Clemson's Guillermo opens up about overcoming depression, alcholism

Guillermo had tried to cushion his fall from star offensive lineman in high school to banged-up backup in college with nightly drinking binges in the bars along College Avenue here in the fall of 2014. Pain lingered in his surgically repaired right foot, and he drank to heal that, too. By the end of December 2014, after weeks of drinking, Guillermo thought he was through as a football player. He was 20 years old.

“I would look in the mirror in the morning, and it was all negative thoughts,” he said. “I didn’t know a person could get so low.”

In January, Guillermo, regarded as one of the top high school linemen in the country in 2011, quit school and returned to his parents’ home in North Carolina. For six months, Guillermo said, he went through a personal atonement, which included substance-abuse counseling, an unorthodox fitness regimen and long talks with his grandfather, Ron Greene, a retired high school football coach.

“When we helped him through that, and welcomed him back with open arms, I think that helped him and us come together,” left guard Eric Mac Lain said of the offensive line’s emergence as a cohesive unit.

“Anything I could get my hands on, I was drinking,” he said. “It was a whole lot, and I was getting depressed.”

Guillermo finished the season at 345 pounds, up from 310. By January his weight had soared to 363, and his blood pressure spiked to 193/102.

“He went to the bars and everybody knew it,” Mac Lain said. “We saw him going through some bad stuff, but when your brother tells you, ‘No, I’m good,’ you believe him. Sometimes you have to push it to where we could have prevented that. “It was a very dark place, I’m sure.”

Guillermo said that through talks with Greene about life and football, he slowly started to come out of his depression. He said he stopped drinking, and Greene took him to the weight room at Burns High School in Lawndale, N.C., where Greene had coached for 25 years.

“One day I told my grandpa I needed to do something different, besides the weights,” Guillermo said. “I asked him for an ax and started cutting down trees behind his house.”

Greene said Guillermo chopped down tall pines, then cut the trunks into shorter lengths to use in weight training before reducing them even further, into firewood.

“He did squats with them, he benched them, he did lunges with them, he ran with them on his back,” Greene said. “It amazed me what he was doing.”

My grandfather told me this is the toughest thing I will ever go through,” Guillermo said of his struggles with injury and alcohol. “He also told me when I came out of it, it would be the thing I would be most proud of. He was right.”