined player. He would use the Mediterranean Sea as a whirlpool and smother himself in ice in his bathtub. He didn't care if it was primitive. He didn't care that Barcelona fans cheered only for the kicker and could live without the touchdowns. This was the most joy he'd had playing since Baldwin Park. Meanwhile, Bicknell was telling people in the States that Phillips and Flutie were the best players he'd ever coached, and suddenly there was interest: from Buffalo, Green Bay, Oakland, San Francisco, Cleveland, Kansas City and Carolina. When Bicknell relayed this to Phillips, LP perked up. "Not only did I prove I could play," Phillips says, "I proved I could stay out of trouble. I hope these teams see that."

But there are doubters. "I mean, how good is NFL Europe?" asks Dave Uyrus, the Patriots' director of pro scouting. "If you look at it cold and objectively, Phillips was playing against sixth- and seventh-round picks and free agents."

"Are you telling me he's over it all now? Just like that?" asks Miami's Weinstein. "I watched him on TV and he looked great. But usually where there's smoke, there's fire. It's not like he's had problems only once."

But in Barcelona, on the shores of a raunchy beach, they don't worry at all. Before the last game of the season, the Dragons had a going-away party and they called LP up to speak. And they asked him to say something poignant, and LP rubbed his chin and opened up about as much as he ever had. "Don't drink too much," he told them. "Whatever you do, don't drink."

And they clapped for him then, because they knew they'd be watching him on Sundays soon. And when he was packed up and ready to leave for the States, Bicknell pulled him aside to say, "You're a great player, but you're also a good person -- don't forget that." And LP nodded and tried to believe it.

When he got home to Atlanta, there was a car waiting for him -- a Camry. With you-know-who inside.

This article appears in the July 26, 1999 issue of ESPN The Magazine.