What happens when a 'can't miss' prospect misses? For Roscoe Crosby, it's been more than a decade-long journey he's only now ready to talk about

CLEMSON, S.C. -- Roscoe Crosby had lost hope. Driving off a bridge seemed like the best solution.

Depression knows no limits, even for a two-sport, “can't miss” athlete who in 2001 signed to play wide receiver at Clemson in addition to signing a $1.75 million contract with the Kansas City Royals. For Crosby, with unanswerable questions in his mind and his career spun out of control, suicide seemed like the best alternative in August 2003.

How do you deal with the embarrassment of telling Clemson fans you're leaving school right after the NCAA allowed you back?

Where does the money come from to pay for the house you're building for your grandmother after you splurged on cars and the Royals now claim you breached your contract?

How do you explain dark feelings of hopelessness to family members who are tugging at you for money?

Who do you talk to about the burden of losing three friends a year earlier in a car accident that happened while they were driving your car to see you play baseball?

When you're Roscoe Crosby, once the nation's No. 1 high school wide receiver who also drew comparisons to Ken Griffey Jr. in baseball, how do you define yourself when the games disappear? In Crosby's case, you black out and drive a car off a bridge in Anderson, S.C., a cry for help so deep and desperate that it has taken him more than a decade just to feel comfortable enough to talk about it publicly.

"The only people I felt like was around me was people who cared about me playing sports," Crosby recalls. "Do you not know what I'm going through is very serious? I was about to explode. I was like, ‘nobody cares, nobody understands, the Royals don't understand, my family don't understand.' My heart didn't become dark, but it really hardened up at that time and I became more reckless in my mind and stuff going on with my life. It was almost like I had stopped caring at the time. I had put all my eggs in one basket and I had no outlet without sports."

Crosby fidgets with a rubber band and wears a Clemson warmup outfit while briefly discussing the suicide attempt. He's 31 years old and a student football coach at Clemson. Some noticeable extra pounds fill out what used to be a chiseled body that made Crosby coveted in two sports 14 years ago.

The $1 million in baseball money he received from the Royals? "It's pretty much gone," says Crosby, who lost a two-year arbitration case in 2005 when Major League Baseball ruled the Royals could terminate his contract and didn't owe him the remaining $750,000 in bonus money.

The money disappeared fast. Crosby says he bought four cars (one was for his mother), purchased 62 acres of land for his grandmother's house in Union, S.C., and spent far too much money on material items such as jewelry and clothes that he associated with being a pro athlete.

Even the suicide attempt didn't stop Crosby's fall. A year later, Crosby's 15-year-old brother drowned in a lake. Having flamed out in both football and baseball, Crosby says he frequently visited clubs, hung out with riskier people he normally wouldn't be around, started drinking alcohol more to fight his depression, and couldn't admit he needed help.

"I was in the denial mode," says Crosby, who eventually received therapy for his depression. "I was blaming people because of my situation. I worked my whole life to be a professional athlete and I had no outlet. It was pretty bad. I was allowing stuff to happen to make me become more of a bad person."

People wondered for years what happened to Roscoe Crosby as he slipped off the radar. A name once synonymous with great potential instead turned into a cautionary story of what happens when tragedies and immense pressure snowball on a young person.

Roscoe Crosby showed flashes of brilliance in his one season at Clemson. (Clemson Athletics)

For a while after Crosby disappeared, Muzzy Jackson, an assistant general manager with the Royals at the time, asked area scouts if they had heard how Crosby was doing. Jackson says he is now a financial adviser for baseball and basketball players in part because of Crosby's case.

"He was a good kid. He wasn't a prima donna guy," Jackson says. "It just seemed like one thing after the other kept happening and was kind of beyond his control. It's tragic. He was one of the best athletes I've ever scouted."

To this day, former Clemson wide receivers coach Rick Stockstill questions if he should have simply let Crosby play baseball instead of recruiting him so hard for football out of high school.

