This is not your typical NFL tale of "too much too soon". Instead it is a story of a man whom from childhood was probably doomed to end up a criminal. If he hadn't been a famous college and NFL running back, he would probably be languishing in a prison somewhere, nameless to the rest of the world.

Lawrence Phillip's dad abandoned his family in Arkansas as a child. His mother took the family to California looking for a better life. Instead Lawrence would up in a crime infested area of 1980's LA run by the Bloods and Crips outside his home, and his mother consorting with a parade of violent men inside the home. He ran away during the 5th grade - basically skipping the whole grade and hanging out and crashing with friends - and not attending school so that his mother could not take him back to the home he feared.

In high school Phillips found his niche - football - and found a kindly mentor and friend in the coach. Standardized tests measured him as gifted, and his gifts on the field got him into the University of Nebraska, where he was within inches of winning the Heismann trophy when a violent incident with a girlfriend who he thought was cheating on him cost him that prize.

In the NFL his problems continued as he bounced from team to team. He developed an alcohol problem to deal with his inner demons, continued to have problems with women, and then a particularly violent incident in California led to Phillips being sentenced to 31 years in prison.

Inside the prison, Phillips made possibly a fatal decision - he decided to not join a prison gang. In spite of his effort to keep his head down and just work on his appeal, hoping for an early release, he wound up with a cell mate who was a gang member doing 82 years. According to Phillips, his cell mate attacked him, and when Phillips defended himself the cell mate was badly injured and died three days later of his injuries. What does the D.A. do? Ask why a gang member is put in the cell of a person marked for death by that same gang? Nope. She decides to charge Phillips with murder and seek the death penalty.

The documentary makes the unchallenged statement that the gangs run the prison Phillips was in, not the correctional officers. The gangs running the prison and bribing the not well paid correctional officers would account for the placement of the gang member in Phillips' cell. Phillips being a one-time NFL star would account for the DA thinking she could make a name for herself by flatly dismissing Phillips' account of what happened when he had always taken responsibility for what happened outside of jail. And Phillips taking his own life and nobody doing anything until it was too late could again be accounted for by the gangs running the prison - and that includes the "see no evil hear no evil" behavior of the guards and the inmates in the cell block where Phillips killed himself.

Are there lots of people with Lawrence Phillips' story of childhood hardship that never harm a fly? Sure there are. But this documentary makes the case for an explanation, not excuses. It seems being completely unwanted by his mother may have been at the root of his mistrust and ultimate violence with the women in his life, that the constant fear he lived in as a child may have left him with crippling PTSD that he didn't even understand, and his NFL stardom set him up for making him an example whenever he got in trouble - and he DID do some things that could have gotten people killed.

I'm no bleeding heart, but the next time I tell somebody to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, I think I'll look at their feet and see if they have boots in the first place.