When talking about the circumstances that led to his drug use, addiction and near-death, Chris Herren spares no detail.
He lays bare the pain he hoped the high would soothe, the emotional void he desperately sought to fill.
In the end, it didn’t, Herren says, and it almost cost him everything.
“We chase death every day,” he says of junkies. “We chase death every day, for a feeling.”
The former college basketball standout and NBA player returned to Naperville last week to give his “Rebound: The Chris Herren Story” presentation at Naperville North High School, as he’d done in 2014 and again at Naperville Central last October. First, he spoke to a packed gym of 2,800 North students last Wednesday afternoon, before doing an encore talk that night for about 500 parents and kids assembled in the North Fieldhouse. Normally Herren says he only makes return appearances about every four years, but North student and faculty leaders brought Herren back early after hearing stories of the impact his talk had made on North students previously.
It was with some hesitation that I took our two boys to hear Herren. My wife, who was with our daughter at basketball practice that night, pointed out that he was speaking and asked me if I’d like to take the boys. Drug addiction is not something we know to have touched our immediate family or closest friends, so a scared-straight talk on the subject wasn’t something on my radar. Especially not for a couple of boys ages 12 and 8.
If nothing else, I figured the boys might like to hear the former pro basketball player speak, perhaps benefiting from some aspect of his triumph over tragedy story. So, we went. I’m glad we did.
See, Herren takes a deliberately different approach in his talk. He doesn’t start his story with the moment he was finally able to get clean. You’re not startled to attention by statistics of how many people die annually from drug overdoses. He doesn’t open with gory photos of his face smashed up in a car windshield.
Rather, Herren starts with a story about his parents. He talks about his alcoholic father and the heartbreak he watched his mother endure when he was a child. He explains how that affected him. In doing so, he gives a full picture of the beginning, of the circumstances that set him on his path. Drinking his dad’s beer in 8th grade was the beginning, he says, with much more to follow.
“Parents don’t ask why. Why hurts,” Herren says, suggesting that moms and dads not yell and punish when they find out their children are using drugs or alcohol, but to give a hug and listen. “Why is Day 1. Why is the beginning, but we don’t recognize it.”
Too many times, he says, the end is too late.
Herren was a high school basketball star in Fall River, Mass. He was a McDonald’s All-American. He talks of Sports Illustrated photo shoots at that time that had him in the company of guys like Ray Allen and Allen Iverson, eventual NBA stars you know now even if you’ve never heard of Chris Herren.
He namechecks those two and others, not as a way of puffing out his chest and boasting of who he was. Herren’s point is to illustrate who he might have been, were it not for drugs.
He talks of the night he says he first encountered cocaine, as a freshman basketball player at Boston College. What should have been a story of a local boy done good became a story of failed drug tests and dismissal from the college basketball program five months later.
He resurfaced at Fresno State, given a second chance by legendary coach Jerry Tarkanian. Herren was drafted into the NBA by the Denver Nuggets, traded to the Boston Celtics – the team he idolized as a boy growing up in Massachusetts – and later played in Italy. And every step of the way, Herren says, the cycle of drug addiction derailed him. Cocaine became Oxycontin, Vicodin and Percocet, which became crystal meth and heroin.
It’s a story of repeated failed drug tests, of life in and out of rehab, of living on the streets, stealing from friends and family to score drugs, being so high he can’t remember the births of his first two children, violent car crashes, and actually being dead for 30 seconds, according to an account Herren says he was given by paramedics.
Most importantly, listening to Herren speak, it becomes clear that it was the near loss of his family that finally got him clean. Told by his wife that she didn’t want him around her or their three children by that point – Herren says he was actually briefly sober for the birth of the third – he says he’s been alcohol- and drug-free since Aug. 1, 2008.
Chris Herren was one of the lucky ones.
Now he takes his story on the road, making presentations like the one at North last week. And each one he kicks off not with the story about the end, he says, of when he got sober eight years ago. No, he talks about the circumstances of his life as a child, and urges parents to dig for the why.
“Why did my little girl have to get drunk to stand in the basement of a kid she’s known her whole life?” Herren asks rhetorically, referencing one familiar scenario among some high school parties. “Why did my little boy who’s 17 years old need to ride around in the back seat and smoke drugs with kids he’s known since preschool?”
He urges teens to be who they are, and to be comfortable with themselves – easy advice that may make sense to adults years later, sure. But also a potentially slippery slope to so much more if not heeded.
“To the kids in here who are engaged in this, to the kids in here who are drinking, to the kids in here who are smoking pot,” Herren says, “I want you to think about your little brother and sister, because they look up to you. They want to be like you. They dress like you, to act like you on Friday night …
“Go home and look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, if you were a kid, would you look up to you?”
The beginning.
Rob Manker is a freelance writer who lives and parents in Naperville.
Twitter: @RobManker
