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 habit. Retirement from basketball led to deeper habit. Chapman burned via 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 peak of his habit, Chapman was consuming about 10 OxyContin and 40 Vicodin drugs 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 middle in Louisville, Ky., the place his faculty roommate, Paul Andrews, was an govt. “Saved my life,” Chapman stated.
After Chapman obtained clear, he started talking in public about recovering from habit. He discovered work overlaying Kentucky athletics on the radio for a regional media firm round 2016. The corporate pushed him to be extra lively on social media, notably on Twitter, however Chapman resisted. “The panorama was simply poisonous. All people hating one another,” he stated.
A dolphin video modified all the things: “I noticed a video someday of a college 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.)