Wishing Billy Gillispie a healthy and speedy recovery
So, side story here: For the last couple of months, I've been reading (and re-reading) David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. It's a mammoth book too weirdly complex to explain in its entirety here (and this is a college hoops blog, so why would you want me to, anyway?) but suffice it to say that anyone who's read the book knows much of it is about addiction and recovery and the relatively uncynical process of giving yourself over to something, as Wallace calls it. For many characters, that giving over consists of recovery from illicit substances.
Believe me when I say after a whole summer with this book, I have a much, much greater appreciation for Alcoholics Anonymous, even if I understand that reading a very popular modern novel about addiction is in no way a substitute for actually living these experiences, and thank God I haven't. Largely thanks to Infinite Jest, I never want to get addicted to anything, period. Except caffeine. That ship sailed long ago.
The point of that big rambling block of text is that while it's easy to be cynical about Billy Gillispie -- who is, after being arrested for suspicion of DUI for the third time on August 27, checking himself into a substance abuse recovery center in Houston, Tex. -- I'm going to withhold my cynicism. Gillispie clearly has a problem with alcohol. Clearly, if he wants to avoid jail, and if he wants to piece his coaching career back together, he needs to stop drinking. So while this might be something of a ploy on his part to avoid some of the legal trouble here, who knows? I've never been in his situation, and as someone in AA might say, I can't Identify.
All I or we can do is hope that Gillispie, for all his boorishness at Kentucky, can get his life together as quickly as possible. He's an awfully good basketball coach. (Kentucky fans might disagree, but his early returns are hard to argue with. It's why you hired him, remember?) It's what he was called to do. And the notion that he's wasting that talent on dark liquor -- the notion that anyone would burn their talent up that way -- is sad. No matter who it is.
Update: I didn't notice this at first, but Gillispie is headed to the John Lucas Center in Texas, the same place Michael Beasley is heading. Lucas is a former addict and All-American college hoops player who specializes in athlete recovery, so Gillispie's choice here makes sense.
Related: Ill-behaved People, Taking a Bubble Bath with:
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