Josh Gordon knows he’s out of chances—at least, that’s what the frequently suspended Cleveland Browns wide receiver said last Wednesday, just hours before he went into meet with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to ask for another one.

With the exception of his 2012 rookie year, the 26-year-old Gordon has missed some or all of every season of his professional football career because of struggles with substance abuse. He has not played a regular season football game since December 2014, absent for 51 of his team’s last 56 games, and spending more than 100 of those 1,052 missed days in rehab. When he did play, he was exceptional, recording a league-best 1,646 yards in 2013 (and doing it in just fourteen games).

Last week, he came to New York for his reinstatement hearings, trying once again to convince league executives that he had a handle on his sobriety. And it worked. Wednesday evening, Gordon was conditionally reinstated into the NFL. "Subject to compliance with clinical and other requirements"—the language of the NFL statement that means, among other things, clean drug tests and AA meetings—he can rejoin Browns’ practices as soon as November 20th. Of course, it is precisely that compliance that has always been the problem.

Gordon has been slapped with multiple suspensions for repeatedly violating the league's substance abuse policy—two games in 2013; ten games in 2014; the entire season in 2015. In 2016, he was reinstated (albeit with a four-game suspension to start the season) and on his way back to playing. Then during a team walk through about two games in, a member of the Browns' security pulled him off the field and told him a warrant was out for his arrest for failure to comply with a paternity test. He said he wondered, "Who's this girl? If there is a kid, who is this kid?" Two Sundays in a row, while the team was on the road, he stayed behind (suspended players don't travel) and "self-medicated." So, the fifth week of the season, the week he was going to return to the field, he opted to go to rehab instead.

It was the second straight season of football he missed—and the second straight season in which the NFL had to go without one of its most dynamic playmakers. At 6-foot-3, 230 lbs, he has a height that shouldn't be allowed to pair with his build; and he has a build that shouldn't be allowed to pair with his speed. (Tim Montgomery, his trainer and a former Olympian, says he could be an Olympic Champion in the 400 if he trained for it.) The last receiver to have his combination of defense-detonating skills was Calvin Johnson, a player so physically dominant he’s nicknamed after a fictional robot with laser-powered cannons for arms. Gordon became the first receiver with back-to-back games of more than 200 yards receiving (237 and 261). That's even more remarkable when you learn that he wasn’t sober for either of them. Or for any game. Gordon says he's had something in his system for "probably every game of his career.”

Since he entered rehab in 2016 for that 35-day stay, Gordon largely faded from public view. When he left in mid- to late-October, he moved to Gainesville, got into "probably the best shape of my life," applied for NFL reinstatement in March 2017 (he was denied in May), and stayed sober for six months. He felt like he deserved a reward. "I wanted it in the way I know how," he says. "And that's drugs and alcohol." He said he "might step into a bar and have two drinks," then leave, trying to figure out how to not go home, how to make it last a little longer. He calls that his "rock bottom." So back to rehab he went—this time for "well over three months."