Former NBA basketball player Chris Herren told every Delaware Valley High School student, plus hundreds of middle schoolers, on Nov. 18 that he wished someone had grabbed him by his shirt and told his teenage self, “Why can’t you be yourself?”
But instead, he revised himself with beer in high school, cocaine in college, Oxycontin while playing for the Denver Nuggets and the Boston Celtics, and heroin while playing ball overseas. Again and again, his athletic career was derailed by his drug abuse. Eventually, he destroyed it and nearly lost his family and his life.
After months of rehab, in 2009 he began sharing his hard lessons learned with students, troops and professional athletes. Now he is the founder of three Herren Wellness residential rehab centers in Massachusetts and Virginia, and still gives about 200 talks a year.
Speaking plainly and forcefully in his New England accent, Herren challenged the students to be better than he was in high school in Fall River, Mass. While his father’s alcoholism was destroying his mother, he was drinking the same stuff “that tore my mother’s heart out” and covering the scent with gum and treating his bloodshot eyes with Visine. He thought that the kids who did not indulge “must have something I’m missing,” but he did not desist. Of his 14 high school friends who drank with him out of red Solo cups, seven went on to become heroin addicts. He and his friends were changing into different people – people their parents didn’t even know.
Herren said, “I hope and pray that one kid (in the audience) will realize, ‘I don’t like the kid I’m becoming.’” He urged students to think of the example they are setting for younger siblings. He made the point that the really cool kids – “my heroes” – are the ones who don’t drink or smoke. “Ask yourself why you have to change yourself.”
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