Reefer did this to him, reefer is why he's got no ring. Four years ago, a buddy handed him a joint, if you want to call that jaggoff a buddy, and now it's cost him nearly 10 mil and a Super Bowl. Ain't that a bitch. Ain't that a bitch when your team's winning it all without you, when you're in your own rec room watching your boys pour Gatorade over the coach who screwed you.

But then, no one put a gun to his head and made him smoke that weed. He did that all by his lonesome, did it before a minicamp, did it three days before the team had to pee in a cup. He thinks about that dumb-ass move all the time now, thinks about it as he's making his boring 10-hour drive from Columbus to Green Bay to work out with his new Packer teammates. He speeds through Chicago and Milwaukee and Sheboygan, and by the time he hits Lombardi Avenue he's already rethought his whole journey, the whole rigamarole from Parcells to Belichick to Tagliabue. And as he sits at a red light, looking at a Packer gnome in some fan's front yard, it all comes clear to Terry Glenn.

	Glenn can't wait for his first Lambeau Leap.

He knew better than to smoke that pot. Trust him, he knew. He knew because he used to see Niecy -- his mother -- on the front porches of neighbors' houses, boozed up. He used to see her stumble down streets, bless her soul, carrying her liquor in a brown bag. And if you want the definition of embarrassment, you should've seen Terry Glenn's face back then, his withdrawn, sullen face. On days like that -- when the whole block knew that Terry Glenn's mama was an alcoholic and that Terry Glenn was on welfare and that Terry Glenn's clothes came from a local charity -- he'd hop on his bicycle. He'd dress up in his football uniform and hop on that bike and ride to the white side of Columbus -- where no one knew his life was a wreck.

Those are the rides he remembers now, the first of his now-patented escapes. When Terry Glenn is embarrassed or ashamed, when Terry Glenn is ignored or ostracized, he runs and hides. Always has. And as an adult -- he's 27 now -- that means he just turns off his cell phone, which is what he did to the New England Patriots last season after he felt the team had dragged his name through the mud. Maybe he got what he deserved, but an NFL psychologist diagnosed clinical depression in Glenn last season, and if that's the truth, his only way out is to forgive Niecy, forgive himself and stand real, real close to Brett Favre.

***

They don't feel sorry for him in New England, and that's okay, because he doesn't want them to. The Boston media have insinuated that Glenn uses his rotten childhood as a crutch for what happened with the Patriots, but he will tell you that's BS.

It's not his fault he woke one morning to a homicide. He was 13 when Niecy turned up dead, beaten to death in an abandoned building, and that's not information he ever volunteers. He only mentions the murder when asked about it.

Her given name was Donetta Glenn, and she wasn't the maternal type -- because it's hard to be a mom from the county jail. Terry won't say why she was locked up, but he spent many an afternoon talking to her through four-inch Plexiglas. Back then he lived with his grandmother, Dorothy Glenn, but Dorothy had diabetes and died when he was 11. That put him back in the custody of Niecy, who was fresh out of jail by then but still hobnobbing up and down the boulevard.

"Those next two years with my mom were hell," he says. "Just my friends knowing my mother was an alcoholic. I was the fastest guy in school, and you could see I had something in me. And then to have a family like that, it brought me down.

"The welfare thing didn't help. You're on food stamps. You're wearing 'charity-newsies' and all those clothes would look the same. The pants all had a circle on the back pocket, and I'd try to remove the stitching so people couldn't tell. And you had the plaid shirt and you had this coat. I used to hate this coat, this big old brown coat with the zipper in the hood and with fur on it. Everybody knew if you had that, your parents didn't work, and you're basically nothing. But I had nothing else to wear."

By the time he was 13, Niecy was so far gone that the electricity and gas had been shut off in the house. Terry and his little sister, Dorothy, would need candles just to see at night, and because neither of them knew their father, there was no help in sight.

Then one night, he swears he saw the face of the devil. A man with rotted teeth knocked on their door, saying Niecy told him to come wait for her. "I'm thinking, 'This guy is crazier than a mug,'" Terry remembers. "I've got my sister with me, and we were in my room bundled up in three blankets. So, I'm like, 'No, man, you're crazy, I'm not opening this door.'

"The next day, my mom shrugged it off when I told her about it. She was leaving with some guy, but first she gave me money to go to the store. And kissed me. I never saw her again. She was missing for days, until we got a call they'd found the body. That really, really, really hurt. And it was that guy at the door who got arrested for it."

With no father, and now no mother, Terry was shuttled between two aunts, but he felt they drank too much -- "Alcohol was real bad in my family," he says -- and would never hear what he had to say. "They didn't even know I played football," he says. "They didn't care, didn't come to my games. I used to have my football equipment, and when you're little, football equipment is everything. You'd ride your bike all day with your football stuff on. I loved doing that. But they'd be like, 'What're you wearing that for?'"

