His day starts at 5 a.m. and ends with lights out at 10 p.m. Usually, he says, he is so drained by all the group meetings and heavy emotional lifting that he falls asleep by 8:30, his 350-pound body stretched over a narrow, twin-bed mattress.

"I can't complain about a single bed," Robbins said by phone the other day, "not when you consider where I've been."

Six years ago, on another Super Bowl weekend, he began a saga that took him from the center of the Raiders' offensive line to the Betty Ford Center and a diagnosis of mental illness. He disappeared from the Raiders' team hotel in San Diego, made a road trip to Tijuana and layered an intoxicated stupor over a bipolar haze. His soaring career would never recover. His absence from the Super Bowl turned his name into a cheap trivia-quiz answer rather than a staple on the Pro Bowl roster. Even then, though, the toll for his illness and attendant addictions came to chump change.

He still hadn't acquired the two bullets currently lodged in his torso, from the guns of Miami Beach police officers. He hadn't spent a total of nearly 22 months in jail, most of it awaiting trial on charges of battery against the officers who shot him, wondering whether he would be sentenced to 30 years in prison. He hadn't lived in a halfway house or gone through multiple rehabs in Florida and Texas, low-rent versions of Betty Ford that he came to see as too pampering.

Now 35, Robbins has lost more than most people will ever have, and his life teeters on the line between tragedy and miracle. Lawyers and family members agree that having an ox's build and the fitness of a former pro athlete may be all that spared his life after the shooting, which left him in a semi-comatose state for more than three weeks.

"I feel good, I really do," Robbins said in his first Bay Area interview since the 2005 shooting. "I still have some physical issues, but that's mostly from playing football. For getting shot in the heart and lung, I'm doing fine. ... And mentally, I've never had clarity like I have now. There was always something missing."

His treatment runs for six months, ending with a graduation on May 12 and then a move into aftercare. When he's on his own, away from the constant supervision, will he stay on the medication he needs and away from the substances he doesn't? Will anything push him to the miracle side of the line and keep him there?

"This is pretty much it," Robbins said from the treatment facility. "I'm fed up with things the way they've been and I'm tired of being sick. And let's face it, I don't have many more chances left."

The wife's perspective

At least one person saw the Super Bowl fiasco as an odd blessing, because it led to Robbins' first diagnosis of bipolar disorder. At the San Diego-area hospital, his wife, Marisa, says: "I was just throwing my hands up to the sky and saying, 'Hallelujah. At least, this will give me an answer to all the things that have been going on.' "

Her husband had been hospitalized twice before, in college and in his second year in the pros, after what doctors believed were psychotic episodes. They treated him for depression and anxiety, and experts in bipolar disorder say the disease is commonly confused with depression in the first years that it surfaces.

Despite the treatment, months would pass in the NFL offseason when Robbins couldn't get out of bed. The bipolar diagnosis changed things. It was far more complicated to treat than depression, requiring three medications and a nonstop balancing act. But against considerable odds, Robbins returned to the Raiders for the 2003 season, made apologies to the team, and won his way back into the starting lineup for nine games.

"He had a year sober after the Super Bowl, and it was the most fantastic year of our lives," Marisa said. "He was the husband I always knew he could be, and the father I always knew he could be."

But at the end of the year, he would need knee surgery, and his wife worried about the aftermath. She had read extensively about bipolar disorder and had come to believe that intense pain and painkillers could trigger manic episodes. Barret recognized her fears, she said, and promised to let her count his pain pills, so she'd know if he had veered off into abuse. Still, she worried, and soon after the surgery she started noticing a return of erratic moods.

Another cloud had developed near the end of the season. Robbins appeared as a grand-jury witness in the BALCO drug case, and later one of his urine samples was retested to reveal the lab's designer steroid, THG. Robbins accepted his release from the Raiders in the summer of 2004.

He also asked for a divorce, Marisa said. In September, she moved out of their Pleasanton home and took their daughters - Madison, now 1o, and Marley, now 7 - back to Southern California, near her parents.

"I'd bought this book called 'Loving Someone With Bipolar Disorder,' and the last chapter was called 'When Is it OK to Leave?' " she said, her voice trembling over the phone. "It says that it's when the situation becomes unhealthy for the kids, and that's how I knew." Their divorce is still pending.

The Super Bowl, 2003

When Marisa and the children flew into San Diego to join Barret three days before the Super Bowl in 2003, he didn't show up to meet them. They went to their hotel, set apart from the players, by themselves. At first, Marisa thought he was being a jerk, but in retrospect she recognizes a buildup to a manic episode.

