Al Harrington tried the restaurant business, and failed. He tried the hotel business and failed there, too. He was an NBA player nearing the end of a 16-year career that began when the Indiana Pacers drafted him out of high school in 1998, and he was looking for his next venture.

He found it, selling marijuana. His grandma played a major role in Harrington’s cannabis business, and she’s always telling him: “I better not go to jail!”

Those are facts, but when it comes to Al Harrington’s second career, a career that could wildly exceed his NBA earnings — and Harrington, 39, earned more than $90 million in the NBA from 1998-2014 — it’s all in the interpretation of those facts. Some people don’t like the facts. Harrington knows. But the world is changing, and society’s view of cannabis is changing, and he knows that, too. He saw it from David Stern, who waged war on marijuana when he ran the league and Harrington played in it, but the former NBA commissioner made a startling public reversal on his marijuana stance after a conversation with Harrington.

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Interesting times for the intersection of sports, politics and marijuana. And an interesting man at the middle of that intersection, Al Harrington.

But his poor grandma. She’s not sure about any of it, even if this whole thing started when Al gave her some pot in 2011.

'Boy, I ain't smoking no reefer!'

Harrington never smoked. Well, not when marijuana was universally outlawed in the United States. Not as a kid. Not in the NBA either. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it, and the man is so delightfully honest about so much — including his grandma, and the way he hid his first marijuana business from the NBA — let’s take him at his word.

And let’s go back to the beginning, when Harrington was playing for his fifth of seven NBA teams, the Denver Nuggets. He played for the Pacers from 1998-2004, averaging 10.7 points, before becoming a 20-ppg scorer in 2009 with the New York Knicks. A few years later Harrington is with the Nuggets and his grandma is in town, visiting from Fayetteville, N.C., and first thing she does is pull out her daily medicines and set them on the kitchen counter. She was suffering from glaucoma and diabetes and in pain quite a bit, mostly unable to read her Bible, though she set that on the counter too.

Well, this was Colorado, where medical marijuana had been legalized a decade earlier. Harrington was always a reader – newspapers mainly, bless him – and he was aware of the benefits of cannabis for pain, for seizures, for a number of ailments. He asked his grandma to try it.

“Boy!” is how she reacted. “I ain’t smoking no reefer!”

Al Harrington reads newspapers. Give IndyStar a try and support local journalism.

Next day. Same conversation. Only this time, Harrington was ready. He’d obtained some marijuana. Set it out, asked her to try it, then went to his room for a nap. When he emerged, he found his grandma in her room, reading her Bible, crying tears of joy.

“I’m healed,” she told him.

This was 2011. Harrington already had invested in the restaurant business in Miami and the hotel business in New York, and he’d lost money. He’d done well in real estate, but he was looking for another opportunity – and here it was. Within a year, he’d invested $5 million in a cannabis company with his cousin, leaving it in the cousin’s name to hide it from the NBA.

He called the company Viola. That’s Grandma’s name.

Preps to pros to ... billionaire?

The news was good. No, really, Grandma, it’s good news. That’s why Al Harrington was calling a few weeks back, telling her that Viola had just gone mainstream in California, hooking up with one of the state’s foremost distributors of cannabis, Origin House. Thanks to that move and its overall growth, Harrington said a company he started seven years earlier with $5 million is about to raise funding at a $100 million valuation.

Grandma, he said: You see what’s going on with Viola?

“Yeah, Al,” she said. “And I better not go to jail!”

Harrington is telling me that story by phone from his office in Woodland Hills, Calif., and he’s just cackling.

“She literally says that,” he says. “If I call her right now, she’d say it again: ‘I better not go to jail!’”

Funny how this whole thing works. Life, I mean. Here’s Al Harrington, turned pro out of high school, not a day of college in his life, and he’s a cannabis tycoon. He knows his stuff, having done most of the work he now asks of his 70-plus employees in four states: California, Oregon, Colorado and Michigan. Viola’s first grow, on a farm in Oregon? Harrington was the guy in the field, in the soil, literally planting those first 16 marijuana plants.

“I’m a firm believer: You’ve got to educate yourself, know the job you’re asking someone else to do,” he says. “From that perspective, literally I go to every state, attend most meetings, I’m very active. There are times I’m gone from home for a month, which is very tough with a wife and kids, but at the end of the day I’ve got that support.”

