Young doesn’t shy from ugly incident
Arrest for DWI leads UT legend to urge others to be responsible
AUSTIN— The footage is easily found by those who seek it. Just type “Vince Young DWI” into your Google search bar and over 640 results flood the screen. It is difficult to watch, especially to those who lionized the Longhorn legend.
Young is clearly impaired, his speech as wobbly as his body. Perhaps that’s why the Austin police officer had such difficulty extracting the 6-5 driver from his white Chevy pickup truck shortly before midnight on January 24, 2016.
You can almost feel Young’s heroic veneer dissipate into the night, replaced by a toxic, boozy haze. He does not turn physical or belligerent, but nor does he cooperate.
The tape ends with the 2006 NFL offensive rookie of the year refusing to undergo a preliminary breathalyzer test. The officer tosses the device onto the hood of his police vehicle, pulls out a set of handcuffs and apprehends Young.
Officials determined his blood-alcohol concentration that night was 0.246, three times the legal limit. Hewas sentenced to 18 months’ probation, fined $300 and ordered to complete 60 hours of community service. An ignition interlock — essentially a car breathalyzer — was installed in his vehicle and he was required to attend drunk driving classes.
Fortunately, Young was not harmed. Neither was anyone else.
Rebuilding reputation
The damage done to his reputation and sense of pride? There is no real way to measure those intangibles. Even so, Young is working to restore the faith and goodwill he built up as an iconic football figure.
“What really hit me was the videos and the classes I took,” Young said Wednesday by phone. “What really opened my eyes, not just the point of drinking and driving, but how you can really injure someone else driving while you’re intoxicated. That really hit me because of hearing the stories of different younger kids in college. Some kids weren’t even drinking, somebody else hit them and they lost their life or were not able to even walk again. So those stories really hit home.”
About a year ago, Young struck up a friendship with Blake Garrett, founder and CEO of Aceable, a mobile education platform that “focuses on creating affordable, engaging and convenient educational content across all devices.”
For Young, this “Keep the Drive Alive” campaign was a way to both make amends and transmute a painful experience into a positive message. The former quarterback now stars in a digital public service announcement and appears in many of the company’s mobile driving courses.
“Vince and I have known each other for about a year and started just talking about how we could take his impact in our community and the community in Texas and maybe beyond that to change habits with people around driving,” Garrett said. “Vince graciously has shared a pretty dramatic experience of his own with others to help them learn from a mistake that he made. The impact is huge.”
Young remains an occasional presence on the Longhorn Network and is employed by UT’s division of diversity and community engagement, where he works alongside college students from low-income backgrounds. His short-lived comeback attempt with the Canadian Football League’s Saskatchewan Roughriders ended in June with a hamstring injury, the final note of a winding playing career.
Inevitably, someone will bring up the 2006 Rose Bowl in Young’s presence, a tale he’s happy to tell for the umpteenth time. His face doesn’t light up when he tells this newer, bleaker story of alcohol and reckless decisions and handcuffs. But it’s one he has grown more comfortable reliving, if only because of the good that might come of it.
“To me, most people just talk about it, but they’re not about it,” Young said. “I’m really about that life. When I get involved with something, I’m 110 percent involved. One of the things I take pride in is backing up what I’m talking about. This is not going to be your only time hearing about this. You will see me doing more and more and more as the years go on.
“I just feel like I’m very passionate about this. And when I’m involved with something, I’m really involved with something. You’ll see me more on videos, on TV, speaking about this all the time. This is something serious that we need to put in everybody’s mind.” Important message
That dark scene from January 2016 will never be scrubbed from the web. It remains widely discoverable, a painful reminder for Young and those who extolled him.
The hope is in the near future, when someone searches “Vince Young DWI,” they’ll discover video of a remorseful figure beseeching viewers not to repeat his mistakes.
“I’m not sitting here saying I’m a saint or anything,” Young said. “No one’s perfect. I understand people want to enjoy life and have fun, because they deserve it. But if you feel like you’re going to have that type of night, feel like you’re going to have some drinks, you can just hit a button nowand a car can be there to pick you up. Do it the right way.”