Herb continues to coach kids to this day, but he would never walk again.

Still, Lorenzen loved Memphis, a city which often felt more like a large town. He was from Memphis; he was of Memphis. He liked the music and the churches and the barbecues joints. “He was like the king of the city, hometown hero stuff,” says Rewis (Raw Dog) Williams, a longtime friend. “He was so proud to say, This is where I’m from.”

Lorenzen’s parents separated when Lorenzen was very young, though both parents remained active in his life. After shuttling between his mom’s home in Oxford, Miss., and his dad’s 80 miles away in Memphis, he moved to Memphis full-time as a high school senior. He started dating Sherra Robinson, whose dad, Julius, was hishe was conforming to cliché, the numbingly familiar profile of the athlete making a mess of his post-career life, as the money and the cloud of fame dissolve in tandem. Wright spent prodigiously and with little record-keeping. By 2010 his million-dollar home in Atlanta was being repossessed, as was another residence in suburban Memphis.

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He also had questionable associations. According to FBI documents, in 2008 Wright sold a 2008 Mercedes-Benz sedan and an ’07 Cadillac Escalade to Bobby Cole, a brother-in-law of Dennis McNeil. Cole was known throughout Memphis for his connection to Craig Petties, the city’s longtime drug kingpin, who had ties to Mexican cartels. (In 2009 Petties would plead guilty to 19 charges, including murder. He is serving nine concurrent life sentences in federal prison without the