Former NBA Star Rex Chapman on Addiction and Recovery

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, our next guest is a basketball veteran who spent 12 years in the NBA. Rex Chapman was a top 10 pick in 1988, but he gambled away his millions and he became addicted to opioids after several injuries. He reflects on the highs and the lows of his career in a new memoir. And now, he shares his story with Michel Martin.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Rex Chapman, thank you so much for talking with us.

REX CHAPMAN, AUTHOR, “IT’S HARD FOR ME TO LIVE WITH ME” AND FORMER NBA PLAYER: Thank you for having me, Michel. Thank you.

MARTIN: I mean, you know, best high school player in Kentucky, superstar at the University of Kentucky. First ever draft pick of the expansion Charlotte Hornets. Member of the U.S. National team. And so, let’s go back to the beginning. Why basketball?

CHAPMAN: Yes. You know, I played every sport growing up. I love what I did. We love football. I didn’t like getting hit, but I liked hitting. Baseball, I couldn’t hit, but I could feel and I could pitch and all that, whatever season it was, I was a really good swimmer. That was my main sport growing up first. But basketball was — you know, my dad played basketball. He knows everyone in basketball. He coached basketball. And from the time literally that I could walk and pick up a basketball I was dribbling a basketball on the side of his practices. So, I learned probably how to dribble behind my back and between my legs and all that stuff before I knew it was hard. It would just second nature to me. By the time I got in first grade, I could do things the fifth and sixth graders were doing. And that was just kind of my chart. That’s the way my life went.

MARTIN: But somehow — you know, 12 seasons in the NBA, but somehow the title of your memoir, “It’s Hard for Me to Live with Me.” It’s hard to fathom why.

CHAPMAN: I know. I struggled a lot in my life just with insecurities and different things. And I had — I — for sure, dating back to when I was a teenager was starting to suffer from depression a little bit. And mental — some mental illness. I was constantly getting in trouble. Just really running wild. And I didn’t really have any coping skills for what I was dealing with externally. The basketball part was — I’m not going to say it was easy, but it was — I was — I had worked so hard at it for so long that it was kind of like second nature. And it was just all of the other stuff that I couldn’t handle or had trouble handling off-court, interviews, relationships, living in an adult world when I felt 12. So, yes, it’s hard for me to live with me sometimes.

MARTIN: Still now? Still, to this day?

CHAPMAN: Still, some, but way better. You know, the last eight or nine years — nine and a half actually, I’ve been clean from opioids. And really from that point on, started making a conscious effort to try to figure out myself and kind of why I made the choices I did. And that’s been painful, but it’s been good. I just didn’t have any coping skills and I’ve had to learn how to sit in my bad emotions and not numb them, not run and get a pain pill and try to escape. So, that’s been the hardest part.

MARTIN: People are going to know you from lots of different parts of your life. Some people are going to know you as that kind of the basketball star. Some people are going to know the fact that you did struggle with opioid addiction for years and were arrested for it. And other people are going to know you as a kind of a social media guy that has like a million followers and you kind of lay it on the line. You really go into detail on all of those lives and it’s painful. It’s painful to read in parts, but it has — so that has to have been painful to write. What made you want to do it?

CHAPMAN: It really has — it’s been terrifying. It’s been — I’ve kept a lot of this stuff bottled up for years. I mean, there were times I had to just bail for a couple of weeks because emotionally I couldn’t do it or I had remembered something that happened that I had completely compartmentalized and had to kind of take a step back. In 1986, I had, at school, unrelated to basketball, I had a panic attack. It was something that was going on. They were kind of telling me who I could date and who I couldn’t date at school. And I kind of realized that was B.S. And I had what — at the time, you know, I’d only heard people describe as like a nervous breakdown, like I woke up as a teenager and I couldn’t move and everything seemed awful. I thought everything is — what’s the point of any of this. And I forgot about that for about 30 years. And about six months ago when we were finishing up the book, I had another panic attack. I’ve never had one. I’d never had one since, I had one again. And I’m sure therapy possibly could have been a lifesaver for me when I was 18 or 19 years old. I was too proud to talk to anybody and, you know, try to keep up this facade that everything was going great for me on the outside.

MARTIN: One of the really interesting things about your book is the way you deal with race, grapple with race. As a white player, the racial dynamics of the sport and of the kind of the whole ecosystem of the sport. So, if I could just get you to read a little bit from the book.

CHAPMAN: Sure.

MARTIN: You know, page 51.

