TANG: Nashville’s lack of third spaces is harming its students
A steady decline: Class of 2028 regular decision admission rate drops to 3.7%, overall admission rate to 5.1%
Fall 2024 Vanderbilt Poll finds increased support for MAGA sentiment and state officials
‘A ray of light’: Vanderbilt community remembers alumna Alyssa Lokits
‘Surreal and unreal’: Class of 2029 early decision applicants react to acceptances
Vanderbilt Football transfer portal tracker
NAVA: Vanderbilt should unlock its doors
Men’s Basketball: Four quick thoughts from Vanderbilt’s upset over No. 6 Tennessee
Film Room: The freshman phenom
Football: The last time Vanderbilt defeated Georgia Tech
Editor’s Note: This piece mentions mental illness and addiction.
The Vanderbilt Sports and Society Initiative — in conjunction with the Vanderbilt Center for Student Wellbeing and the Live, Learn Lead Academy — hosted former NBA player Rex Chapman on Jan. 16. Chapman discussed his rise to stardom as well as his personal struggles with addiction and mental health.
The event began with opening remarks from Dr. Jill Stratton, assistant provost for academic support. Stratton then introduced Andrew Maranniss — special projects coordinator and head of the Sports and Society Initiative — who mediated the conversation. Maranniss introduced Chapman, detailing his background and the events that inspired his recent memoir “It’s Hard for Me to Live with Me.”
College basketball and mental health
Chapman began by detailing the beginning of his basketball career and the purpose he found in playing the game. However, he also shared the downsides of devoting his life to one thing.
“I really took to basketball. My dad played, and he was a coach, so I kind of felt like I was supposed to do that — I was good at it,” Chapman said. “[Basketball] also seemed to give me some self worth. But looking back, that was the only thing I had and the only thing I did that I enjoyed, [so] I became extremely one dimensional.”
Chapman said this one-dimensionality manifested itself in a disregard for class and schoolwork while in college at the University of Kentucky.
“If the professor let me go home for the weekend and not take the final, [I said] ‘Okay,’” Chapman said. “I started taking advantage of all those [opportunities and] not going to class because they were going to push me through and give me my grades anyway.”
Chapman also discussed the alienation he felt during college due to his interracial relationship with his then-girlfriend Shawn, recalling a story of when he was told by his basketball coach that the couple should only spend time together in private at night.
“Still to this day, I get mad at myself for not just getting up and walking out — and I wanted to. If I wouldn’t have had to sit out a year, I definitely would have left right there,” Chapman said. “But I didn’t. I just sat there and took it and said ‘yes, sir.’ It was devastating to me; they hadn’t even met her. It was just straight racism. The calculation they made was that their All-American, white, home grown guard could not be seen in that light.”
Chapman said the culmination of all these pressures led to — what he believes now was — low-grade depression.
“I had a world of crap going on with my coach and my girlfriend that really put me in a bad place mentally, and I didn’t really have any coping mechanisms,” Chapman said.
After two years at Kentucky, where Chapman amassed a total of 1,073 points en route to two NCAA Tournament appearances, he decided to depart from Kentucky and enter the NBA draft.
“I left. I just had enough, and I left school,” Chapman said.
Off-court struggles
Chapman was the eighth pick in the 1998 NBA Draft and the first ever pick by the Charlotte Hornets — a brand new expansion team at the time. Chapman went on to have a 12 year career in the NBA from 1988 to 2000. He played with four different teams — the Charlotte Hornets, Washington Bullets, Miami Heat and Phoenix Suns. Across his career, Chapman averaged 14.6 points per game and was a NBA All-Rookie Second team selection in 1989.
However, Chapman said his depression worsened because these NBA teams continued to view his interracial relationship as a problem.
“I had some things in life that I needed to talk to somebody about, but I didn’t feel like there was anybody I could talk to about this,” Chapman said. “I lived a life of being very popular, and basketball was going very [well], but my personal life always seemed to be a struggle, and I didn’t really know how to cope.”
Chapman said he turned to the horse racetrack, a place his dad had introduced him to from a young age, and he quickly became addicted to betting on races.
“It wasn’t just nickel and dime gambling. I [would] take $10,000 a day down to the track. I [would have] two hours of practice and nothing else to do the rest of the day,” Chapman said. “[There was] a lot of addiction in my family, and I guess the gambling took hold.”
According to Chapman, his struggles with addiction multiplied two-fold when he was prescribed opioid painkillers for physical injuries he suffered while playing. In his 12th year in the NBA, he was prescribed 90 Oxycontin pills after an appendectomy and subsequently became addicted.
“It’s drugs and problems, and then eventually it’s just problems. I never played basketball again — I had no desire to ever play again,” Chapman said. “Within 18 months, I was taking 40 vicodin and 10 Oxycontin a day.”
Chapman attributed his eventual time in rehab to longtime NBA player Danny Ainge, who convinced him to go.
“I didn’t want to [go to rehab],” Chapman said. “I didn’t think I needed to, but because this person who I thought so much of was telling me to, I thought I better [go].”
Chapman said he relapsed following a wrist surgery where he was prescribed more opioids. It wasn’t until 2014 — when he was arrested for shop-lifting — that he realized the harm his addictions had caused to his life.
“I was broken, so I went back to rehab and I took it very seriously,” Chapman said. “Slowly but surely, I started digging out of it.”
Finding a new purpose
Following his second period in rehab, Chapman began to amass a social media following and used his platform to advocate for marginalized communities and social campaigns, including the Black Lives Matter Movement. He said that when George Floyd was murdered and the University of Kentucky basketball team knelt for the national anthem to honor him, the local public reacted very negatively.
“I had so many regrets when I was young for not saying things. If I don’t speak up for things that I feel are truly unjust, and I have this platform, then that would be unjust,” Chapman said. “So I started trying to do that a little bit. Some people like it, some people don’t, but I thought I would be true to myself by being a little bit more outspoken about important things, not just basketball.”
Chapman’s book — “It’s Hard for Me to Live with Me” — opens with a quote from a poem written by Rainer Maria Rilke: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” As Chapman continues on his life journey, he said he keeps that quote in mind. While it is challenging for him to talk about his hardest life moments to the public on a regular basis, he does it to hold himself accountable to keep working on his recovery, which he said is a lifelong process.
“I can’t say I like doing this, but I feel like it could be kind of cowardly not to,” Chapman said. “I do it for my kids, just to let them know that their dad is still doing okay. Even if they don’t see me, they know that I’m here at Vandy and I can’t be using because I’m sitting up here and talking. It helps keep me honest as well.”
Chapman also shared his thoughts on the NIL space in college athletics, saying he believes SEC athletes have been getting paid under the table for decades, and he is glad it is now all in public view. However, he expressed concern about the added pressure that large paychecks impose on 18 to 22 year old athletes who are still trying to figure out their lives and adapt to the demands of college athletics.
“I’m glad that athletes are making money, because it is a job,” Chapman said. “I think it’s going to be pretty much up to each individual university to educate the young people about life, about taxes. For these young brains, learning a lot of this stuff is daunting.”
In a conversation with The Hustler, Maranniss said he brought Chapman in to speak because of how honest he believes him to be about the ups and downs of his life. For student athletes, he expressed hope that Chapman could provide insight into how to deal with the pressures of being a star athlete and public opinion.
“There are so many things that he’s been through that all of us can learn from, and it’s really important to hear from people who have been through things and are willing to honestly talk about it,” Maranniss said.
The official student newspaper of Vanderbilt University
