SOUTH HADLEY — When former Celtics player Chris Herren was in high school, he thought that presentations about drugs were a joke.
More than 25 years later, a lot has changed. Now he gives 250 presentations a year about addiction and his own decade-long struggle with the disease as a motivational speaker. Over the past eight years, he has talked at schools, prisons, and commencements, spoken to professional athletes and given TED Talks.
On Wednesday, Oct. 17, Herren gave a presentation to South Hadley High School students about addiction.
“My goal,” he told the students, “is that one kid walks out this gym today — right out that doorstep — and says to themselves, ‘Without a doubt I can be better, I should be better.’”
Herren attended high school in Fall River, where he was a basketball star. He was named Massachusetts High School Player of the Year and then went on to play for Boston College, where he was eventually suspended for drugs, and played at Fresno State until he failed a drug test and was kicked off the team.
He went on to play professionally for the Denver Nuggets and Boston Celtics, but he continued to struggle with addiction. His basketball career ended in 2004 when he was arrested on drug charges. In 2008, he crashed his car, needle in his arm, and was dead for 30 seconds. That was a turning point for him, according to ESPN.
He then went to rehab and has been clean since. And in 2011, Herren started The Herren Project, a nonprofit that assists those struggling with addiction and educates people about the disease.
Though he didn’t take presentations like his own seriously as a teenager, he wished that he had, he told the students. He wished someone had pulled him aside in high school and asked: “Why would you take these chances? Why would you risk breaking your mom’s heart?”
Growing up, addiction affected his family, too. For Herren’s entire life, his father has been an alcoholic and it pushed his family apart. He remembers the yelling, the screaming, the fights between his parents, and weekends when his house would smell like Miller Lite. At 14, he took his first drink from a stolen bottle of his father’s beer.
One point he emphasized: looking at why people do drugs. “We all have a why,” he said.
Herren said he surrounded himself in high school with people like him — and it was intentional. “My friends made the same mistakes I did,” he said. “They behaved in the same way I behaved. My friends drank what I drank, smoked what I smoked because I didn’t want to be around people who showed me how wrong I was.”
Many of his Fall River teammates would face their own struggle with addiction. “Out of the 15 kids on my high school basketball team that smoked pot in back seats, laughed at these assemblies, seven of them became heroin addicts.”
As teenagers though, none of them expected that they would become addicted to drugs and destroy relationships over substance use. “That conversation never came up around the keg in the woods,” he recalled. “It never does. For me that’s the scariest part about addiction … You have no idea that you’re the one who’s going to suffer from it.”
The few hundred students packed into the school gym appeared to take Herren’s words to heart. Some walked out of the presentation teary and exchanged hugs in the hallway.
“I’ve accomplished a lot in my life and I’ve failed at a ton,” Herren reflected. “The greatest gift I’ve ever been able to give anybody is that for the last 10 years I’ve been the same dad … I’m not waking up and taking a chance of dying.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.