He was 24 when he led the Miami Dolphins onto the field in Super Bowl XVII. Only 51 men have made it to the Super Bowl as starting quarterbacks and, for many, their lives are never the same. They make Hall of Fame speeches and open restaurants. Maybe Woodley did have one thing in common with them. He was never the same, either.
Twenty years after he left that field in Pasadena, Calif., he died, alone, a sliver of the hunk that Suzonne Pugh, his ex-wife, met at a bayou bar in college. He'd apparently driven himself to the hospital. What happened in that lonely gap between the Super Bowl and his death in 2003 will always be confounding.
"He was always a loner," says former Miami quarterback Don Strock, who, like most of his teammates, lost touch with Woodley after football. "Came to work and did his job."
Super Bowl quarterbacks like Tom Brady and Eli Manning savor these days, standing on the biggest stage of the sports universe, all eyes on them. For Woodley, it was a job he never wanted but couldn't live without.
"The pressure overwhelmed him," Pugh says. "He drank to try and forget most of it, or make it so it didn't matter that much.
"You know, he could've been happy, and he could've been a great player if … everybody would've just stepped back and let him be himself."
When Woodley moved back to Shreveport, he put his NFL life far behind him. He drank alone. He had a liver transplant in 1992. He struggled through money problems alone and apparently made no attempts to cash in on his past. The Dolphins would occasionally see him at training camp, trying to peddle jewelry as the players walked to their cars.
Woodley never wanted to feel beholden to anybody. When he was playing for the Dolphins, a car dealership offered him wheels and money for what amounted to one or two appearances a year. Athletes weren't millionaires back then. Woodley promptly told the dealer no.
"It was a … they were going to take a part of his soul kind of thing," Cefalo says.
"David didn't care about money and fame. He shunned all of it. It was something thrust upon him. David was a tortured soul, but he had a kindness behind his eyes. He was trying to define himself to himself. He was his own person and trying to figure out what that meant."
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