The Time is Now
Addiction, in all its apparent randomness, is ruthlessly non-discriminatory. As if Jeff Hatch didn’t know.
“This is my truth,” the former New York Giants National Football League player said in the hours before speaking at Natchaug Hospital’s “The Time is Now” community addiction forum on Thursday, Sept. 29, in Enfield. “At 22 years old, I had signed a multi-year, $1 million contract with the New York Giants, I had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, I was dating Miss Maryland and I had won the President’s Award [for work with the homeless]. I had checked every box that I thought success was. I was 22 and I was completely miserable.”
Hatch, now 37, works for The Granite House, a substance abuse treatment facility in Derry, N.H., a long way from a trajectory that he began as a high school football player in Severna Park, Md. Hatch became a Division I-AA All-American offensive lineman at Penn, drafted by the Giants in the third round (78th overall), with a future seemingly as big as his 6-foot-6, 302-pound physical presence. He now speaks to students in local schools, at community forums like the BHN event and wherever else he can offer, as he describes it, service to his fellows.
“That’s the thing that brings me the most joy,” he says.
Even before the NFL draft, Hatch was filmed as part of a CNN documentary — and was featured in another by ESPN as a rookie — yet he played only four games with the Giants, his career finished two years later in 2005.
He endured multiple injuries, including a debilitating spinal fusion that ended his career. Along the way, the drugs that aided his physical recovery also fueled an addiction.
He never played in the Super Bowl, but he won’t forget the 2006 game: He watched from a Florida hospital bed, recovering from a drug overdose.
“It was one of those light-bulb moments,” he says, “that was so powerful, so in my face, that I couldn’t hide from it. There were a few of those moments.”
Hatch sought help after the 2006 overdose at a Louisiana substance abuse facility, which offered him a job when he completed treatment.
Patricia Rehmer, the Behavioral Health Network president who moderated the forum and appeared with Hatch earlier in the day on FoxCT news, says public perception prevents many addicts from confronting their disease.
Recovery, and sobriety, has its own rewards — different, perhaps, from a $1 million contract — but in some respects more rewarding.
“I’m grateful for the experiences I’ve been through,” said Hatch, “because I can’t tell you as a man today if I would feel that way if I hadn’t had the opportunity to be gifted by those material things and to have achieved that success. Only seeing it through those eyes did I realize, ‘Oh, wow, this isn’t really anything. There’s so much more.”