‘Basketball Junkie’: Former star urges Upper St. Clair students to avoid his path
A few years after H.G. Bissinger wrote his revelatory “Friday Night Lights,” another author decided to chronicle a year in the life of a group of high school athletes.
Instead of football in Texas, they played basketball in Fall River, Mass., where the B.M.C. Durfee Hilltoppers were led by a point guard who was on his way to setting a school record for career points.
“Seven of us became heroin addicts,” Chris Herren, the team’s star and McDonald’s All-American, admitted during a recent presentation at Upper St. Clair High School.
Nearly two decades after Bill Reynolds immortalized Durfee’s 1993-94 season in “Fall River Dreams: A Team’s Quest for Glory, A Town’s Search for Its Soul,” the author collaborated with Herren to tell the other side of his life’s story in “Basketball Junkie: A Memoir.”
Herren has been clean and sober since he wrecked his vehicle after injecting himself with heroin, and according to the second book, “I was dead for 30 seconds. That’s what the cop in Fall River told me.”
Had he not been resuscitated, Herren probably would be remembered as an exceptionally promising young athlete – he was featured in Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated even before he entered college – who wasted his prodigious talent.
Today, he devotes his life to putting others on positive paths through Herren Wellness, a residential substance use and health organization, and the Herren Project, a national nonprofit providing free resources and support for treatment, recovery and prevention of substance use disorder.
The prevention aspect has prompted him to speak to audiences numbering almost 2 million members in the past dozen years, as he talks candidly about himself while acknowledging a certain amount of skepticism among some of the people who are listening.
“That attitude comes from what I believe is the way we’ve irresponsibly presented addiction over the years,” he said at Upper St. Clair. “I think we put way too much focus on the worst day, and you forget the first day.”
His own first day came when he was 13 and swiped a couple of his dad’s light beers for himself and his best friend. After a sip that disgusted him, Herren promptly dumped the rest of the can.
But his curiosity had been piqued to the point where he eventually joined various acquaintances, including his basketball teammates, in further exploring substance use. And he did everything he could to hide his indulgence from his proud-of-her-son mother, who “truly believed that I could have fun on Friday nights without that stuff.”
“At the end of the night, as I’m shoving Visine in my eyes and gum in my mouth, I’d look across the room and I would see my friends in high school who never drank and never smoked, kids who were often laughed at, made fun of, left behind because they wouldn’t,” he recalled. “I would say to myself, those kids have something special that I’m missing. How can they have fun without it? And why do I need it?”
Before he figured all that out for himself, Herren carved out a substance-riddled career in college and the National Basketball Association, as related in the ESPN “30 for 30” documentary “Unguarded.” He also came close to destroying his family while squandering his resources in the constant pursuit of what ended up killing him for half a minute.
Herren has three children – ages 22, 19 and 12 – and he’s pleased to report the two older ones are leading the type of lifestyle he has spent his latter years promoting so heavily. He certainly hopes the youngest does, as well, but just in case, he plans to ask one question: “Can you just tell me why?”
“Most parents are afraid of the answer that you’re going to give them,” he said, “and most kids don’t even know how to explain it to them.”
He also stressed the importance of frank conversations among classmates with regard to substance use.
“The saddest thing is, your friends know how much you struggle. And they’re sitting in this auditorium right now, kind of uncomfortable for you. But they don’t know what to do about it. They just know that it’s changed you,” he said. “No one will tell you this, but a lot of people don’t want to be around you on Friday nights. They talk about what it’s doing to you, but they’re afraid to say it to you.”
At the two Herren Wellness locations, in Massachusetts and Virginia, he sometimes meets parents who confide in him while checking in a child: “She’s embarrassed to tell you, but she was in the bleachers when you came to her high school.”
“I can’t even tell you how many people I meet five, six, seven, eight years later,” Herren said, “who wish they’d listened.”
For more information, visit chrisherren.com.