"There's still a part of me that wonders if I didn't work so hard, if I didn't want him so bad, would he have just gone and played baseball and not had to go through what he's gone through?" Stockstill says. "Maybe I could have said, 'Go play professional baseball and if it doesn't work out, come back in three or four years.' I was obsessed with winning that recruiting battle."

There are no longer regrets from Crosby, who started opening up about his story in recent years to some media members in South Carolina while counseling troubled kids.

"I'm at peace," he says, smiling. "I feel like I have a lot to offer a lot of people. One of the biggest things is hope."

A 'savior' from a small, South Carolina town

There's some irony that Roscoe Crosby now wants to be a symbol of hope due to his perseverance. Back in 2001, Crosby became the picture of hope to so many different people based on his athletic ability.

He was Clemson's symbolic hope that Tommy Bowden could recruit against his father, Florida State's Bobby Bowden, and guide the Tigers to their first ACC title in a decade.

He was the Kansas City Royals' future hope that, unlike Bo Jackson, this two-sport star would stick and might soon end the club's streak of seven straight losing seasons.

He was the savior hope for Union, S.C., where he attended high school not far from his home in Buffalo, S.C. People from Union openly spoke about their hope that Roscoe -- he was a one-name person like Elvis or Tiger, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal noted -- would make Union synonymous for more than a collapsing textile industry and 1994 child-killer Susan Smith. "Union looking for a hero," read a headline by the Charleston Post and Courier over a story about the town's two-sport star.

He had the ability to be a Hall of Fame-type player This guy could do everything you ask a baseball player to do.

Crosby was also the financial hope for his extended family, which had multiple people in federal prison and struggled financially. Crosby was 2 years old when his father left and he was raised by his grandmother. Crosby lived behind St. Luke Baptist Church, and from the time he was about five years old until his senior year of high school, he would sit on the church steps most nights and "cry to the Lord" to help him succeed in sports.

"I was really asking Him to be able to take care of my family," Crosby says. "I wanted all of the arguing to stop and I really believe that was a big part of my success in sports. I always prayed to buy the material stuff, and He gave me everything I asked for."

At 6-foot-2 and 200 pounds, Crosby offered a rare combination of speed and power in two sports. His legend grew with each mammoth home run (there were reports of 500-foot shots) and dazzling touchdown catches (he scored 23 TDs as a senior).

Jackson, the Royals' assistant GM, remembers that the first baseball player he ever scouted was Alex Rodriguez. A fellow scout told Jackson that day he may never see an athlete like Rodriguez again as a scout.

"Until Roscoe, I really had not seen that type of athlete," Jackson said. "He was that type of athlete. He had the ability to be a Hall of Fame-type player. His swing was as fast as Mike Trout, he hit the ball as far as Griffey. This guy could do everything you ask a baseball player to do."

If Crosby had wanted to play only baseball, there's no doubt he would have been a top-10 draft pick in 2001 instead of being the 53rd selection. George Brett told Crosby the Royals would draft him at No. 9 overall if he gave up football. At one point, Crosby's prominent California-based agent Jeff Moorad asked Crosby if $5 million would buy him out of football.

"I didn't want to get to the majors as fast as everybody wanted me to get there," Crosby says. "I'll get there one day on my time schedule when I felt it was right in my heart and I wanted to let the football door close on its own or let the baseball door close on its own. Why was everybody pressing so much?"

Bowden remembers Crosby looking like a 25-year-old at the age of 18. He was a physical receiver -- "basically a running back playing wide receiver," Bowden says -- and a rare young player who could gain separation from defenders and catch the football with his hands.

In a wide receiver recruiting class with Reggie Williams (Washington), Michael Clayton (LSU), Fred Gibson (Georgia) and Larry Fitzgerald (Pittsburgh), Crosby was generally regarded as the best high school receiver. Coincidentally, another two-sport star, Joe Mauer, was considered the top football prospect in 2001, but he never played college football and continues to enjoy a very successful, very lucrative professional baseball career.

But while it was widely known that Mauer would give up football, Crosby kept both doors open and his college choice wasn't revealed until signing day.

