Rex Chapman Isn’t Sure He Deserves Good Things

Love and success appeared to result in ache.

That feeling intensified within the N.B.A. After some accidents and surgical procedures, he ended up hooked on opioids, exacerbating his long-running playing dependancy. Retirement from basketball led to deeper dependancy. Chapman burned by way of cash. By his 40s, he was crashing on couches and shoplifting items to pawn for money. His spouse, Bridget, divorced him in 2012.

On the top of his dependancy, Chapman was consuming about 10 OxyContin and 40 Vicodin capsules per day, chewing them to get them into his bloodstream faster.

“Sooner or later, I had simply resigned myself to the truth that my life’s simply going to be as a drug addict,” he stated, including an expletive for emphasis.

In September 2014, he was caught shoplifting greater than $14,000 value of electronics and was arrested. His sister, Jenny, took him in, and with the assistance of mates persuaded Chapman to go to a rehab heart in Louisville, Ky., the place his faculty roommate, Paul Andrews, was an government. “Saved my life,” Chapman stated.

After Chapman received clear, he started talking in public about recovering from dependancy. He discovered work masking Kentucky athletics on the radio for a regional media firm round 2016. The corporate pushed him to be extra energetic on social media, significantly on Twitter, however Chapman resisted. “The panorama was simply poisonous. Everyone hating one another,” he stated.

A dolphin video modified every thing: “I noticed a video someday of a faculty of dolphins swimming out to sea, and a man on a paddle board coming in, and a dolphin jumped up and hit him within the chest and knocked him off. And I stated to myself, ‘That’s a cost,’” Chapman stated, including one other expletive. (The account that first shared the video is now suspended.)