Daryl Gardener Went Back To College

Former Miami Dolphins defensive tackle and current bodybuilding enthusiast Daryl Gardener was arrested after an altercation with his girlfriend, Sonia Cabrera, earlier this week on the campus of the University of Central Florida.

Via the Sun-Sentinel:

The 38-year-old former defensive tackle was arrested early Tuesday morning in front of the University of Central Florida’s Zeta Tau Alpha house in Orlando along with his 49-year-old* girlfriend Sonia Cabrera after the two got into a fight.

Cabrera told police she was angry with Gardener after the two had attended a club called Fubar** earlier in the night (because, of course Orlando nightlife includes a spot called Fubar). Cabrera became so angry that later in the night she threw two bottles of cologne at Gardener and struck him with a tire iron at the Alpha Xi Delta sorority house.

For reasons we don’t really understand and this Sun-Sentinel article doesn’t clarify, Gardener tried to confront Cabrera with police officers at another sorority house at UCF. He had seen her in a third-floor window*** he told police. The fact that most of this all went down at sorority houses seems like the strangest part to us.

You’ll have to forgive my happiness over this story. So rarely does a news article come along that is, simply put, my perfect storm. A guy who used to play for my favorite NFL team was arrested on the campus of my alma mater after an altercation in front of two sorority houses that I spent too much time at in my college days. I’m so wistful right now.

It just makes me miss my tattered Abercrombie & Fitch cargo shorts, my Sig Ep rush t-shirts, all-nighters fueled by Southern Comfort followed by endless dry heaving, telling professors that my sister died even though I don’t have a sister, stealing the Sigma Chi flag, watching the new sorority pledge classes run down Greek Park Drive and feeling bad for the fat girls who have to walk, instigating fights between SAE and Pike, talking the campus police into letting me and my buddy Stone use breathalyzers to see who had the highest BAC, convincing Pi Phis to strip down to their underwear and sprint to the Reflecting Pond at 7 AM in winter as part of our Polar Bear Club tradition, watching my frat brother get a ticket for peeing outside and then getting a ticket for the same thing the following night, stealing all the composites from the KD house and hiding them in my room and then saying, “Hey, who put these here?” when their house mom showed up at my door, playing goalie for the B-league soccer team and throwing up on the net because I was just too hungover, waking up to my roommate peeing in his laundry basket on three occasions, passing out in our back yard in a giant foam Charlie Brown costume because I won the Jose Cuervo shot contest that nobody else was participating in, telling prostitutes to go hang out at the Lambda Chi float area on Homecoming morning at the Citrus Bowl, going to Circus Circus and seeing one of our brothers’ girlfriends stripping, drinking until 7 AM before having to go hand out food at an elementary school, being asked to leave that elementary school and never come back because we smelled like a brewery… and those are only the PG stories. God, I miss college so much. I need a pledge to bring me more coffee.

As for the actual story:

*He’s 38 and she’s 49. I need to see a picture of her to see if she’s hot, otherwise… gross, dude.

**I’m not sure why it’s such a revelation to the writer that a college bar would be called something as stupid as Fubar. Because there are no bars in Miami or Ft. Lauderdale with asinine names. But Fubar used to be the Liquid Cellar, which is where I cut my teeth as a college drinker. RIP, $1 mug night.

***Cool story, bro, but there aren’t any three-story sorority houses at UCF. As someone who has had to climb out of a few sorority house windows, I know this quite well.

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