CHAPMAN: I hear myself being compared often to former Wildcats, Kyle Macy is the one I hear the most. I also hear a lot of comparisons to non- Kentucky players like Pete Maravich and Jerry West. No doubt those guys were great players, but I don’t know anything about them except that they are white. That bugs me because I think myself more like Darrell Griffith and N.C. State’s David Thompson. The two guys I idolize the most, both of them are killer athletes who attack the rim with abandon. I try to imitate them every time out. But that’s how it is in sports, white guys are compared to white guys and black guys are compared to black guys. It’s a pattern that will recur throughout my career and bothered me to no end.

MARTIN: And that’s just the half of it. You were in love with — it’s fair to say in love with an African-American girl, right?

CHAPMAN: Yes.

MARTIN: And you were discouraged from dating her. Say more about that.

CHAPMAN: Shawn Higgs and I — Shawn is my — she was my girlfriend in high school, like probably my first love, her first — you know, we were 15, 16 years old and we grew up together. People in our hometown didn’t like it very much. So, we kind of hid it and — as best we could, all the kids knew. She went to Kentucky too. And she was a track star in high school. We were in town of about 60,000 where we grew up. And I think we just assumed that when we went to school that it’s a bigger city. I think we thought of Lexington, Kentucky as like New York. We got to Lexington and started going to class together and stuff like that. And very quickly, I got called into the coach’s office and they said, hey, Rex, listen — because also every school that recruited me knew Shawn was my girlfriend and they had made it clear to me that that was not going to be an issue. All of them did. And when I came in, you know, the coaches were in there and our head coach said, hey, Rex, listen, you and Shawn been walking to class together. You need to be careful about that, maybe just — you guys spend time together when it’s dark or at night. I said, yes, sir. And it’s the most cowardest thing ever. And I just didn’t — I couldn’t stand up for myself. And also, I knew I was going to have to go tell Shawn. And so, you know, I just remember telling Shawn and her eyes starting to well up. And me in that moment thinking I’m never going to love something so much that I hurt like this. And I felt something kind of breaking me a little bit at the time to where I started putting my emotions away.

MARTIN: I know you’re sort of — it’s still personally painful, but what do you think that says about the sort of the world you were in writ large? Is that that white players like yourself have to be sort of reserved for white people to like or what do you think that means?

CHAPMAN: Well, first of all, I didn’t do the work to — in college to be an academic all SCC person or make the dean’s list, but I did miraculously. They just put me on those things. I had — you know, they needed my image to be the all-American kid on campus, white kid, homegrown from Kentucky. And they didn’t — I guess, my dating, my girlfriend didn’t fit that sort of image. And they were definitely afraid of it. They just were. And it still makes me mad. It still makes me sad.

MARTIN: I see that. So, let’s fast forward. The other big pain point in your life. You’re in the pros. You are having a successful career. How did the addiction start?

CHAPMAN: Yes, yes. Well, I think — again, I was always a basketball addict. I just didn’t — you know, I didn’t drink and drug, but I would wake up in the middle of the night in a panic at midnight realizing someone on the West Coast was still at a park playing and I’d do push-ups or go run and come back, go to bed. I was weirdly motivated like that. So, I was an addict always. If somebody gave me a Jolly Rancher, the little candy, I’d be like, one? I want that whole bag. Those are good. Like, I’ve always been that way. If I like it, I like it. And I started gambling. When I got stressed, I left and I was stressed all the time. And so, I would go to the track, spend hours at the track, and then go back to the gym. So, that’s probably where it started. And then, my last three years of playing in the NBA, I had seven surgeries. Right at the end of my last surgery, a doctor gave me a new drug called OxyContin. He said, take it. I took it, and in two days, I was in love. It was the greatest thing I’ve ever had in my life and probably have had. It made me feel smarter, funnier, better, better husband, better dad. More relaxed in my own skin. If people came up and wanted to chitchat, I was all for it. Like, come on. All my social anxiety went away. And as they say in rehab, drugs are fun at first and then it’s drugs and problems. And then, it’s just problems after a short period of time. And that’s what it was with me. It was a very — you know, 18 months after retiring, I was taking probably 40 Vicodin and 9 OxyContin a day. And Danny Ainge came to me and said, hey, you are messing your life up. You got to go to rehab. So, that was kind of the start. And that was in 2001. And we go into rehab. And I did it three different times. The last time in 2014, after I was arrested for shoplifting in an Apple store. I still can’t. It’s hard to say those words. And yes, after that, I went to rehab. And I was broken and broke. And I was just — I was rock bottom. And if I was going to live, then I was going to have to try to figure out what landed me in the spot.

MARTIN: You tell this really heartbreaking story of when you were released from jail after having been arrested for shoplifting at an Apple store. And you don’t — you know, you don’t have your car. You don’t have your — you don’t have anything. You don’t have your license. You have nothing.

CHAPMAN: I’ll read it for you.