She said they spent a weird Friday evening together, trying to get to Rodney and Holly Robinson Peete's party in a car Barret had hired, a magenta Honda Civic driven by a woman who kept getting lost. With the Raiders' 11 p.m. curfew approaching, they went back to the team hotel to drop Barret off. The next morning, in the family hotel, Marisa heard that Barret was missing.

He returned Saturday night, and the Raiders sent him to her hotel the next day, game day. As they sat in the room, she said, he flipped through music channels on TV, apparently oblivious to all that had happened. Gently, she asked if he knew what day it was and whether he knew where he was supposed to be. He looked confused, she said. She prodded him, saying "It's Sunday."

He took a guess, she said. He thought he had missed church.

Later, as they drove to the Betty Ford Center for his 30-day stay, she said he told her that while he was in Tijuana, he thought the Super Bowl had ended and that he was partying to celebrate a Raiders win.

The Raiders, of course, lost and lost big. Robbins' absence is occasionally cited as one of the reasons that quarterback Rich Gannon was sacked and intercepted five times and Tampa Bay won 48-21.

"I'm not buying that," Gannon said. "Quite honestly, I don't think I was ever mad at Barret. I just felt frustrated and disappointed, and I felt bad for him, that he couldn't enjoy the fruits of his labors. He was supposed to play in the Super Bowl, and he got voted into the Pro Bowl for the first time. He never got to do any of that."

Attempts to find someone in the Raiders' organization to comment on Robbins were unsuccessful, but Marisa said: "I know if I needed something, I could call the Raiders."

From his current treatment facility, Robbins said he had lost track of his teammates and their phone numbers.

Christmas Eve, 2004

By late 2004, after his football career and marriage unraveled, Robbins no longer had any real structure around him. On Christmas Eve, he allegedly showed up alone at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in Union Square, trying to reach the renowned Starlight Room on the 21st floor. Most nights, the establishment would be eager to serve an NFL celebrity, but the bar had closed for the evening and Robbins was no longer the kind of guy who merited a red carpet.

According to a police report, Robbins punched a security guard who tried to stop him from going to the bar. He was arrested on misdemeanor charges of battery, trespassing and being drunk in public. Before long, he had ditched the Bay Area, leaving behind an outstanding bench warrant.

That apparent low point, being arrested on Christmas Eve, turned out to be little more than an omen. Robbins flew to Miami to meet an old friend and partake of the South Beach social scene. Relatives, fearing the worst, tried to track him down and persuade him to leave, but they couldn't pull him away.

By Saturday, Jan. 15, the friend had left Florida, and Robbins was on his own.

That night in Miami Beach, according to published accounts from a police report, Robbins forced his way into a building that housed a pub, gym and jewelry store. The pub owner summoned police, who reported finding Robbins in a stall in the women's room. A brawl ensued, and Robbins took two bullets to the torso.

According to police accounts, Robbins growled, snarled and laughed during the struggle with three officers, slamming each of them into a wall or onto the floor. Robbins' defense attorney, Ed O'Donnell, said two of the responders were plain-clothes detectives, and Robbins, apparently in a manic episode, reacted as if he were being robbed. The police contended that Robbins seemed to be trying to take one of their guns, and fearing for their lives, they shot him in self-defense.

Robbins says he has some memories of the incident but can't share them. He filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit on Jan. 13 of this year, accusing the Miami Beach police of excessive force and seeking unspecified damages.

The attorney in his civil case, Michael Feiler of Coral Gables, says members of the same police department had picked up Robbins earlier in the day on Sunset Island, an upscale development. According to copies of a police dispatch log provided by Feiler, a large, heavily tattooed white male was wandering aimlessly, barefoot, acting disoriented. "They just took him over to the mainland and dropped him on a street corner," Feiler said.

"They should have invoked the Baker Act," Marisa Robbins said sadly, referring to the Florida statute that allows for detention for mental health evaluation. "It's for when ... it's the same thing as a 51-50 in California."

For a cosmetologist with no formal legal training, she knows far too much about the codes for detaining people who constitute a danger to themselves.

"Fourteen years of dealing with this stuff," she said. After a brief silence, her voice returned, choking on tears. "And I still love him."

Far-ranging trouble, 2005-08

The first thing Robbins remembers after awaking from weeks of unconsciousness, strapped to a hospital bed, was looking at a calendar on the wall of his room.

"It was terrifying, to be honest with you," he said. "I couldn't talk, but I could open my eyes and see things. I saw this calendar that said March 2, and I thought March 7 is Marley's birthday. I've got to get to a phone by March 7."

He stayed in the hospital until April, then traveled to his father's home in Flint, Tex., for more recovery time. Robbins was free on bond; in Florida, he faced three felony accounts of attempted murder.

