The drive that day was not a pleasant one, Fred Biletnikoff recalls. It was 1997, and he was taking his daughter Tracey, just 18, to a drug treatment program in Burlingame. She was addicted to crystal meth and heroin, and her father worried that she might not be strong enough to get past it.
“She was telling me she was only going to go (for) 30 days,” said Biletnikoff, the Hall of Fame Oakland Raiders wide receiver. “I was telling her to just give it a chance. She was very defiant.”
It was a struggle, he said, to persuade her to give it a chance, to stay for at least 60 days.