Practice perseverance. 

Keep working your own problems. 

Don’t ever stop.

“It’s everything you dreamed of as a child. Living the high life, you know, staying in five-star hotels everywhere. Traveling on a private chartered plane, the best food you can eat. The NHL is everything you’d image it to be.

I had this hole inside of me that I thought would be fill with…Once I got there I’d be happy, you know? This thing that I thought I was missing, that It would go away. And it didn’t and that’s, you know, that scared me. I’ll be honest with you, I struggle with self-esteem, self-doubt and a bit of depression from a young age. Everything around me, I blamed for my problems. And I thought: ‘maybe if I’m here, if I’m there, everything would go away.’ But there’s one common denominator: is that I was everywhere.

I was chasing this dream thinking once I got it everything would be okay, -the things that were going on in my head and inside of me-,and they weren’t. It’s the best life you could possibly imagine, -being in the NHL-it doesn’t fill that sort of void inside of you.

You know the disease with addiction and alcoholism, whatever you want to call it. You really need to be ready to be help. Its very tough to help somebody who’s not ready.

I have my bad days, but my bad today’s nothing. It’s a joke. It’s a walk on the park”

The nurses at the clinic were laughing. That’s how bad it was. It was just a few weeks after I had played in my first NHL playoff series with the Los Angeles Kings. I was 23 years old, being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to live my dream, and I was such a mess that I was either going to wind up dead or kill somebody else. I didn’t even call the intake center. I got on a flight from LA to Boston, where my brother was going to college. He picked me up at the airport. I just said, “Okay. I’m ready.” My brother drove me 10 hours to Toronto on the spot, right to the doorstep of the rehab clinic, the very same one that I had checked into two years prior. Back then, I had stayed for four days before saying, out loud, “This is insane, I’m out of here.” When I got to the reception desk, everyone remembered me. I had made quite an impression. They were actually laughing. I guess they thought I couldn’t be serious. And that’s when I broke down for the first time and said, “I am an alcoholic. I am a drug addict. For sure. Help me.”

“you are in control”

Utica Comets @ Toronto Marlies, game 5 of round 1 of the 2018 Calder Cup playoffs

Maple Leafs Training Camp: Garret Sparks - September 13, 2018