Hi,
I’m a regular Mavs Moneyball contributor, and I’m an alcoholic. I’m one of the lucky ones, because I found help in recovery after trying dozens of failed solutions on my own. Now I hope that in recovery I can help someone else out there who might be struggling with a similar problem.
Growing up, the Dallas Mavericks were one of my first sports loves. I latched onto the Three Js at the same time playing basketball for my school became an option in the fourth grade. I still have that Jason Kidd rookie card that meant so much to me as a kid, and through high school, I took to taking one-legged jumpers, like Dirk Nowitzki (I thought), much to the chagrin of my coaches.
I didn’t recognize it at the time, but in my last couple years of high school, I was already starting to drink like an alcoholic. I quit the basketball team my senior year, using the excuse that the coach wouldn’t allow basketball players to go on a senior trip I wanted to go on, because it fell during basketball season. Quitting was convenient for me, a young man who had recently discovered the wonders of alcohol and chasing girls. Quitting gave me more time to drink with my buddies and get into all kinds of fun trouble.
Over the years, as I became an adult, the trouble became less and less fun. The drinking became less fun. I started to drink alone, and I justified it, the same way I justified my choice to quit the basketball team. This is just what adults do, I told myself. They drink.
I continued to follow the Mavericks as a devoted fan through the championship year of 2011 and for a couple years after that, but my fandom waned soon afterward, over the same years I now recognize that my drinking was starting to control more and more of my life. In fact, I remember the day of the championship parade. Some friends and I all called out from work, filled backpacks with booze and took the first TRE train from Fort Worth to Dallas that morning. We started drinking at around 5:30 a.m. that day. I would lose that job due to various alcohol-related issues three years later.
I lost several jobs in my 20s and 30s due to my drinking problem, in fact, and after each of these critical moments, I decided I would slow down or stop for a while. But every time, after a month, or three months, or six months, I’d always go back to it. I’d get comfortable again, I would make whatever justifications needed to be made at the time so that I could go back to drinking, and eventually, the drinking would become a problem again.
Fast forward to a few years ago, when I responded to a preseason tweet from our editor Kirk Henderson. He was asking for contributors to Mavs Moneyball for the upcoming season. Once again, I had slipped back into old habits, but the thought that my life had become unmanageable due to my drinking was still completely off my radar. Look at all the things I still had: a home, a car, a middling corporate career. Sure, my marriage had failed a couple of years earlier, but I wasn’t living under a bridge, so how could I be an alcoholic?
I reached out and got onboard. Here was a chance, I thought, to reconnect with the team I loved for so many years and to keep myself out of the bar for two-to-three nights a week, six months out of the year. That’ll be the ticket. I’ll keep myself busy, and that’ll cure me. On some baseline level, I knew I had a problem, and I was grasping for a solution. I meant well, but meaning well isn’t enough. Writing about basketball, as rewarding as this little side gig quickly became, was simply not enough to get well.
The alcoholic brain is clever and deceitful. We become great liars out of necessity, to keep up the charade that “everything is fine,” and the one we end up lying to the most is ourselves. My alcoholic brain speaks to me in my own voice, telling me things like, “It’ll be different this time.”
I found ways to drink as much and more than I ever had, be it basketball season, a work night, the night before I had family obligations to attend to, whatever. Any little irritation or minor success became a great excuse to go on a tear. I drank when I was happy. I drank when I was miserable, and despite my new hobby, the misery was winning.
It all culminated in a decision I made one year ago today, on Jan. 4, 2025, to seek help. My escalating binges over the holiday season put me down for the count for good. The holidays can be tough, especially for hard-drinking loners. I realized then that I did not, of my own volition, have what it took to stop and stay stopped. I did not, under my own power, have any control of the amount I drank once I started. I realized I was completely powerless over alcohol. I was honest with myself and with another man about it, for the first time in over 25 years of drinking.
I’ve been working on my recovery for a year now. I am a member of a recovery program I will not name here, as I am no spokesperson for this program, nor is it endorsed by or does it endorse the website for which I write. I am simply an alcoholic trying to get better — and I’m here to tell you, a few simple changes in my own attitude and behavior have netted me the best year of my adult life.
The solution I, and millions of other recovering alcoholics, have found is in acceptance, honesty, open-mindedness and willingness to change. To those of you who are able to have a couple of drinks to relax and put the booze down, to those of you who innately know how to live life on life’s terms, these things may already be second nature. Well, for an alcoholic like me, who drank for 25 of my first 40 years on God’s Green Earth, acceptance, honesty, open-mindedness and willingness to change were wholly foreign concepts. The fact that the world refused to bend to my whims was ultimately why I drank. In a lot of ways, when I got sober last year, I was developmentally still just a 14-year-old kid. What I’m trying to do now is piece together one good day at a time, by making one right decision after another. It’s simple, but for an alcoholic like me, it isn’t easy.
One of those right decisions along the way has been writing for Mavs Moneyball. It’s a good use of my time. I am useful and productive within this community, and now I’m able to do it with a clear head and focus that have been a springboard for greater and greater usefulness, productivity and service to my fellows in other areas of my life.
Sports fandom and alcohol have gone together like peanut butter and jelly since before I showed up on the scene, and they will continue to long after I’m gone. I’m not going to change that, and I don’t aim to. I don’t begrudge my friends who want to have a beer and watch the game. It was up to me to figure out that my own fandom does not have to be intertwined with my alcoholism. It was up to me to get rid of the things in my life that were not working and to keep the things that do work.
My recovery is for me and those closest to me, but another thing I have learned over the last year is that to keep the gift of recovery, I have to give it away. This is the ultimate point of this post on the one-year anniversary of my sobriety.
If you or someone you know is wondering whether they might be an alcoholic, odds are that it’s probably already gotten to the point where it is, in fact, a problem. The good news is that there is help, and it doesn’t cost any money. The bad news is, it’s us. Whether you’re a man or woman, black or white, religious or agnostic, gay or straight, rich or poor, the suggestions we follow are the same. You can do it, too, one day at a time.
The good people who have helped to guide me in this design for living hold to the belief that one alcoholic working with another alcoholic is the best way to get rid of the obsession to drink and live a better life. It yields better results than any pill you can take or any resolution you can make. Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.
To that end, I’m going to set up a new email address, and I’m going to add it to my phone. I will check it every day — hell, it’ll be on my phone — I won’t be able to avoid it. If you think you might have a problem with alcohol or drugs, I want to hear from you. I will share my name and contact information with you after a brief exchange, and if you want it, I will help you find a group of people in your area who have found the same solution I have. If you are in Dallas-Fort Worth or the surrounding area, I want to show up for you like so many have shown up for me over the last year. And if you’re not, I can tell you more about my experience and point you toward the proper online resources or resources near you.
Unlike on the basketball court, there is victory in surrender when it comes to addiction. In life’s worst moments, it may seem antithetical to say that the dawn of a new day draws ever closer, but I’ve seen it happen for dozens of alcoholics who got to a point where they were only living to drink. Out of hopeless situations, I have seen lives changed. If you want to change yours, it’s going to take some work, but help in getting started is just one conversation away.
If any of this sounds like something you want to talk about further, please reach out at
[email protected].
