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Love and success seemed to cause pain.
This feeling intensified in the NBA. After some injuries and surgeries, he became addicted to opioids, exacerbating his long-standing gambling addiction. Retiring from basketball led to a deeper addiction. Chapman burned the money. In his 40s, he was banging on sofas and stealing goods to pawn for cash. His wife Bridget divorced him in 2012.
When Chapman was at the peak of his addiction, he was consuming about 10 OxyContin and 40 Vicodin pills a day and chewing them to get them into the bloodstream faster.
“At one point, I had just surrendered to the fact that my life was going to be just one drug addict,” he said, adding a curse for emphasis.
He was caught and arrested in September 2014 for the theft of more than $14,000 in electronics. His sister Jenny took him with him and, with the help of his friends, persuaded Chapman to attend a rehabilitation center in Louisville, Ky., where his college roommate Paul Andrews was the director. “I saved my life,” Chapman said.
After Chapman was cleared, he began speaking publicly about recovering from addiction. Around 2016, he got a job on Kentucky athletics in radio for a regional media company. The company pushed him to be more active on social media, especially Twitter, but Chapman resisted. “The landscape was just poisonous. Everyone hates each other,” she said.
A dolphin video changed everything: “One day I saw a video of a school of dolphins swimming in the sea and a man on the paddle board came in and a dolphin jumped up and hit him in the chest and knocked him down. And I said to myself, ‘It’s an accusation,'” Chapman said, adding another profanity. (The account that originally posted the video is now suspended.)
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