Ben Gordon’s honest, enormous gift
Jim Calhoun had hung up the phone with Ben Gordon’s mom Yvonne only a few minutes earlier when my call arrived.
“It is great that Ben is so honest,” Calhoun said. “The thing is he is going to continue to need help. Coming out, sharing his thoughts about feeling lost, the desperation, powerfully and dramatically, it is terrific for other people. So it is a great thing. Personally, Ben has to best as he can get a hold of this to make this a consistent lifestyle as opposed to the incredible highs
and lows he continues to have.”
Along with Emeka Okafor, Ben Gordon lifted Calhoun’s UConn basketball team to the 2004 national championship and went on to a successful and prosperous 11-year career in the NBA. His post-career path, however, led Yvonne Gordon’s son to the darkest, most terrifying, most hopeless place man has known.
“Where Is My Mind?” was the headline of Gordon’s essay published last week in The Players Tribune. His first sentence stripped everything — the polarizing life of a manicdepressive, the complex world of mental health, the endlessly confusing search within one’s self — to 19 of the starkest words:
“There was a point in time when I thought about killing myself every single day for about six weeks.”
Yes, Gordon opened with one of his famous 3-point daggers and from there he cut away vague generalities and genteel banality for nearly 3,000 words of unnerving detail and brutal honesty. My wife Liz, who has fought mental illness for three decades, read all those words and had two of her own in response: “Raw. Profound.”
Gordon wrote about standing on the roof of his Harlem brownstone at four in the morning and giving hard thought to jumping. He wrote about putting a heavy rubber jump rope around his neck, getting a chair, hanging, the blood vessels in his head about to burst before deciding at the last moment to live.
He wrote about a string of baffling arrests, including one in LA where he pulled a fire alarm. He wrote how it got so bad he was committed to a mental hospital, strapped to a bed in a white room, needles in his arms, like in the movies.
And then Ben Gordon wrote something so hopelessly poetic that it felt like the work of some 19th century novelist: “It felt like this black cloak got thrown on top of me, and it was suffocating me. But not just physically. It was suffocating my soul.”
“What he has written about here is going to make people who have never experienced this uncomfortable, if they can get through it,” Liz said. “This isn’t, ‘Reach out. Get help. Call this number.’
“I can’t relate to everything he has gone through. I can relate to many things especially when he wrote that he was dead inside. For someone like me, he gets it, he knows what it’s like. He has been there. It’s amazing how he brought us into his mind.”
So many millions of families have been touched by this great scourge. We share in the pain and the joy of recovery, all of us in it, yet no two stories perfectly alike. With some, therapy can do the trick. Others, certain medications. Or a combination of both.
Or maybe there is not initial success and doses are heightened and that may lead to a cocktail of medications. And if that doesn’t work over the years maybe there’s electroconvulsive therapy or transcranial magnetic stimulation. Maybe there is a week in the hospital psychiatric ward. Maybe there is a harrowing disappearance due to an improperly prescribed dosage that mercifully leads to a phone call hours later from the police 45 miles away, “Mr. Jacobs, we have your wife.”
That is Liz’s story. She has major depressive disorder, bi-polar II, which means less intense elevated moods. Over three decades, there are successes that last for months and darkness that last almost as long. Insomnia, endless sleep, confusion, anger, hopelessness, she knows them all too well. Ketamine treatments at Yale New Haven Hospital have helped in recent years. Yet only a month ago, Liz drove off for two days to be alone and contemplate the worst. She returned home. And here she was the past few weeks leading her support group again, her gift back to those who would help her.
Gordon has made his gift with his remarkable piece in The Players’ Tribune and it is an enormous one.
“For him, as a black man to reach out to other black men and athletes is so huge,” Liz said. “They’re going to listen to this ahead of some guy in a white coat saying, ‘Remember, reach out if you’re feeling depressed.’ When you’re feeling suicidal, all you want is for the pain to end. For some the last thing they are able to do is reach out to somebody. Depression isolates people.”
Nature, nurture, genetic, life’s circumstances, mental illness is not a broken leg. In Gordon’s case he wrote how he was approaching the end of his career, not getting playing minutes and he had anger, pain, fear and regret that he had internalized and compartmentalized his entire life.
“What do you think is gonna happen?” Gordon asked.
The manic part, the anxiety, the paranoia, the panic, the delusions made his situation all the more chaotic.
“The one thing about the NBA is it gives you structure every day,” Calhoun said. “He got up. He knew what he wanted to do. Add three years of college, before that high school, all those years with a reason to get up every day, reason to overcome he wasn’t the tallest guy to average all those points in the NBA, All-American, all these athletic accomplishments. At least, he had something when we didn’t feel as well, maybe security, he could head to a gym and build his security with a jump shot.
“People transition in their life, lose some structure, and now you’ve got to deal with real life matters.”
Gordon wrote how the habits that got players into the NBA don’t translate into real life. The goal doesn’t need to be perfection.
“It can just be peace and acceptance with yourself,” he wrote. “No, man, for real. Don’t even worry. Go seek some help. Find a therapist and sit in a chair and just talk your s-it, brother. Don’t worry about what anybody says. Don’t worry about how your boys react to it, or about what people got to say about it on social media.
“Bro….. I heard it all.” Calhoun, who has led St. Joseph into the national Division III Top 25 in only the second year of the program, has spent time with Gordon and his mom on campus.
“All the guys I coached, they’re my kids,” Calhoun said. “I fight for them. I’ll always have their backs. Just like others had my back when I was younger.”
And that’s why as awed as he was by Gordon’s essay, he is equally intent on Gordon finding tranquility. That’s the thing. He took us inside his mind and when we re-emerged, it is impossible to believe Ben Gordon hadn’t changed UConn sports fans, and thus Connecticut, for the better. His great gift to us must also be the gift to himself. He wrote how he found help and has made improvements, yet also wrote there are things he is working through. Something I have learned over 30 years is mental illness, unlike that broken leg, cannot be seen with an X-ray nor do you know when problems can reoccur.
“I don’t know what the answer is for people who are suicidal,” my wife said. “I do know what he wrote makes more sense than anything I’ve read before if you need help. Look, people who hold benefits for suicide prevention they’re doing the best they can. This s-it is what helps people. Most people can’t handle what mental illness is. It’s not pleasant. It’s ugly. He gave us raw truth.”
“You’re not crazy, dog,” Gordon wrote in closing. “You’re not damaged. You’re just human like the rest of us.”
Former UConn star Ben Gordon detailed his struggle with mental illness in a Players’ Tribune essay, an unflinching and honest gift to the world.