"He was sort of the first high school player in this new era to get so much attention and hype built around him," former Clemson running backs coach Burton Burns recalls. "Today, everyone knows all about these kids coming out of high school. It wasn't like that back then. Roscoe really was the first."

There was no Twitter or Facebook in 2001, but Internet recruiting message boards had started to become extremely popular and provided fodder for any kind of rumor surrounding Crosby.

"He'd get home Sunday night from a visit and all the recruiting people are calling and saying, ‘Did you commit? Where are you going next week? How do you feel?'" Stockstill says. "Then you've got as many baseball scouts in the stands watching him play as you did college football coaches. He's a small-town guy that kind of lost his innocence just with all the attention."

Roscoe Crosby was perhaps Tommy Bowden's most prized recruit. (Getty Images)

In order to sell Clemson, Stockstill would write Crosby hundreds of letters and mail them simultaneously. Stockstill taught himself about the history of two-sport players and created charts showing the careers of baseball players.

"I've got notes upon notes of different things [from Crosby's recruitment]," Stockstill says. "I was relentless."

Florida State and Clemson were the main contenders to sign Crosby, even though there was no guarantee he would play football. Three months earlier, after Florida State had routed Clemson 54-7, Bobby Bowden told his son Tommy in the postgame handshake he needed to go recruit. Crosby kept his decision quiet until signing day, when he announced Clemson.

"I thought the publicity of signing a five-star athlete would be positive whether Roscoe came or not," Tommy Bowden says.

Stockstill believes Crosby would have been in the major leagues by his second year if he had played only baseball. Crosby's situation taught Stockstill a lesson: High school players who are that talented need an unbiased person to help sort through advice from agents.

"I wanted to coach him. I'm sure baseball was telling him the same," Stockstill says. "He needed a middle man that didn't care if he went to Clemson or if he played baseball."

Crosby showed up at Clemson driving an Escalade. He would eventually buy two Escalades and a Jaguar, plus a Jeep for his mom, Freda Crosby.

"The Escalades and stuff like that, it wasn't really me," Crosby says. "It was the fact I thought this is what professional athletes are supposed to do. I didn't think about you pull up on campus with an Escalade. I understand now. I wanted to blend in with certain areas and didn't want to blend in with other areas."

Bowden tried to treat Crosby as normal as possible, but there was nothing normal about the situation.

"He was very mature. I wanted the team to understand he wasn't like everybody else," Bowden says. "Everybody else hadn't signed a million-dollar contract. During spring practice and winter workouts, I wanted to have them understand he's under more pressure than they are."

Crosby says his cars got broken into multiple times at Clemson. He would go out at night wanting to be a college student, but it couldn't happen because he was anything but a normal college student.

After four practices in 2001, Stockstill declared Crosby the best player he had ever seen as a true freshman. Crosby set a then-Clemson freshman record with 27 catches for 465 yards and four touchdowns despite battling a sprained knee and a broken nose.

Roscoe Crosby had flashed his potential in football. He never caught another pass in a game.

Unraveling of Crosby's promising career

Quenton Savage, Jermaine Savage, Jerel Brandon, James Ruth and Adrian Salter weren't normal friends for Crosby. They were like family. They didn't look at Crosby any differently because he had money.

On April 24, 2002, the five friends, in Crosby's Chevrolet Impala, were driving to Florida to see Crosby play in a Gulf Coast League minor league game when they got in a fiery, two-car crash on I-95 in Georgia. Quenton Savage, Brandon and Ruth were killed; the other two friends were injured.

"I looked at it like I was kind of selfish because I wanted them to come to Florida because I was missing those guys," Crosby says. "I did take on the burden of a lot of different things. I started asking myself, what if?

"So when the accident happened, I was kind of devastated for a while because of the rumors. Rumors of me that I used to race my car and had nitrogen in my car (the one the friends drove in the accident). I was like, are you all serious? At some point can we put Roscoe aside and can we think about the families that lost their kids?"

Crosby says he was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress due to the accident and unspecified situations while in high school. The accident was often cited as a major reason Crosby later left Clemson and spiraled downhill personally. In hindsight, Crosby believes the accident had less to do with the turn of events than his idle time away from sports.

