Former IU basketball player Todd Jadlow said he wished someone would have told him he would spend 20 months in a 20-by-20-foot cell, lose his possessions and custody of his 2-year-old daughter and sit shaking with a revolver in his mouth.
That’s what he told more than 100 students Monday night in Rawles Hall. They had never seen him make a layup in Assembly Hall.
“Seems like yesterday I was running in and out of the Lambda Chi house,” Jadlow said. “I kind of know what you’re going through and what you’re dealing with here.”
Jadlow was there to speak about his path from drug and alcohol abuse to the head of a recovery foundation.
“We’re doing this to raise awareness of the various pathways to recovery,” OASIS Director Jackie Daniels said. “And his was pretty bumpy.”
Daniels reached out to Jadlow when Sam Storey, a junior in Delta Tau Delta fraternity, contacted her about hosting a program with Delta Delta Delta sorority.
Storey and Josh Piper, the chapter president, said they were glad Daniels presented the opportunity to hear a Hoosier tell his story, especially in Rawles Hall where students in and out of the greek community could attend.
They were also glad to join the Tri Delts in raising money for the Todd Jadlow Give It Back Foundation, which helps people get into rehab centers and sober housing.
The program coincided well with National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week, Daniels said, and it relates to OASIS’s relatively new group Students in Recovery.
But for Daniels, there was a personal element. When she was 9, IU won the NCAA championship.
“And Todd was on the winning team,” Daniels said. “So he was kind of part of my childhood growing up here in Bloomington.”
Growing up in Salina, Kansas, Jadlow was teased incessantly. People told him he would never be athletic or smart enough to succeed in college.
“At 14, I had my first taste of alcohol,” Jadlow said. “And I thought that was the answer.”
Four rough years later, he walked onto the IU campus for the first time. His life became submerged in IU basketball. He said he and his teammates were treated like gods.
Jadlow said basketball was his savior because he couldn’t risk using substances and losing his scholarships.
Looking out over the audience, he recalled driving by the Jackson Heights Apartments just before coming to speak to the group. As always, he had to blow into his car’s breathalyzer every half hour.
Jadlow recounted how, just after graduating and as he prepared for the NBA draft, a teammate invited him to that same apartment complex. The teammate offered Jadlow his first line of cocaine.
“Show me your friends, and I will show you your future,” Jadlow said to the room of fraternity brothers and sorority sisters.
In that apartment, Jadlow promised himself the cocaine would be a one-time thing. In years to come, he would play countless professional basketball games.
And that one line of cocaine would transform into a prize after every win — and every loss.
Jadlow promised himself the drugs and alcohol would stop once he finished playing.
Yet his addiction followed as he moved from basketball into orthopedic surgery. He would earn four DUIs in six months, two in one December 2013 day.
Thinking back to his college days, Jadlow asked why, when the weekend hits, students can’t be themselves.
“If you think it can’t happen to you, you better take the steps to make sure it doesn’t happen to you,” he said.
Once Jadlow finished talking and most of the lecture hall cleared, members of the greek community and Students in Recovery chatted with him.
Harrison Campbell, a senior Lambda Chi Alpha brother and recovering student, said he walked through the door that night to represent the hard work of Students in Recovery.
He walked out the door with Jadlow, now sober, and showed him the Lambda Chi house where he sometimes parties, now sober.