His attorney, O'Donnell, said the attempted-murder charges stemmed from the Miami Beach Police Department's need to justify the shooting. The police, citing the pending litigation, declined to comment.

The prosecutor's office, after further review of the evidence, reduced the attempted-murder charges to three counts of felony battery on a police officer, as well as resisting arrest with violence and trespassing. All told, Robbins said, he was looking at 30 years in prison.

But by August 2006, a plea bargain had cut the sentence to five years' probation, and Robbins received a "withhold of adjudication," an element of Florida law that kept a felony conviction off his record.

Robbins took the plea bargain over O'Donnell's objections. Robbins said he wanted to move on and not risk a long sentence or spend more time in jail awaiting trial. He had already been incarcerated for 11 1/2 months after violating the terms of his bond with another in a long sequence of unfathomably irrational acts.

"He was in San Antonio, smoking pot in a car, and he blew the smoke right in the direction of a (bicycle-riding) cop," his father, Dean "Rob" Robbins, said. "What in the world could you be thinking?"

He was sent back to Florida and put in protective custody alongside people with long criminal histories, he said. "That was tough, really tough," Robbins said. "I learned a lot about myself there."

But his disease and addictions wouldn't bow to any one lesson. Positive drug tests added up to probation violations, more jail time and more rehab attempts, plus a stay in a halfway house. None of those remedial efforts took. His father said the family would get a call from a hotel, saying that Barret had checked in, then left all of his possessions in the room, never checking out or paying the bill. He just vanished.

Eventually, Robbins said, he ended up with probation officers whom he calls "very caring." They couldn't stop him from abusing drugs, but before his last positive test, in May, he confessed that the sample would detect cocaine and pot. He was sent to jail again for six months, then to his current address, in Harris County's Substance Abuse Treatment Facility at Peden.

"It was probably for the best that we didn't go to trial and win," O'Donnell, the defense attorney said, "because Barret would have been on his own, and he wouldn't have ended up where he is now, which is where he needs to be."

Uncertain times, 2009

Marisa Robbins and her father-in-law both say they are receiving letters from Barret these days - an unexpected, pleasant new pattern. They know better than to take any one sign of improvement too hopefully, but his dad says he seems to be more open emotionally these days (Barret's mother died in 1999).

Marisa has never told Marley and Madison exactly where their dad is. They know that he is sick and getting help from doctors, she said, but not that he was shot or arrested. When he can't send holiday presents, she always wraps an extra gift and marks it from their dad. She can still see him in the good days, barbecuing for the family, shooting hoops and swimming with the girls, and hopes that those memories can someday become a reality for her daughters again.

Amid all the instability, she said, Barret has flown out to see them twice in the last two years, including four days last March around Marley's birthday. Marisa said he slept most of the time.

She knows that a lot of people don't understand why she agrees to do interviews about their private torment. But she hopes that if she explains what she has seen, her husband's illness won't be dismissed as a weakness or an excuse for humiliating behavior.

Robbins says he is getting the medication he needs. He doesn't experience many side effects, he said, except for weight gain. He'd like to drop 25 pounds and get back to his playing weight.

Still, his family worries. Life outside the highly structured treatment facility will offer so many temptations.

Descartes Li, a psychiatrist and director of the bipolar disorder program at UCSF, said studies show that more than half of bipolar patients have been connected to substance abuse. One of the most common triggers for a manic episode, he said, is sleep disruption, which often occurs around big life events.

"You could be getting married," he said, "or maybe you're about to play in the Super Bowl."

With proper care, Li said, bipolar people can lead fulfilling lives. "But it's challenging," Li said. "I admire what some people I treat have to go through to take care of themselves. I don't know about you, but I can go to bed an hour or two late, and I might be a little tired the next day, but I don't have to worry about becoming manic and hospitalized."

Robbins isn't sure what he might do next, but he has told family members that he would enjoy cooking school and becoming a chef. Over the phone, he said he would like to try coaching, first in high school, then at higher levels. He also is considering writing a book. He also thinks about the possibility of playing again.

"I wouldn't want to go on the record saying I could do it," he said. "But in my heart of hearts, I think it's possible."

His father, who went back to college at age 46 and got a degree at 50, said he wants that kind of comeback for his son. "I think right now he doesn't see himself as very useful, and when you're used to making $3 million a year, the idea of making $60,000 can be tough," Rob Robbins said. "But you have to see that $60,000 isn't useless. It's normal."

Today, Robbins will be like millions of other people around the world. His treatment facility has a day room with a TV.

And so yes, he said, "We'll be watching the Super Bowl."

E-mail Gwen Knapp at gknapp@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle