Yesterday, Dexter Manley’s wife was reunited with the Super Bowl ring he won as a member of the 1983 Washington Redskins. A timely article from the Washington Post tells the tale of the ring, which passed between the retired NFLer and his former employer and friend, prominent Houston lawyer John O’Quinn (who died in a car crash last fall).
Manley fell from grace in the early 90s due to a drug addiction and pawned his ring for $5,000 in 1998. O’Quinn, a highly successful trial attorney, bought it back from the pawn shop for three times that price a year later and soon showed it to its rightful owner — who by that time was working as a researcher at O’Quinn’s firm.
Manley asked his friend to hang onto the ring for safekeeping and O’Quinn took him literally — to the point that O’Quinn began to evade Manley’s follow-up questions about the status of the ring. After O’Quinn’s death, Manley called his friend’s executor and eventually tracked down his ring: it was in a safe deposit box, along with explicit instructions detailing the conditions that must be met in order for Manley to have it returned: his wife, Lydia, had to swear that her husband was clean.
Earlier this week, Lydia got the chance to do just that and retrieved the ring, which she’ll return to Manley next week. Right now, he’s in Florida celebrating this Sunday’s Super Bowl XLIV, and she’s in Las Vegas on her annual Super Bowl weekend getaway.