Leave Your Pain on Another Plane
Reimagining NFL-adjacent CBD & THC brands
I know Sun Ra didn’t have dreads. Blame Midjourney.
LeGarrette Blount is retired.
Still, when it’s football season, I find myself thinking about him.
As a running back at the University of Oregon, he gained notoriety by landing a punch to the face of a Boise State player after the Ducks first game of the 2009 season. As a result, he was suspended for almost all of his senior year.
Here, we find out what provoked him (a racial slur, he explains), we also learn the three things his grandma advised him to never tolerate, and finally, we hear a little bit about his CBD pain relief brand LG’s Feel Good:
Undrafted in 2010, LeGarrette caught on with the Buccaneers. Made two stops in New England. One in Pittsburgh. One in Philly. One in Detroit. By the end of his career, he’d won three Super Bowl rings (2 w/ Patriots and one w/ Eagles), and was two for two in skipping Donald Trump’s White House invites, saying he did not feel welcome there.
This is all fascinating. And LG was a lot of fun to watch.
But let’s talk about the present. Where is he? What’s he doing now?
Answer: Coaching his kid’s youth football team in Arizona (their uniforms are sick btw). Was his 2022 scuffle prompted by one of the three reasons his grandmother told him to fight? Who knows?
He’s also running his own CBD-based pain relief brand.
Of course, nowadays dozens of retired NFL players are creating and/or endorsing CBD and sometimes THC-based pain relief products. The NFL once frowned upon current player use/endorsements of any type of cannabinoids, cautioning against trace amounts of THC, but they’re evolving. Travis Kelce, busted for smoking weed in college, admits what we already know: football players use weed and hemp-derived CBD to deal with pain, because the alternative—opioids—are bad news.
A not-very-rigorous survey of a handful of player/retiree-involved brands reveals that they’re all over the place:
—Ricky Williams’ Highsman brand is 100% about getting fucking stoned. The brand leverages the yeah, we get it wordplay on Heisman, and a vaguely football-esque strategy of what strain to smoke and when, and there are no zero CBD tinctures to be found here. This is pot!
—Kyle Turley’s Neuro XPF comes in a variety of CBD (no THC) tinctures, gummies, extracts and more, touts pain relief and rejuvenation, and it seems like it’s rooted in Kyle’s quest to find a way to deal with the effects of CTE. (Kyle does use THC, too, and claims it cured his plantar fasciitis). The dude has been through a lot. A lot.
—Marshawn Lynch’s Dodi brand offers diamond-infused blunts, cultivated in his hometown of Oakland. Wait, are diamonds smokable? Did I miss something? Am I high as shit right now? I’m not sure.
—The Rob Gronkowski-endorsed CBDMedic, plays it safe via a relatively personality-free e-commerce destination whose green backgrounds, hint, unsubtly, at the DNA of its product line. A snoozer that makes the aisles of Rite Aid feel like a fucking Vivienne Westwood store.
—Jerome Bettis’ CBD products are presented as similarly innocuous, even featuring a GIF of elderly women doing yoga, and the headline: “Our products are made with CBD from industrial hemp, not marijuana.” Make no mistake!
Which leads us to LeGarrette’s brand, LG’s Feel Good. It’s fine, even though its packaging might be confused with a lovemaking product and it appears to be dormant over the past year on its social platforms.
It’s a shame the whole “Sun Ra is LeGarrette’s great uncle” story went tits up. Leveraging a factoid like that could dimensionalize his CBD brand in ways that would make marketers drool. The story is bizarre enough that the internet won’t let go, even though it’s been debunked. But imagine:
—Uncle Sun Ra (R.I.P.): a groundbreaking musician who claimed to have been taken to Saturn, dared us to imagine life beyond planet earth, and entertained the world for decades.
—Nephew LeGarrette: racked up three Super Bowl wins in the 2010s—often playing a huge role in the process, as a running back, which we’re told is now an obsolete position.
— One CBD and THC brand that celebrates the unique and varied successes and heritage of the family. LeGarrette doesn’t even need to add THC to his products. (Sun Ra was anti drug. LeGarrette, not so much.) All a customer needs to know is that in this iteration of LG’s Feel Good, leaving your pain behind, in another atmosphere, is the promise of the products.
Here’s an extremely rough comp for a CBD and perhaps THC-based energy drink to rival Celsius and Prime, etc.
A slightly more Afrofuturist take via Midjourney.
