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“We don’t know where he is, and we don’t have time to look,” Jim Gilstrap, head coach of the Rough Riders squad that had just two games left in a season in which it would finish 3-15, said at the time. “This is professional football and you must be at practice. If he does come back, he better have a good excuse.”

He didn’t, although six years later Marley briefly considered returning to the sport in which he had starred at Miami. He trained with former Hurricanes teammate Ray Lewis, by then an established National Football League star with the Baltimore Ravens, and contacted a Memphis-area semi-pro team for a tryout, thinking it might be the first step on a path back to the CFL.

“I was to report to camp on Friday,” Marley says in a telephone interview. “The coach called me on Friday morning. ‘Rohan, are you? …’ I’m like, ‘Coach … ahhhhh … I don’t think I’m going to make it.

“I had been away from the game so long and, obviously, I was thinking about injuries and how long it takes to recover.”

What that coach probably didn’t know, what maybe nobody else knew, was that Rohan Marley was already on his way to becoming a successful businessman.

He had used a financial windfall from the estate of his father, Bob — yes, that Bob Marley, the reggae superstar who died from cancer in 1981, a week before Rohan turned nine — to purchase more than 20 hectares of land in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains in 1999, and eight years later he founded Marley Coffee. It’s now a multi-million-dollar U.S.-based business selling products internationally, including in Canada.