Former ESPN talking head Sean Salisbury has been in a little bit of a battle with himself in an attempted return to television. Salisbury apparently gained a lot of weight recently, and was on a course to develop diabetes if he didn’t lose weight and change up his diet. Salisbury also had an extremely low testosterone level, which is apparently due in part to his NFL career and the blows to the head he sustained during it. 

ESPN suspended him in 2006 after he showed a picture of his genitals to some of his fellow ESPN employees, and the company let him go in 2008 when his contract expired. Salisbury sued Deadspin, who broke the story, and eventually became very paranoid, so much so that he stopped using the Internet out of fear of what people were saying about him.  Here’s more of what Salisbury told the NY Daily News:

“It was a sophomoric thing to do that got me in trouble,” Salisbury says of the bar incident. “I deserved to be kicked a little for it. But I didn’t deserve to be bludgeoned. The past few years have been a rough, rough time. I hit rock bottom physically, mentally, emotionally and financially all at the same time.”

“If I’m going to be the poster boy for getting beat up by Deadspin, then let me be the poster boy for helping people, too,” Salisbury says. “I want to write a book about my experiences, and the title will be ‘Rock Bottom is a Trampoline.’ I want to show people that you can survive depression and physical pain, that you can hit bottom and bounce back.”

All of these issues also resulted in a bout of depression for Salisbury, which was exacerbated by physical issues that he sustained during his NFL career. He’s the second announcer, joining Andy Gray formerly of Sky Sports, to come out in recent weeks talking about depression after his controversial exit from the public eye. Salisbury has been receiving help for his myriad of issues through PAST, a New Jersey-based medical group that provides medical services to retired athletes. The organization is helping him get back on the right track, and the former analyst is working sporadically as an announcer since ESPN let him go, including with uh, the Lingerie Football League.

Hopefully, Salisbury can get his life back together and get a national job somewhere… because honestly, I think that a lot of the current analysts out there have shown that we can do far, far worse than him. Godspeed.

[h/t: NY Daily News]

 

About Joe Lucia

I hate your favorite team. I also sort of hate most of my favorite teams.