Strip Clubs, CTE Talk and a CBD Sales Pitch: A Weekend Inside Warren Sapp’s World
SI.com
By TIM ROHAN January 29, 2018
Sapp (center) with Ray Lewis and Michael Irvin at the October Ring of Honor ceremony.
GETTY IMAGES
It’s a Thursday night in South Florida, middle of October, and Warren Sapp is sidled up to the bar at a strip club watching football. The Eagles play the Panthers on a flat-screen in the corner, and a DJ pumps the room full of rap music as the Hall of Fame defensive tackle alternates between sipping on a beer and puffing on something he’s passing back and forth with a friend. The place is owned by Edgerrin James, another former Miami Hurricane, and Sapp comes here often.
A few other men mingle about, drinking, but you wouldn’t know the nature of the establishment if not for the metal poles scattered about. “Where are the girls?” I ask the bartender.
“We tell people they’re in back, changing,” the bartender says, “but [the dancers] won’t come in on Thursdays anymore.” Business is that slow.
Sapp and I order more drinks and half-watch the game as we get to know one another. Several times he makes a point of saying he can’t party like he used to. It seems to be his way of conveying that, at 44, he’s slowing down, maturing. He predicts that he won’t last beyond midnight—but then at halftime, around 10 p.m., he announces we’re relocating.
“We need to get some a-- in your face,” he says.
I had reached out to Sapp a few months earlier, around the time he was re-emerging into the public eye. Last most people had heard from him, he was being arrested and charged with assault and the solicitation of a prostitute at Super Bowl XLIX in Phoenix, in February 2015, losing his job as an NFL Network broadcaster in the process. He all but disappeared for two years—until this past summer, when he went on a mini press tour announcing that, upon his death, he would donate his brain for concussion research. If it all felt a bit orchestrated, this positive press, that notion was reinforced when he aligned himself with the esteemed CTE Center at Boston University, making appearances as a spokesman about the dangers of head trauma, asking the football-consuming public to take him seriously on perhaps the most important topic in sports today.
“Let’s get the research, let’s apply the knowledge, and let’s make [player safety] better for everybody,” Sapp implored viewers in the Players’ Tribune video in which he announced his brain donation.
I wanted to talk to Sapp about the prostitute incident, his work with the CTE Center and his unorthodox transition. And he seemed game. He invited me down to attend the Miami home tilt against Georgia Tech, during which he would be inducted into the Hurricanes’ Ring of Honor. He keeps a place in nearby Hollywood, Fla., and he said we could hang all weekend. He seemed to think it would make for a good story.
Now Sapp wants to relocate, and so he takes me to a second strip club a short drive up I-95. He leads us to a VIP entrance, and then a VIP section on the second floor, where we’re given a corner table facing the main stage. (There are zero empty poles here.) Sapp orders a vodka soda, gets me a gin and tonic, and surveys the scene. Twenty bucks for a dance, he informs me—but for $150, he says, there’s more to be had.
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