Betty Ford Center's Recovery and Mental Health Awareness Hour returns with athletes Grant Fuhr, Carrie Bates

Following a break due to COVID-19, the Betty Ford Center's Recovery and Mental Health Awareness Hour will return in-person and be broadcasted across the world on Saturday.

The event begins at 9 a.m. in the Helene Galen Auditorium (inside the Annenberg Health Sciences Building) on Eisenhower Health's campus, located at 39-000 Bob Hope Drive in Rancho Mirage. It is free and open to the public.

Held on select Saturdays since 1976, the program is the longest-running recovery speaker series in the nation, according to the Hazelden Betty Ford website. The Saturday event will mark the first time it will be broadcasted live for people around the country — and globe — to watch.

The first event will feature NHL Hall of Famer and Coachella Valley resident Grant Fuhr and three-time Olympic gold medalist Carrie Bates, who will be interviewed by Hazelden Betty Ford national recovery advocate William C. Moyers.

Fuhr, who played for the Edmonton Oilers in the 1980s, was inducted into the NHL Hall of Fame in 2003 and was named one of the top 100 greatest NHL players in history in 2017.

Early in his career, the goaltender began using cocaine, he said on the Let's Talk podcast. He used the drug for about seven years, but later went into a recovery center in Florida in 1989. In 1990, Fuhr was suspended from the Oilers for one year, but said on the podcast it ended up being about a five-month suspension.

Fuhr established his own nonprofit foundation in Palm Desert in 2019 and will host the second-annual Grant Fuhr Celebrity Golf Invitational on May 13 and 14 with all proceeds going toward the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation.

Bates won gold medals in the women's 100-meter freestyle, 4×100-meter freestyle relay and 4x100-meter medley relay at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Following the games, Bates struggled with alcohol abuse. She went through treatment four times in two years before she got sober. In an interview with KGW8, she said that beside the birth of her two daughters, her sobriety is what she is most proud of.

Bates is an outreach manager for the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Oregon. She lives in Portland with her husband and two daughters.

The two athletes will share their struggles with substance use and how they found the road to recovery. 

To learn more about the Recovery and Mental Health Awareness Hour series, visit https://www.hazeldenbettyford.org/events/awareness-hour-2022. Other 2022 dates and topics will be announced at a later time.

Ema Sasic covers health in the Coachella Valley. Reach her at ema.sasic@desertsun.com or on Twitter @ema_sasic.