ONE: Surrender

I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.
For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. —Romans 7:18

Vance Johnson came home from playing in his first Super Bowl, sat in the dark of his bedroom closet, and tried to slit his wrists. He was twenty-three years old, and from the outside, seemed to be on top of the world. On the inside, however, he was a depressed, addicted, desperate mess.
One of the “Three Amigos” recruited by Mike Shanahan for the Denver Broncos, the wide receiver had been drafted in the second round, when he was in the middle of his junior year of college. He was pick #31 overall out of 368 players. He’d always been an incredible athlete, and even qualified as an alternate for the Olympics in the long jump. When he was a kid, he’d race his cousins for 25 cents a race, and never, ever lost. He loved sports, and had this natural ability that few people have. During his years with the Broncos he went to the Super Bowl three times and set three franchise records for punt returns and receiving. A few days earlier, he was standing on the sidelines of the Rose Bowl field in Pasadena, California, across from the New York Giants at Super Bowl XXI. That moment was the pinnacle, the moment he had dreamed of all his life, the moment he thought would change everything. “I remember standing on the sidelines of the stadium, seeing the massive crowds, listening to the national anthem. All of a sudden, I was six years old, standing on the sidelines of an NFL game, dreaming of this moment. I started crying, right there at the Super Bowl, thinking, I made it, oh my God, I made it. That day, I played my heart out and gave it my all. But then I went home, and there was…nothing.” Caught in a dark, bottomless pit of despair, he tried for the first of many times to end his life.
You hear that story and think what? How could that be? He just played in the Super Bowl. How could anything be depressing after that? To understand that moment in Vance’s head, start with understanding how a troubled childhood impacts an adult, how addiction twists the words in the
brain, and how depression can convince even the richest, most famous person (Anthony Bourdain, Robin Williams, Kate Spade, just to name a few) that life isn’t worth living.
“I had this voice in my head constantly saying you should kill yourself,” Vance said. That’s all he could hear, all he could think, was that the world would be better off without him. His marriage was falling apart and he was already well on his way down a bumpy road of addiction to pills and alcohol. “That voice isn’t the voice of God, it’s the devil telling you what to do. He disguises himself as your own voice, then takes those wounds that are deep inside you and uses them to convince you to make that first cut.”
Growing up, Vance had never been a drinker. He’d seen how alcohol could turn his father into a raging bull, and spent more than one night with his mother, searching local bars for his father— who was undoubtedly in the arms of another woman. His father had a hair trigger temper and
regularly hit his wife for the slightest reason. When Vance was four, he and his sister were in the family car, heading to a family get together. His parents were arguing, and out of the blue, his father hit his mother so hard, blood spattered across the pale sedan interior and speckled the windshield. Vance and his sister sat there, traumatized and terrified. Vance remembers his mother, who was caught in a world that didn’t have resources and
domestic violence shelters, where the options for a single mom were few, constantly praying. “My mom was always in the bedroom on her knees, crying and praying. She was the one going to church while my dad would go out to bars, come back with lipstick on his collar, smelling of perfume, looking like he was always having fun. I started to resent and hate my father, and most of all, hate my life. Then I got introduced to sports and that was where I found my escape. I knew the reality of what I lived and witnessed wasn’t what I wanted, and I saw sports as a way to
escape that.” He worked hard, because he figured out early on that doing his best and pleasing his father eased the tension in the house. His father was his track and football coach for a few years, which made for a difficult dichotomy of burying the hatred Vance felt and respecting his father as a coach. “When I performed well on the field, life became less chaotic. I became the hero in the house,” Vance said. “Many kids in their adolescent years play a role. Some play the jokester, some play the hero, some kids just disappear and rebel. My role was to be the hero.”
But in the off-season, the abuse started up again with a vengeance. Watching it was so traumatizing to Vance that he stayed away from girls, terrified to be in a relationship and end up like his father. Recent studies by the Grady Trauma Project, a research institute within Emory
University in Atlanta, said that babies and young children exposed to domestic violence often end up developing PTSD that is as bad as what a soldier experiences after serving in combat. These children grow up, watching the person who is supposed to love and protect the family,
hurt those very same people. The abuse creates chaos, uncertainty, and a war of love and hate inside the child.
As Vance grew taller, stronger, and more confident, he began to meet other role models, like his high school football coach, who showed him not all men hit women. When he was sixteen, Vance had had enough. He walked in on his intoxicated father once again beating his mother. Vance called his father outside. He picked up a huge rock and held it over his father’s head, threatening to kill him. His father dropped to his knees and begged his son not to do it. “I won’t kill you,” Vance said, “but don’t you ever touch her again.” The damage, however, was already done to the young Vance’s psyche, and the wounds that fed into his doubts and despair were already beginning to open. The road to addiction is rarely a straight express lane. Many addicts choose a drug—alcohol, heroin, food, sex, codependency— to quiet the voices in their head that say they aren’t good enough, they can’t handle it, they deserve the punishment they’ve received, and most of all, that any other kind of existence is impossible. Like hundreds of others who have made the difficult journey of crawling out of that pit of despair, Vance Johnson had a history that pushed him down when he should have looked
up. He had his first drink the day before final cuts for the Broncos. He’d been playing a game against the 49ers and missed catching a punt—but worse, touched the ball just enough to send it into the end zone, scoring a touchdown for the San Francisco team. He was convinced his NFL career
was over before it really got started, and when a friend on the team suggested they do some tequila shots, Vance decided why not?
“As soon as I did the shot, I was like whoa, what is this? And that was it. I started drinking and never stopped.” In fact, the prescription drug abuse and alcohol use would get so bad, Vance ended up in jail for vehicular assault, lost every dime he made in the NFL, blew through eight
marriages, and ended up selling his Super Bowl rings at a pawn shop just to support his habit. Even as he walked away from his Broncos contract, sank into debt, ruined friendships and relationships, he kept telling himself he was fine, just fine, and he had it all under control. Vance went through moments that should have killed him, moments recounted in this book, moments that are almost unbelievable. “I was constantly searching for joy and fulfillment—in women, alcohol, football. But the more I searched, the bigger that hole inside me got, because I couldn’t fill it no matter what I did.” Then in 2007, his son Vaughn was killed in a motorcycle crash. A drunk driver ran a stop sign and plowed her SUV straight into Johnson’s son. Vaughn, a college student and aspiring football player like his father, died at the hospital. In a horrible ironic twist, the powerful demon of
addiction that Johnson had been carrying around for decades had taken away the most precious thing in his life. But even that moment wasn’t rock bottom. Not yet. Instead, the death of Vaughn gave Johnson an excuse to drink and drug even more. He was sitting in a bar when he found out about
Vaughn’s death, and instead of going home, he finished off the bottle of Patron. He was so high at his son’s funeral, he couldn’t find the gravestone when he went back to the cemetery. Anyone could understand the unspeakable pain a parent feels at the loss of a child. Vance blamed himself for not being there, for not being a better role model. He had been a Christian all his life, but in those dark, dark days he was convinced that God had turned away from him. “I still believed in God and I never blamed God, as many do; I just hid from Him in my sin.” Vance rinsed and repeated with tequila and benzos until he stopped feeling any of the agonizing, crippling pain of that loss, numbing himself so much he ended up slipping into a coma that lasted twenty-eight days and nearly killed him. Even then, it wasn’t enough to turn his life around. “Death didn’t scare me. The next day never mattered anymore, the next drink or smoke did. I couldn’t see past my own face.” It would be several more months before Vance finally said the words that would change his life:

Help me. I surrender