With his combination of speed and power, Crosby was compared by some to Bo Jackson. (Clemson Athletics)

In high school, Crosby suffered an elbow injury that everyone knew would eventually require Tommy John surgery. Crosby's contract with the Royals stipulated the surgery would happen at some point.

Two months after the car accident, Crosby had the surgery, which required him to miss the 2002 football season. In October 2002, Crosby withdrew from Clemson to go to Arizona to continue his baseball career with the plan to return to college in January 2003.

"I had a lot of time to think during that time and I really didn't have an outlet," Crosby says. "The outlet became for me buying cars and shopping and just spending money."

In retrospect, Crosby believes in choosing Clemson he stayed too close to home and too many people had access to him. Crosby says his decision to buy a house for his grandmother, Freddie Mae Jeter, created friction with his mother. (Crosby says his mother did not want to be interviewed for this article and his grandmother wasn't feeling well to speak.)

"People started looking at stuff thinking they deserved this," Crosby says. "My mom went through a divorce right when I signed. My stepfather felt like he helped her raise me, and it was just so much."

Crosby always felt he could ignore family issues as long as he had his fix playing sports. If he could control the home runs and the touchdowns, the noise wouldn't matter. When the surgery sidelined him, all he had was time. He didn't feel comfortable talking to anyone about his emotions.

Three of his friends were dead. His agent was in California and oblivious to how famous Crosby was in South Carolina. The Royals kept pressing Crosby to play baseball full-time despite a dual-sport contract.

What happened next resulted in a two-year arbitration case before Major League Baseball. The Royals attempted to void payments to Crosby for the final three years on his contract because they claimed he left extended spring training without permission in May 2003.

"He had agreed to come back to spring training, and for whatever reason, decided not to," Jackson says. "We made a significant investment in him and we understood he had priorities with Clemson and priorities with us, so we had to resolve it. It was almost like the perfect storm hit this kid at one time at 19."

The Royals' breach-of-contract letter to Crosby came in August 2003, shortly after the NCAA granted him a medical absence waiver to play based on the injury and emotional trauma from the deaths of his friends. The Royals were also paying for Crosby's tuition, as Clemson could not pay for it under NCAA rules because of his professional baseball status.

Crosby says he has no hard feelings toward the Royals, He says he was always honest and that he communicated appropriately with them. He also contends he would have won in court but lacked the money to challenge the ruling by MLB executive Sandy Alderson.

"I took [the breach of contract] as the Royals were just taking advantage of my closest friends, and that couldn't sit right with me," Crosby says. "After everything that had happened and the NCAA granted me a hardship waiver, how can they not be understanding of a kid getting a hardship waiver over a tragedy? They took it like this is an opportunity for us to get him out here playing straight baseball. It made me feel a certain type of way about sports when I seen it was like they don't really care about the person."

After his suicide attempt, Crosby withdrew from Clemson again just 16 days into his return. Crosby says his agents, Brian Peters and Moorad, told him to stay quiet publicly about why he left school in order to fight the arbitration case. Prominent sports attorney David Cornwell took on Crosby's case with MLB.

"I could go out on the field and play, but I didn't see how I could hide the pain and stress I'd go through with the media if I stayed," Crosby says. "I'm like, how can I be true to my fans? How can I be true to people about what's going on with me and my life? I don't feel I'm the greatest thing walking on Earth, but I know in South Carolina, I'm on a different pedestal. I'm held to a standard of a professional athlete, that's what I felt."

In the years to come, Crosby spent a season on the Indianapolis Colts' practice squad in 2005 and had a baseball tryout with the Texas Rangers in 2007. He never played an NFL or Major League Baseball game.

As his life continued to unravel, Roscoe Crosby could not find his way back onto either field that gave him so much peace within the storm.

"Everybody wrote me off because I wasn't playing sports," Crosby says. "It was like, ‘If he don't play sports, he fails and his life is over.'"

'I have peace'

Because everything about the legend of Roscoe Crosby became overblown, Crosby is asked if he regrets that it all became too big. Crosby views his answer this way: He's lucky he experienced his problems early and still has the rest of his life to live.

