The Long Way Home—A Mini-Memoir

For a long time, I had a pretty easy answer to the question Who are you?

I was the basketball player. The kid from New Castle. The Butler guy. The shooter. The son of two parents I pretty much hit the lottery getting.

Then basketball ended. My mom died. Life got complicated. Alcohol went from something I did to something I needed, and eventually the distance between the guy people thought they knew and the guy I had become was almost hard to believe.

Rehabs. Detoxes. Divorce. Legal trouble. Homelessness. Halfway houses.

Same guy.

The Long Way Home isn’t really a basketball story, and it isn’t really an addiction story either. It’s about what happens when the things you’ve used to define yourself disappear—and whether you’re still allowed to become somebody else after you’ve become someone you barely recognize.

I don’t have a miraculous comeback story. I didn’t wake up one morning fixed. There were fuckups after the supposed turning point too.

What I found instead was a lot less dramatic.

Show up. Tell the truth. Go to work. Be a dad. Take responsibility. Make the next decision a little better than the last one. Then wake up and do the shit again.

Somewhere along the way, I started recognizing myself.

This 23-page mini-memoir is the first piece of the larger story I’m writing. It’s about basketball, family, loss, alcohol, shame, fatherhood, recovery, identity—and the strange realization that sometimes the road you were certain led nowhere was taking you home.

$3.33 because I wore #3. Figured I might as well get one more use out of it.

The full story is still being written.