“Oh yeah,” he said. “The thing is I was in a good spot. I felt good. I was excited. I felt like everything was in the past. Then I was right back to the bottom.”

The video portrayed an image and spawned a reputation that Mauk says never was accurate. He didn’t abuse drugs, he said. He was never an addict. He drank. He occasionally smoked pot. He wasn’t into hard drugs.

“It’s not like I was (drinking and smoking) every day,” he said. “There was a lot going on with multiple players, multiple athletes. I don’t want to go down that road . . . But with all the pressure, I needed to get away and relax.

“It was never to where I felt like I had a problem or other people felt like I had a problem, at least the people who truly know me. Everybody else was saying this or that on tweets or message boards saying, ‘Mauk is this, Mauk is that.’”

Like, a cokehead?

“Yeah, and they don’t know me,” he said. “That (video) was a one-time thing and I didn’t even do it. I was putting on a show and acted like I did it. But in our world, the first thing that’s out about you, that’s who you are. It upset me that people didn’t really know me.”