Bettis is really telling a story now. Via an interview with Graham Bensinger, Bettis admitted selling crack and shooting as a teen.
“The mind-set was, ‘We’re in the hood. Mom and Dad, they’re working their butts off. There’s no money around. We need to make some money.’ So we said, ‘You know what? Let’s give it a shot.’ And it was one of those moments that you regret, but at the moment, that was the only thing that was really available to us.
“Yeah. That was part of growing up in our environment, in our neighborhood. That wasn’t out of the realm of normal,” he said. “When you go back, it’s nothing that I ever wanted to glorify, because I know in retrospect that it was awful. Here you are in a position to take someone’s life, and that’s never a good thing. And so as I look back on it now, I always see the wrongs that are in it and never want to bring light to it in that respect: that it was a good thing. It was the worst thing that I could’ve ever done. It was a bad decision, but it was the decision that I made and that I lived with at that moment.”
Bettis admits that the life he was living was dangerous, and he obviously made the right decision in switching careers.
He’s not the only Hall of Famer to let off shots.
By Glenn Erby
