My Last Fight by Darren McCarty & Kevin Allen

Author:Darren McCarty & Kevin Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triumph Books LLC
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

11. Falling Down in Hawaii

“Well if I have one I’ll have 13, now there ain’t no in between, ’cause the more I drink the more I drink”

—“The More I Drink” Blake Shelton

Alcoholics don’t need a reason to drink. They need a reason not to drink. By 2006, I had gone 10 years without drinking. But I woke up one morning in Hawaii and decided I needed to drink two beers and a mini-bar bottle of Patron Silver Tequila.

I don’t know why. I have absolutely no idea.

Maybe it was because the sky looked blue or the moon was going to be full that night or the beaches looked spectacular. Maybe my life was going too fucking well.

There’s never really a true explanation for why an addict tumbles off the wagon. To explain why I resumed drinking after a period of not drinking, I usually say that I contracted a case of the I-don’t-give-a-fucks.

Eight Calgary players and their wives had gone to Hawaii after the season, and while we were there I went up to my hotel room and decided to drink.

I didn’t stop.

The next day, I went with my Flames teammates and their wives and girlfriends on a tour boat with an open bar. Jarome Iginla, Marcus Nilson, Byron Ritchie, Robyn Regehr, Tony Amonte, Rhett Warrener, and Stephane Yelle were among the players who were in attendance. I was with my girlfriend, Anna Okuszko, a woman I had met in Calgary.

I drank heavily. Probably everyone noticed, but no one said anything, mostly because my Calgary teammates didn’t have a grasp of the seriousness of my problem. Chris Simon wasn’t on the trip, and he knew the most because he had gone to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with me in Calgary.

My Flames teammates knew I wasn’t drinking, but they’d only known me for one season. That means we had about eight months together. They didn’t know the depths of my problem. Even if they suspected I was in trouble, they didn’t have enough history with me to confront me in a meaningful way.

If this had happened when I was playing with the Red Wings, Kris Draper or Kirk Maltby or Chris Osgood or Steve Yzerman or someone would have tried to intervene. They probably would have failed, but they would have tried. You can’t stop an addict from drinking when he or she wants to drink.

Even Anna didn’t know my history because I had purposely kept it from her. I wasn’t Mr. Communication when it came to my problems.

Just to be clear, I had not been clean for 10 years when I had those drinks in Hawaii. The trip to my hotel room simply ended a 10-year abstinence from booze.

After I had stopped drinking, I initially stayed completely sober for three years. Then I started doing drugs after my stepfather died. I had an ecstasy problem for a while, and then got off that. But after 1999 I was never willing to give up marijuana, an issue that I will discuss later in the book.

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