The parallels of the two gentlemen’s lives (both left their dead-end hometowns in the south to find themselves) would have made for something every brand needs — a memorable story. So, in this universe:
Why call his CBD patches, patches? Why not MAGIC CARPETS? On the package, we see LeGarrette and Sun Ra sitting on a “patch” in outer space, floating through some goal posts. How many points is that worth? Is too many the right answer?
His CBD gummies are now FUMBLES, or PLONKS and on the packaging we see them raining down on LeGarrette as he celebrates in an end zone painted to resemble one of Sun Ra’s keyboards or synths.
SPACE SELTZER — Is it made from water vapor from Saturn's largest moon? Who knows? This is not a recovery drink. It's meant to be enjoyed while sitting in a hot or cold tub.
But we don’t have this story to tell!
There is, however, LeGarrette’s own rich narrative, that with barely any interrogation, already conjures some distinctive products. Lacking the grades to go right to a D1 school, LeGarrette spent some time at East Mississippi Community College, in Scooba, a town with zero amenities. With no restaurants, his family sent him hot plates to cook with in his dorm. Maybe his LG Feels Good CBD patches could be called Hot Plates, put them on and they start to cook away the pain.
At Oregon, his ferocious right jab of justice vanquished a serious pain in the ass. His CBD gummies could be called Right Drops. Try one, and knock out your pain. Right drops will get you right.
In the NFL, he was like Marshawn Lynch, plussed up by 25%, rolling over opponents all the way down the field. His CBD roll-on product could simply be called Roll On, or Run Over. Something about crushing your pain.
Various distinctive hallmarks and nuances of his career could take LG’s Feel Good from boring to compelling with just the slightest bit of reflection. LG’s Feel Good has license to dream bigger than its current harmless packaging and marketing suggest. And at a time when CBD / THC brands are becoming as common as bottled water, why be boring? LeGarrette Blount is cool, but it’s hard to give a shit about his CBD brand. He needs to dig into his personality to unearth something that he alone owns, that his audience wants to be a part of. I’m sure it’s there, but is not being celebrated.
Join us at NFL, Weakly. Forever.
Liquid Death succeeds at selling us water, in part, because they’re also selling us fun:
Other retired players and coaches could sell us fun, or at least something unshakeable. Just imagine:
Dick Vermeil’s Tear Drops Gummies.
The packaging could be a bit more illustrative, vs. photorealistic, like perhaps a folksy Newman’s Own-vibe, while still being surreal. Known to generously share his emotions, Dick and his team have created a pain-relief product for senior citizens to feel comfortable with who they are and whatever skills they still possess. These gummies are made with a blend of THC and in a nod to his Super Bowl days, ram’s milk (yeah, female rams have horns, but not the big-ass ones) — and actually lower your defenses, so that you can cry more easily, getting rid of toxins, as well as releasing the oxytocin and endorphins that make you feel good. And the THC gives you an appetite (for cottage cheese or lime Jello) while watching Forensic Files or doing a Word Search. Comes with a few pamphlets about the benefits Crying While High.
BRAIDS
A radical re-invention of the Tom Brady we all know and tolerate. He’s retired and needs to let loose. His Purple Kush BRAIDS are fully mature buds, each guaranteed to be roughly the size of one of Andre the Giant’s fingers, featuring vibrant purple hues as a nod to the sky of patriot Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride. Additionally, the nugs’ glowing orange “hairs” are a homage to the ginger whiskers of patriot William Dawes, the Boston shoemaker who rode alongside Revere. BRAIDS are uniquely packaged and sold inside a box of new BRAIDS cereal, made from puffed Quinoa, and dusted with dried agave, CBD, and St. John’s Wort. It tastes like a healthier update to Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks. Product delivers intense pain relief and temporary memory loss.
Head in the Cloudz
Brady is not the only out-of-work QB with a cannabinoid product. Mike Glennon, the retired 7’8'‘ journeyman QB, has a CBD/THC vape product that, although is not legal in Florida, puts the user in the temporary frame of mind of someone with a very long neck who has QBed all three Florida-based NFL teams and is now a millionaire. Like Glennon, the product will not help you get in and out of small vehicles. Even if you’re a normal-sized human, you will get the urge to crane your neck and tuck your head. Sorry.
Beasles
Cole Beasley’s Beasles CBD tincture vaccinates you against being woke.
BONUS: Watch Sun Ra’s Space is the Place
Midjourney fantasizing and product comps were done by the talented Zach Korman
Saturn’s Rings Energy Drink: me.