Neither aunt understood that football practice ran late, and they wanted him home before sundown. But football was all he had. So he hopped on his bike in full uniform and never came back. Glenn moved in with Mary and Charles Henley, who had a son on his little league football team, and, at 14, his life settled down. The Henleys fed him three meals a day, and through them, he met a teacher named Georgia Hauser, who began mentoring him in high school. Now he had an entourage in the stands, and when he became a star receiver at Ohio State, Hauser kept a scrapbook and attended every home game, wearing a red corsage.

Still, Glenn was somewhat of a recluse on campus, and teammates suspected it was related to the trauma of Niecy's death. Word spread that he had witnessed her murder -- he hadn't -- and that's why everybody, including coach John Cooper, tended to coddle him. "With what he's gone through, we're lucky Terry Glenn's still alive," says his former OSU teammate Eddie George. "A lot of guys would've been out on the street." The staff, as a result, wouldn't come down hard on Glenn when he was late to meetings or practice. But when they needed to find him, he was usually at Hauser's. "Terry has never let me down," Hauser says. "I tried to do things that a mother would, but nobody can ever replace someone's parents."

From Ohio State, he was turned over to Bill Parcells, who drafted him with the seventh pick in the 1996 draft. Aside from Parcells calling Glenn a "she" -- for babying a hamstring injury -- those two got along famously. "Coach pulled me aside and said, 'I think you're a 'he,' you know that,'" Terry says now. "He was a master motivator."

Glenn caught an NFL rookie-record 90 balls for Parcells, helping the Patriots to Super Bowl XXXI, but that was as good as it got. Parcells left for the Jets, while Glenn had ankle, hamstring and collarbone injuries in '97 and a broken ankle in '98. He also wasn't as much of a go-to guy in new coach Pete Carroll's offense. He felt neglected -- "Just like when I was a kid," he says -- and his old pain resurfaced.

That's when he lit one up, lit up the reefer. Who, what and where are irrelevant, because, either way, Terry Glenn's free fall dates back to that very moment. It was May '98, and he says it was a one-time experiment, that there was no cocaine or anything else going up his nose. But some of his Patriot teammates doubt that it was an isolated incident. They say he was never an angel, and the fact is, his indiscretions kept going public. Nov. 24, 1999: Allegedly gropes a woman outside a nightclub. Nov. 25, '99: Pulled over for speeding and is three hours late for practice. Dec. 29, '99: Suspended a game for skipping treatment. Dec. 18, 2000: Seen at a Canadian strip club with teammates Ty Law and Troy Brown, after a game in Buffalo. After Law is arrested for possession of ecstasy, all three are late for the next day's meetings in Foxboro.

So that was his rap sheet heading into last season, although the team trusted him enough in November 2000 to give him a six-year, $50-million extension -- including a series of bonuses worth $11.5 million. At the time, their only concern was whether Glenn was drinking, but he says no. "I've seen what it did to my family," he says. And it's not like his urine wasn't being sent to the lab. Three times a week, he'd get a random phone call to undergo a drug test. "You just get used to somebody watching you piss," he says.

But the team's antenna went up for good in May 2001, when Glenn was arrested for shoving Kimberly Combs, the mother of his 5-year-old son, Terry Jr. He says Combs was angry over his seeing another woman, and that Combs filed charges as "a get-back-at-you type thing" -- charges that were later dropped. Still, the timing of it was horrid. The Patriots had just learned from the league office that Glenn had violated the substance abuse policy and would miss four games. Details are sketchy because the league won't comment, but Glenn was suspended for supposedly evading a drug test. His version is he'd been attending the Texas Relays in Austin when the NFL called his home, asking for a test. He claims he called back offering to be tested in Texas -- "I got phone records," he says -- and that two days later, he tested clean. But he says the league still suspended him for delaying the process.

"They didn't come 'til two days later to test me, and they blame me for that?" he says. "I was tripping. That's why I created the situation I created last year. I mean, if you're in that program, you have no control. That program, oh my god, man. That program, it's a weapon. If they want you out of that league, or want money back from you, they'll get you. It was like someone was trying to get me out of the league.

"I mean, I didn't come up with a positive test. But all the publicity made it seem like I failed a test. I know people were thinking, 'He must be on cocaine or shooting needles.' They think the worst, you know."

His instinct, as always, was to turn off his cell phone and hide. The Patriots were withholding his signing bonus and paying him the minimum -- for violating a clause in his contract -- and he sensed it was Bill Belichick's way of turning on him. He hibernated in Columbus with his new girlfriend and blew off training camp. The Patriots suspended him for the season in August, although an arbitrator overruled them. The two sides couldn't or wouldn't reconcile. When Glenn returned to the field in Week 6, he had a seven-catch day, but the team thinks he feigned a hamstring injury thereafter. He caught only seven more passes all season and late in the year, the team suspended him from the playoffs, claiming he'd missed a series of meetings.

