After years of surgeries, rehab and a recovery machine built for return-to-play, the former NBA forward stopped asking whether cannabis could help and started asking harder questions about how it actually worked.
Al Harrington didn’t come out of basketball looking for another celebrity weed lane.
He came out of it with a body that had absorbed 16 seasons of professional punishment, a long and personal relationship with the plant, and a growing suspicion that most of the recovery industry, cannabis included, wasn’t asking serious enough questions.
That’s the more interesting story. Not that a former NBA star believes in cannabis. Plenty of them do. Not that he has a product line. Plenty of them have that too. What separates Harrington, at least right now, is that he sounds genuinely less interested in the wellness pitch than in whether the products behind it were actually built to do something real.
He got there the hard way.
“What frustrated me most was how little focus there was on the long-term,” Harrington told High Times, reflecting on traditional pain management and recovery after retirement and multiple surgeries. “Traditional rehab is usually about getting you back on the court, but there’s not always a real plan for what comes after that. There should be more attention on what habits, routines, and treatments need to become part of your lifestyle so you can stay healthy long after the rehab process is over.”
That’s a bigger idea than sports medicine usually allows. The whole recovery machine is built around return-to-play. Patch the guy up, get him moving, get him back out there. What happens to the body after the season ends and the cameras move on is a different conversation, one that professional sports has never been especially good at having.
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
