Former Tech QB Sleeps on Bare Air Mattress [VIDEO]

He lives in the basement of a Wisconsin duplex, but he says the story gets exaggerated.

“What people don't understand,” Graham Harrell said with considerable seriousness, “is that I have a top-of-the-line air mattress.” Read more and take a tour of his pad on the next page.
That, and a chair. “For video games,” he said.

This is how a pro athlete furnishes his life, and this is how he has come to accept it, too. Harrell still holds college football's record for touchdown passes, and he's gone from being undrafted to unnoticed as Green Bay's third-string quarterback. Yet he acts as if he's looking from the top of a high rise.

“Some guys have waited 15 years for a Super Bowl,” Harrell said. And here he is, his first season in the NFL, not only in the Super Bowl, but in the first Super Bowl not far from his home.

“I can get used to this,” Harrell said.

Graham Harrell’s mother, Kathy, has been concerned with the Packers' backup quarterback's living conditions.

A few weeks ago, Graham’s older brother, Zac, received a forwarded email from Kathy with the subject line of “Holy Graham.”

Kathy had watched a video on-line from a Fox TV station in Wisconsin that showed the room Graham, the former Ennis and Texas Tech quarterback, is living in on the bottom floor of a three-story apartment he shares with two teammates.

Graham sleeps on an air mattress that has no sheets and a pillow with no pillowcase. On one side of the room is a three-tiered plastic storage container with drawers and in the middle of the room is a small, video-game playing chair in front of a big-screen TV. And that’s it.

“If you know Graham, that’s just him,” said Zac, the offensive coordinator at Van High School. “He’s always never spent money and lived on the simple things in life. He called me when he was going to buy the air mattress and he was mad that he had to spend money on it. But I didn’t know he was sleeping on it with no sheets or pillowcases, so that just topped it off.”

Graham said every time he talks to his mother now she tells him he needs to go buy some sheets for his air mattress.

“He just tells me the air mattress is comfortable because he bought it at Bed Bath & Beyond. I appreciate him not spending money and the simple life, but he’s taking it to the extreme,” Kathy said. “I don’t think sheets are considered a thrill of life.”

The almost $90,000 per-player bonus to the winning team could buy a lot of sheets, even those silky-smooth high thread count ones. He should also invest in a safe to store that shiny new Super Bowl ring.