MARTIN: You really don’t mind?

CHAPMAN: OK. After a long sleepless night, I’m taken at 6:00 a.m. to appear in front of a judge. They let me go. As soon as they hand me my wallet, I dig out that sheet of medicine and put it under my tongue. I have no way to get home. So, I start walking toward the freeway, my mind in a total fog. It’s hot. And after 20 minutes, my son Zeke finds me and pulls up in his car. He gets out, comes around to hug me, and starts bawling. He keeps asking me over and over if I’m OK. I know I am sad, but I don’t really feel it. And I barely console him. That’s what life is like when you’re addicted to drugs. You just go numb. Here I am, worst moment of my life, the worst of his two. Zeke is completely broken up. And yet, I don’t even shed a tear. I climb back into his car. After about five minutes, the medicine kicks in. I feel much better and seek drives me home. Out one prison, back in to another.

MARTIN: That’s tough.

CHAPMAN: Yes.

MARTIN: But, you know, you’re here to tell us about it. So, that’s a victory, right?

CHAPMAN: I hope so. I hope so, yes.

MARTIN: You know, it’s interesting, the same community that so let you down — you know, not the same exact ones, but basketball world, right?

CHAPMAN: Yes.

MARTIN: It’s so disappointed you and with such hypocrites about the whole thing. When you kind of hit that moment, a lot of them really put their arms around you.

CHAPMAN: The NBA has always done that. And I’ve never really spoken on this, but when I came in, I left school and I didn’t want to leave school. I didn’t feel like I was ready to leave school yet, especially emotionally and socially. Basketball-wise, I was fine and, you know, I went right into the NBA and was fine, physically. But emotionally, I wasn’t. And when I got into the NBA, guys like Magic Johnson and Isaiah Thomas and all those — all the stars, black stars, they all put their arms around me, all of them. And I was — I still am. I feel like a lot of guys’ little brother. You know, Joe Dumars and Rolando Blackman and all these guys, they knew, they knew what I’d been through. None of us ever talked about it, but they were so damn nice to me. And if not for them, my teammates, Dell Curry, Muggsy Bogues. Dell taught me how to tie a tie. But everyone really put their arm around me and really helped raise me because I was the youngest player in the NBA by two or three years. And so, that part of it is so heartwarming and it almost brings me to tears thinking about it when I have to articulate it because they didn’t have do that. I always a competitor of theirs. And — but they did, and I’ll never forget it.

MARTIN: What reaction are you getting? I know a lot of the younger athletes really enjoy it and follow you, but what about the basketball world writ large?

CHAPMAN: So far, it’s — no, it’s been very positive, which kind of makes me feel bad too. When you’re 10 years old and you think about being a famous athlete someday and maybe writing your memoir, this isn’t the memoir that you want to write. I wanted to the write the one that Steve Nash will write someday or Grant Hill will right someday, just the all-American guy that did everything and could handle all that stuff. I couldn’t handle it. And that makes me feel bad. And being praised for it is weird too. I feel like I’m failing up. But a friend of mine told me the other day, he said, shut up. What you’re doing is not failing. So, I had to take that in.

MARTIN: Well, before we let you go, you know, one of the other — the big stories in basketball world right now is, of course, LeBron James. You were King Rex for a minute, but he’s King James, just scored 40,000 points. But the other big story, Caitlin Clark.

CHAPMAN: Yes.

MARTIN: What do you think about her?

CHAPMAN: Love her. Also, LeBron took a picture with my book the other day and put it out, which just out of nowhere. I mean, I don’t even know LeBron like that. I just love and respect him. But great. Caitlyn Clark, amazing. I think this all the time and I’m good friends with Candace Parker and different women’s basketball players. My sister is two years younger than I am, 54. She was a great athlete. But there were really women sports at the time. A lot of women had to play in men’s, you know, on the men — on the boy’s team, played boys little league and all that stuff. What these women are doing — and my sister didn’t have WNBA players to look up to. There was no such thing. Now, the girls are — and the women — the young girls, have these idols like Candace Parker and Caitlin Clark to look to up to and forget the sport part of it. The best times I’ve ever had in my life are on the back of a bus with my teammates, flying across the country with my teammates. We deprived young women of that for a long time. And now, I just look in and I see all the heroes that these young ladies have to look up to. I have three daughters. My daughters are growing up in a different world than my sister grew up in, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

MARTIN: Well, Rex Chapman, it’s been great talking with you.

CHAPMAN: Thank you for being so comforting because this is a tough subject and subject matter is tough to discuss and I just really appreciate your care and kindness.

MARTIN: Well, thank you. Rex Chapman, thank you so much.

CHAPMAN: Thanks, Michel.