Every addict hits rock bottom — if they’re lucky enough to live to see it. For some, it’s the loss of a job. Others are most affected by their spouse leaving or being sent to prison.
Court McGee’s life spiraled so out of control, he hit rock bottom, then kept going. When he overdosed on heroin in 2005, his own father barely mustered the energy to care whether he lived or died.
McGee’s cousin found him on the floor of the bathroom in her trailer. She called her uncle to ask him what to do, and Ron McGee simply shrugged.
“I consciously made a decision to tell her, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Ron said. “Because I’d had it.”
Now, eight years later, McGee is a successful UFC fighter who spreads his anti-addiction message to anyone who will listen. But that day he was just another statistic — clinically dead, propped against a toilet in a Utah mobile home.
Paramedics rushed to the scene, performed CPR and applied a defibrillator. Those methods didn’t work until a police officer saw the syringe and told the EMTs it was an overdose. Then McGee was treated with an opioid antagonist, which worked to reverse the effects of the heroin, and he was resuscitated.
“If that cop wasn’t on duty that night, there’s a possibility I wouldn’t be here,” said McGee, who faces Robert Whittaker Thursday on UFC Fight Night (FOX Sports 1, 8 p.m.).
Before that, he had thrown everything away. McGee started with alcohol in high school and that escalated to prescription drugs after a surgery. When that wasn’t enough, he began snorting pain pills.
His addiction caused his girlfriend, Chelsea, to leave and he lost his job at an excavating company. His parents threw him out of their home and Ron said they even had to put a lock on their bedroom door “so he wouldn’t go snooping around in there.” McGee was in and out of jail on multiple charges.
Instead of turning his life around then, McGee fell into an even darker place. He began using heroin.
“I didn’t have any direction in my life,” McGee said. “I was miserable. Heroin took that pain away.”
Until it almost killed him. Then the slow recovery process came — and not without relapses. McGee fell back into substance abuse three more times, including five months after the overdose when he had a sip of a Long Island Iced Tea in Las Vegas and the next thing he remembers is waking up four days later in Iowa with no pants on, searching for crystal meth.
But now the 28-year-old has been sober since April 16, 2006. Chelsea eventually returned and is now his wife. They have two kids together. His family trusts him again and his dad is in Indianapolis for his big fight against Whittaker Thursday.
“It took me a year to get over that I felt bad enough about it that it was time to let him go,” Ron said.
McGee is 4-2 in the UFC, but a title shot is far from his mind. Using his profile as a professional athlete to tell his story is more important.
“My job now is to carry the message to people who struggle out there,” McGee said. “My job allows me to do that and … it allows me to be all these things I never thought I could be.”