Crosby talks to NFL players who hit walls in their life in their late 30s. Crosby's wall just happened to come in his 20s.

"When I was growing up, I seen all the things professional athletes could buy themselves," Crosby says. "I seen Michael Jordan, I seen Deion [Sanders], I seen all the stuff on commercials, and for me it was all about buying, buying, buying. But what I realize now is the material things, that's nothing. That don't make you fulfilled as a man.

"After everything that went on, I really do think this is what God planned. Whether it was too big, no, because if I had a successful baseball or NFL career and I buy, buy, buy, or maybe it gets to the point where a needle is in my arm one day, then I look at it like I lose in the game of life."

Roscoe Crosby had made his way back to Clemson, where he serves as an adviser and student coach. (Clemson Athletics)

Crosby credits his life changing in 2010 when he began counseling teens at AMIkids White Pines in Jonesville, S.C. The bad choices those teens were making were caused by issues at home, and that brought Crosby back to his childhood.

"I couldn't be a hypocrite," he says. "I could see some of their situations when parents didn't show up for visitation, and it took me right back to my father. When I started looking at it and my life, those kids helped me more than I think I could ever help them. I tell them no matter how bad a situation gets, you have to talk with people. You have to communicate. You have to put your pride to the side."

Crosby never forgot how Dabo Swinney, then in his first year as Clemson's receivers coach, was a rare person who understood why Crosby needed to leave school in 2003 to provide for his family.

In January 2014, Crosby returned to Clemson to finish his education. He has a little over a year left as a Parks Recreation Tourism Management major. Clemson is paying for Crosby's tuition with an important condition: Swinney, now the head coach, requires Crosby to help the football team.

So Crosby, once a millionaire baseball prospect, is now an unpaid student coach. Like graduate assistants, he's watching and cutting film, helping on scout team and trying to learn from Clemson coaches so he can perhaps one day become a coach himself. Until recently, Crosby lived in the same apartment that he did as a Clemson freshman.

The wisdom Crosby lacked when thrown into the fast life is now used to counsel Clemson players, such as promising freshman quarterback Deshaun Watson, who is recovering from a torn ACL and faces high expectations.

"He's a special kid," Crosby says. "If I was as humble as that kid is, I might have been able to handle it. He's far ahead of his time."

So much time has passed that two of Crosby's former Clemson teammates, Jeff Scott and Tony Elliott, are now Clemson's co-offensive coordinators. Crosby views that development as another sign from God that he was meant to endure what he did for so long.

Today, Crosby says he keeps a tighter inner circle of people with access to him and believes he communicates far better. Given his new responsibilities, he needs to. Resting on the dashboard of Crosby's black 2011 Camaro is a photo of his 7-year-old daughter, Camora.

"She asks me all the time, ‘Daddy, why [does] everybody know you?'" Crosby says. "It will be just little stuff that tickles me like somebody just asked her for her autograph. She don't care nothing about Roscoe Crosby. She cares about Terence the person -- dad."

Yes, Terence. An interesting footnote to the legend of Roscoe Crosby is that Roscoe isn't even his name. Crosby thinks he got the Roscoe nickname from the Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane character in the 1980s TV drama "Dukes of Hazzard."

Some people call him Roscoe and some call him Terence. It doesn't matter to him. He views the Roscoe Crosby legend with open eyes now and carefully decides who to discuss his past with because he believes his story rarely gets told correctly.

"When I say Roscoe, that's more of the athlete," Crosby says. "My daughter loves me for who I am, whether I'm catching 100 passes or not, it don't matter to her."

Crosby questions society's infatuation with treating athletes as anything but human. He wonders how a player can be praised while wearing a helmet even if he's a bad person off the field. Crosby remains competitive -- he gets excited talking about a teenage flag football team he coached -- but he doesn't need the cars, nice clothes or models like he once did.

"I still feel like I've got a lot of work I have to do, but I have peace," Crosby says. "I don't ever want to get too high or get too low. It took a lot for me to get here."