NEW ORLEANS — As 49ers offensive lineman Alex Boone reflects on the world as he knew it in 2009, he sees a life didn’t seem to make much sense.
Boone showed up strutting at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis that February, bringing with him a body on loan from God. He was 6-foot-8 and 340 pounds, a little flabbier and less chiseled than he should have been, but his Ohio State pedigree of flattening defenders should have made NFL coaches and scouts drool.
Or so he thought.
When Boone left the 40-yard dashes and the shuttle runs for the interview room, he was in for the shock of his life. How could any organization this side of the CIA know so many intimate details about his love affair with alcohol?
“They had done their homework, and they knew things that nobody else knew, and I was like, ‘How did you find that out? You must’ve called my Mom,’ ” Boone, 25, said yesterday, five days before Super Bowl XLVII, about his battle with the bottle. “It wasn’t just the stuff that was in the paper. They knew everything, and they were bringing stuff up. I was like, ‘Wow, uh, no comment on that one.’ ”
And it wasn’t just one team that asked.
“Basically, it was everybody,” Boone said. “They said, ‘You are a major-league head case. You drink way too much and you are not worth the hassle. I was like, ‘Well, I can play football.’ They were like, ‘We don’t care. You’ve got to quit drinking.’ ”
Boone’s precarious predicament as a talented player not worth the trouble didn’t truly sink in until the April draft. He watched every second of the two-day draft and heard 256 names called. His cell phone never buzzed.
Everything the coaches had told Boone in February — which he didn’t truly believe — had come true.
“My eyes were wide open after that,” Boone said. “I said, ‘This isn’t a joke anymore. If this is what I want to do, I’ve got to get sober and stop drinking.’ ”
Boone signed with the 49ers as an undrafted free agent and spent that season on the practice squad. After that season, Boone hooked up with a man who would change his life.
Former Ohio State center LeCharles Bentley, like Boone a native of Cleveland, had launched a fitness and training center specifically for budding offensive linemen, and Boone put himself in Bentley’s hands.
In a strange twist, Bentley, 33, said Boone came along at exactly the right time for him. Bentley’s promising NFL career with the Saints and the Browns had been cut short after six seasons by a knee injury and a serious staph infection.
The best center in the NFL still was dealing with the anger of losing his job due to a medical condition, but now he was trying to resurrect Boone, who had enormous potential but was on the verge of throwing it all away.
“I would like to think I’ve been a blessing to him, but I think he’s been more of a blessing to me,” Bentley said yesterday from Arizona, where he is conducting training sessions for draft-eligible linemen. “Alex worked. He believed. He bought into what I was preaching to him, and here he is now in this situation.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited for another person in my life,” Bentley said. “To see Alex is like watching myself — other than he’s 6-foot-8 and white. I always tell Alex he is the second-toughest person in the world, outside of myself.”
Boone started his NFL career as a tackle but moved inside to right guard, which is where the 49ers needed him. He has played every snap this season, learning to, as Bentley told him about moving to the interior, “fight like I’m in a phone booth.”
What Boone is most proud of is changing his lifestyle, giving his family peace of mind and rebutting the NFL skeptics with a day-by-day consistency he never used to have.
“Absolutely there’s been a lot of ups and down,” Boone said. “I’m just happy to ride the ups and learn from the downs. To be here with this team right now is just unbelievable. People said, ‘This guy is going to say one thing and do another. He’s not trustworthy.’ It was one of those things where it was going to take time to prove myself.”
And Bentley is the proud “big brother.”
“The exciting thing for him is the best is yet to come,” he said. “At the end of the day, he could be and should be a top-five tackle in the NFL.”