As Ray Nettles approaches his 60th birthday on Aug. 1, Nettles has come to realize what an ill-fated path he's been travelling all these years. As much as he revelled in being that notorious tough guy -- earning him a Schenley Award as Outstanding Lineman in 1973 and being elected to the CFL Hall of Fame in 2005 -- Nettles' penchant to constantly experience life on the edge didn't suit him so well off the field.

After years of abusing alcohol and feeding a cocaine habit that nearly killed him more times than his family cares to recount, Nettles, who is now battling Stage 4 cancer in his liver and lungs, acknowledges how much of a golden opportunity he wasted. He understands all about misplaced priorities, the price of addictions, manipulating people and, most painful of all, hurting the ones who loved him the most.

But in a life in which Nettles has endured so many extreme highs and lows, the fiery leader of the B.C. Lions' defence from 1972 to 1976 is trying to make up for lost time in what may be his final season.

"God has given me the chance to sit here and talk about this," Nettles said. "I want my story to matter to somebody."

Nettles has packed a lifetime of hardship and redemption into the past two years. He was diagnosed with liver cancer in August 2007, saw it go into remission and return, and now his terminal illness has spread into both of his lungs. Within a span of one week in 2007, Nettles lost his mother, Lucille, to cancer and fell off his motorcycle, breaking his neck and causing him to go back on pain medication, which reignited a longtime cocaine habit.

Last September, a tenant at his rental property (now in foreclosure) was arrested for drug possession. Nettles admits that, for several months, he allowed the tenant to pay rent with cocaine. That complicated scenario led to Ray being angrily confronted by his wife, Bonnie, when she discovered a voice mail of an unidentified caller asking if her husband wanted to purchase drugs.

The next day, after years of Nettles living in denial about his addictions, a determined Bonnie and his sister, Dale, drove Ray to Statesboro, Ga., for a life-changing rehabilitation at Willingway Hospital. What has transpired in Nettles' life since then - sobriety, his Tennessee football fraternity rallying to support him, repairing his broken marriage and turning back to his faith in God for guidance - is one of those comebacks for the ages.

"It's been something tremendous to witness," said Anne Cummings, Nettles' older sister and a nursing supervisor at Flagler Hospital. "It's a shame you wait to the end of your life to get where you can enjoy it. Ray is aware that he had some wasted years. You see this with a lot of football players. They try to play with pain, and after they shoot these guys up [with painkillers], then they learn to manage pain chemically. It's not too big of a step to addiction.

"We're just so thankful to the Lord that Ray is back where he is. Underneath all the mess, Ray is a fine person with a good heart. He still wants time to do something worthwhile before he leaves us."

As the terminal illness keeps weakening his body, Nettles acknowledges he's "in overtime" of his life.

AN EXTREME MAKEOVER

Nettles was the epitome of a rough-and-tumble linebacker and did everything to live up to that reputation on and off the field. Before and after his pro career (1972-80), when the long-haired country boy played for five teams and won the Schenley Award in '73 as the CFL's outstanding lineman, Nettles acknowledges he routinely consumed beer in large quantities.

But when he tried cocaine for the first time, according to Nettles, in the hotel room of 1972 Heisman Trophy winner and then-Montreal Alouettes tailback Johnny Rodgers after a CFL awards banquet, Nettles didn't think it was a big deal. Nettles was 24 and figured it was just an experiment that would go away like some passing fad.

After 35 years in the fast lane - which includes being on nearly every medication or painkiller possible, a 1996 diagnosis of hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver and a statement from a doctor to Bonnie in 2004 that her husband had "enough cocaine in his system to kill two people" - Nettles has finally come to understand what a dangerous game he was playing over that time.

It's little wonder that he could never sustain a lasting relationship with women, including Bonnie, who divorced him in 2001 after five years over his alcohol abuse. She remarried Ray in 2004, only to come home to their apartment in Atlanta from a plane trip (she's a flight attendant with Air Tran) and find her husband crawling to open the door. Ray had injected cocaine into his knee, which later swelled up like a volleyball and put him near death in the hospital.

Bonnie left Ray again, moved back to Jacksonville without divorcing him, and spent the next four years wondering if the man she never stopped loving could ever get off the addiction train.

During their first marital go-around, Ray carefully kept his on-again, off-again cocaine use hidden from Bonnie. "Ray never did any drugs in front of me," she said. "I was totally oblivious to it."

Because he was on all kinds of medications and painkillers anyway, Nettles, who endured 11 surgeries because of football-related injuries, had a convenient alibi to explain his sometimes erratic behaviour.

"Oh, I was good. I was a manipulator," Ray said. "People accepted me as being normal. Very seldom was I out of line or off balance. I had the cat-and-mouse game thing down.

"You know when you're an alcoholic, you climb in your own bottle by yourself. Well, that's the way I was with cocaine. It got to the point where I wasn't a social, recreational user anymore, and it haunted me."

Jamie Rotella, a University of Tennessee player living outside Atlanta and Nettles' closest friend from his college days, understands the transformation his fellow linebacker has undergone as well as anyone. Rotella conquered his own alcohol problems just as his parents were passing away in 2001 and 2002.