"I wasn't missing meetings," he says. "When you're in the drug program, they come to your house and test you before you go to practice. But sometimes I couldn't piss. And I can't leave until I piss. So I'll be sitting in my house drinking water, and I'll call over there telling them I'm gonna be late because there's a guy giving me a test. And that happened like three times, and I guess the third time it was to the point they'd had it.

"Belichick, he said he had no control over that. He said other guys are here and you're not. It got to the point it was just strictly like enemies. It was bad, real bad. And once that started, I was never coming back. I was gonna be on another team or out of the league. Retired."

Belichick, through a spokesman, declines comment on all this, but the sentiment in Boston then was the team should trade Glenn at any cost. His teammates weren't on his side either. He insinuated in a TV interview that his leg would heal, pronto, if he got his signing bonus back, and one Patriot -- requesting anonymity -- says, "Guys thought that was messed up. He was thinking about himself, not the team."

It is Glenn's contention that once the Patriots made the playoffs, ensuring Belichick's job security, the coach was never going to suit him up again. "Didn't need me anymore after they made the playoffs," says Glenn. "I've thought about it a lot. Maybe they wanted out of my contract. Or maybe they felt they had a couple of receivers they could use. Obviously they did. They won the Super Bowl, didn't they?"

He watched that Super Bowl from his Columbus home with 15 buddies who were closet Patriot fans. When he'd leave the room, they'd scream for New England, and when he'd return, they'd pipe down. "Come on guys," he said. "Root for them if you want. I don't hate them. I just want out of there."

Of course, when the game ended, and the house was barren, Terry Glenn did what he always does: turned off his cell phone.

***

One of Mike Sherman's first calls late last February was to Bill Parcells. "If you were me," asked the Packers coach and GM, "would you take Terry Glenn?"

"Not only that," Parcells answered, "but if I coach again, I'll trade for him."

Sherman decided then to meet Glenn, and came away impressed that Glenn took some blame for the New England fiasco. As for Glenn, he was praying Sherman would whip out a contract right then and there. He'd heard Washington, Cincinnati and Seattle had interest, but when the Packers entered the mix, all he could think of was Brett Favre.

At the meeting, he grabbed Green Bay's director of pro personnel, Reggie McKenzie, and said, "Reggie, get this done. This will be huge. Me and Brett Favre? People ain't gonna know what hit 'em."

In the end, all it took to pry Glenn away was a fourth-round pick this year and a conditional pick in 2003 (second or third round), although the Patriots wouldn't do the deal unless Glenn dropped his grievance against them for withholding his $10 million in bonuses. Took him one second to say yes. "It felt like I'd been in a foreign prison and the president had come to set me free," says Glenn, who has noticed the Packers will be visiting the Patriots on Oct. 13.

"It's gonna be a game like none other," he says. "The Patriot fans'll try to hurt my feelings by calling me Druggie. They'll have their signs. They're going to give it to me. And I've got to make sure to give it back to them."

On the day of his news conference (traveling in with Hauser, the woman who befriended him when he was in high school), Glenn was greeted by 50 Packer fans at the airport, although the best part was when Favre invited him to play golf. "Well," says Favre, "I'm just a good ol' Southern boy, and that's the way we do things down South. Seriously, the people here are willing to wipe the slate clean. These people are tickled to death and ready to accept Terry Glenn as a star here."

On paper, Favre has his purest receiver since Sterling Sharpe, while Glenn has his dream scenario. He is "the best quarterback in the league," and a town that doesn't care that his life used to be a wreck. He's driven his 10 hours from Columbus every Monday, for voluntary workouts, and his new teammates like him enough to razz him about his unruly hair. "Boycotting the barber," Glenn says.

At Favre's charity softball game, in front of 6,500 people, Glenn got the second biggest cheer (next to Favre), but it also made him melancholy again -- because his mother wasn't there. "That feeling, it comes up when the good times come around," he says. "Like when I was at Ohio State or when I got drafted or went to the Super Bowl. Every time I see teammates with their families, I look at them and go, 'Man, they don't know how blessed they are.' And they're probably looking at me like, 'Man, he got all this money.' I'm thinking you can have this money, man. Let me have my mama and have her come to my games. And let me hear her say, 'That's my boy right there.' I'd do anything for that."

What he'll find in Green Bay, as long as he scores touchdowns and does the Lambeau Leap, is 62,500 fans who'll say, "That's my man." Maybe he'll start leaving his cell phone on. Better yet, wait until he hears what the Packer players do at training camp:

They borrow kids' bikes and ride to practice. In full uniform. Hallelujah.

This article appears in the July 8 issue of ESPN The Magazine.