Talking to Harrington about his cannabis company is educational in the most basic of ways. The bar is low here, because me and my college degree don’t understand a thing about business, and Harrington kept saying things I couldn’t understand, things I asked him to explain, business lingo like “valuation” and “market penetration” and “$1 billion.”

That last part — a $1 billion valuation, which means what Viola would be worth on the open market if he were to sell it — is something he calls as an “attainable goal,” especially now that Viola has partnered with Origin House. But then he says something else, something I do understand, and as I’ve been saying: Take this man at his word. Here’s what he said, when I asked him about what he calls “a potential billion-dollar exit” for Viola:

“At the end of the day — and I want you to put this in there, because it’s the truth — I’m not doing it for the money,” he says. “Money will come and go, but I’m more focused on service and products and patients. If we take care of them, the money will be there. I get more joy from someone calling or hitting me on Twitter or Instagram (and saying): ‘My mom tried your product and this happened.’ Or: ‘My grandmother tried cannabis for first time and this is the best she’s felt in years!’ I get way more joy from that, than from looking at a bank account.”

David Stern's shocking reversal

The revolution is coming our way.

“I firmly believe that (medical marijuana) will be allowed in one of these major sports leagues in the next two years,” Harrington says 20 minutes into our conversation, and now we’ve hit on the topic that gets him the most fired up, even angry, because he was a professional athlete, and he knows what professional franchises are doing with their injured athletes: Giving them frighteningly addictive opioids to deal with pain.

Harrington underwent 14 surgeries, including an arthroscopic procedure in 2012 that left him with a staph infection, requiring four more procedures and leaving him feeling “sick as a dog.” After years on the opioid carousel, Harrington tried cannabidiol (CBD) – a non-psychoactive component of cannabis with far-ranging medicinal benefits – and now says he’ll never pop an opioid pill again. He’s waiting for the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball to come aboard.

“Leagues say health and safety is first,” Harrington says. “If that’s the case, stop prescribing opioids and giving prescription pills and shooting these NFL players up to be able to go compete. They walk away from the game and their quality of life (expletive) sucks, and if cannabis can help them and give them quality of life, they should look into it.”

So … when?

“Oh, it’s coming,” he says of legalized CBD’s in pro sports. “Maybe topical, but it’s coming. I understand no athlete should smoke – I understand people thinking that. But at the end of the day, it’s not the truth. With technology today there’s so many delivery systems to get the CBD into your body, it doesn’t have to be consumed from smoking. That’s one of the stigmas we talk about, educating people. The same medicine a guy can get from smoking, he can get from an edible or a topical.”

Medical marijuana and Indiana:What we know about effort to legalize weed

The revolution is underway. Marijuana is legal medicinally in 33 states and recreationally in 10 (although marijuana for any use remains illegal in Indiana) — and Harrington was there, literally talking to David Stern, when the former NBA commissioner who crusaded for years against marijuana made a startling admission during a documentary produced by Uninterrupted.

"I'm now at the point where personally I think it should be removed from the banned list," Stern told Harrington. "You've persuaded me."

Harrington snapped to attention and smiled.

“That’s huge,” he said.

To me, Harrington says that moment was a significant mile marker on this road he’s on, this road toward the acceptance of an industry he’s come to love as much as he ever loved basketball.

“It just let me know that what I’m trying to do is right, and I’m going in the right direction,” he says of Stern’s conversion. “I looked at it as a stamp of approval, not just for me but the industry. It’s easy to come to work every day for me. I feel like I’ve founded a company where the same energy and effort I needed to compete in the NBA, that same work ethic, I bring to this business. I have fun every day, have fun learning as the industry evolves, and I’m pretty much at the forefront of it all.”

Back in Fayetteville, Viola isn’t so sure. She’s 87 now, and long-held beliefs – long-held fears – change slowly. It was the same with Stern. When Harrington told the newest convert to cannabis that he “brought some creams for you,” these were the first words out of Stern’s mouth:

“I’m not going to get arrested?”

Al Harrington is telling me that, and he’s cackling some more. And he’s reminded of his grandma, of his company’s namesake. He’s reminded of Viola, and the tears in her eyes when she told Al she could read her Bible after trying that pot.

“After it helped my grandmother, it gave me confidence and allowed me to poke my chest out,” he says. “At the end of the day, right is right and wrong is wrong, and it’s been proven that cannabis is an alternative way for people medicate themselves.”

Those are his final words of our conversation, because we’ve run long and Al Harrington has more places to go, more people to see, a message to deliver from a man who scored 13,237 points in the NBA and has since become a mogul of marijuana.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.