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LAS VEGAS – Court McGee sits rigidly in a chair, recounting the story of his life and death, occasionally running his hand through his beard as he speaks.
Court McGee is one of 28 cast members of Season 11 of the MMA reality series "The Ultimate Fighter."
(Spike TV)
He speaks dispassionately, as if he’s relating the details of a work of fiction.
He sits upright and focuses his gaze intently on a visitor as he provides the details.
There was the time as a 5-year-old he was lost for nearly 10 hours in an amusement park, tucked behind a hot dog stand, an incident that changed his life forever and which has haunted him ever since.
To this day, he doesn’t put ketchup, mustard or mayonnaise on anything he eats. The smell of the condiments reminds him too much of that traumatic day from his youth.
There was the time, as a young adult, he awakened in Iowa, more than 1,000 miles from his Layton, Utah, home, with no pants on and no idea how he got there.
There were the times he tried cocaine and, later, heroin for the first time.
There was the time his girlfriend could take no more and bolted for Russia.
There was the time when, filled with drugs and alcohol, he ran a red light, was hit in the rear and hung on for dear life as his Jeep rolled over, his skin shredded like a grater by the concrete.
There was the time he was declared clinically dead after a heroin overdose. He relates the stories easily, filled with lurid details but largely devoid of emotion.
McGee is 25, a professional fighter and a one-time star high school wrestler. He’s on the verge of fulfilling a dream and winning a job in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
He’s one of 28 members of the cast of Season 11 of the successful reality series “The Ultimate Fighter,” which will debut later this month on Spike TV.
He tells you how badly he wants to fight in the UFC, how desperately he yearns to reach the pinnacle of his chosen profession.
Spend a little time with him, however, and you soon realize he’s fighting not just to be a champion but also to champion a cause.
He is, he says, a drug addict. His story is one of tragedy and redemption and he hopes to use it to save lives, to steer others off the path he took. He graduated high school in 2003.
Two years later, he was a heroin addict who could barely remember his own name. Large parts of his life are a blur.
“No one wants to go where I’ve been,” he says, coldly.
He grins wanly. He senses a visitor can’t fully understand how low he had sunk. He tells of a time when he’d managed to pull himself together, to get rid of drugs and to hold down a legitimate job.
He was working on an excavating crew and was a whiz at running a jackhammer for hours a day. Things were looking up. He was making more money then he’d ever had, his mind was clearing and for once in his life, he looked to the future optimistically.
Downward spiral
Then, he got a phone call. A friend offered him a Percocet tablet. He said no and hung up the telephone, but couldn’t get the conversation out of his mind.
A few days later, he picked up the phone and told his friend he’d take them.
“When he asked me if I wanted the Percocet, I told him I quit, but [his offer] stewed in my mind for a couple of days,” McGee says. “A couple of days later, I was in a frenzy and I called him and said, ‘I’ll take them.’ “
It wasn’t long before he was, once again, completely under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
“Within about two months, I was full-blown using cocaine, I was drinking every night, taking Xanax at night to go to sleep because the cocaine kept me up high, waking up to cocaine and having to drink,” he says.
The model employee his bosses admired and his co-workers enjoyed being with had turned into a lazy, whining annoyance in his best moments.
“I didn’t know up from down,” he says. “I was making close to $1,000 a week at that construction job and it got so bad, I couldn’t even pay my cell phone bill. My parents kicked me out of the house. My girlfriend I’d been with since 10th grade, she ended up leaving.”
McGee was on his own and confronting a dangerous world in a drug-induced stupor. He had no friends, no support system, nothing to help him break the cycle of dependency and return to some semblance of a normal life.
He’d been afraid of something from the day he was lost as a child in the amusement park, and it started to become clear what it was: He was afraid he was going to die alone.
“My family didn’t want anything to do with me,” he says. “I had no friends, except for the kid who gave me the drugs. It was only the people in the party scene and even that, I wasn’t comfortable in and nobody wanted me around because I was the messed up guy all the time.
“I’d lie, cheat, steal. I didn’t have anything. I pawned the majority of the [expletive] I had. I didn’t have anything. I lost pretty much everything I had. Life wasn’t looking good. Guys at my workplace didn’t want me around and I got switched from crew to crew. My life was horrible. It was nothing. I was a waste.”
As bad it was, things would get much worse. He was so despondent and so dependent that he began taking black tar heroin.
It doesn’t get much worse than black tar heroin. He quickly advanced from one try to doing it to doing it numerous times daily, throughout the day and night.. He seemed an unlikely bet to be around for his 25th birthday.
His friend, Cody, who had introduced him to drugs, assisted in his first heroin experience. Cody put the belt on Court’s arm, prepared the cocktail and shot him up.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” McGee says. “I remember what vein it was in. I sat there and he made one up in a spoon. He shot it, just a little bit, and I remember I fell back in my seat and two tears rolled out of my eyes. They hit my earlobes and I just went ‘Ahhhh.’”
He knew he’d paid a huge price for that moment.
“I lost my family,” he says. “I lost my friends. My girlfriend, who I wanted to marry and who I’d given a promise ring to, was gone. I wasn’t capable of being a friend, a son, a brother. I was unemployable. … I had nothing. I was completely mentally, physically and spiritually bankrupt.”
He went to live with a cousin and her boyfriend in their home in a trailer park. They went grocery shopping and then planned to go to dinner when they finished.
McGee was home alone – or, at least, he was supposed to be – in the trailer. But there was a woman whom he didn’t know who was in the trailer with him. He was planning to go to bed, but decided to take one last shot of heroin before he did.
He went into the bathroom while the unknown woman sat on the edge of a bed. He shot up, but, as so often happens, he took too much.
“I did it on the toilet,” he says. “I got real sweaty and cold and then I fell over. I fell between the toilet and the door and I guess she heard me hit the floor. There was a gap in the door and I guess she could see me and I was turning gray. I was only breathing once every 15, 20 seconds.”
His cousin had bought ice cream and decided to return home to put it in the freezer before heading to the restaurant. She and her boyfriend walked into the door to see the strange woman in their trailer.
“At the time, they were using Meth and the rule was nobody in the house but me,” McGee says. “They walked in and saw this girl there and they were angry right away. ‘Who the [expletive] are you?’ They were freaking out that she was there. And she was freaking out and yelling back, ‘I think he’s dead. I think he’s dead.’ “
His cousin quickly called 911. McGee’s luck, finally, was about to change, because there was an ambulance in the trailer park already. It had been dispatched on a false alarm and so arrived to help McGee within two minutes.
The paramedics performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation and gave him the drug naxolone, which is used to counter heroin overdoses.
He was taken to a hospital, where he was declared clinically dead.
Redemption
Court McGee, though, wasn’t ready to die. Somehow, some way, he got another chance. He was taken to Highland Ridge Hospital in Midvale, Utah, a place that specializes in treating chemical dependency. Though he relapsed one, he stayed 32 days.
He had couple of relapses after that, including one where he took a drink in Las Vegas and wound up in Iowa with a long sleeve shirt on and no pants, unsure of how he’d gotten there but craving Meth.
But after buying alcohol for an underage teenager, he managed to right himself. On April 16, 2006, Easter Sunday, he quit drinking and doing drugs and has been sober ever since. He’s devoted himself to helping others. He found God, he says, and lives his life to be of service to others.
His girlfriend returned from Russia and the two were reunited. One day, while fishing, he put a toy ring on the end of her line. When she reeled it in, he asked her to marry him. They had a son together, Isaac. He began his fight career and, shockingly, was still good at it despite the abuse he’d done to his body.
And he suddenly had remorse for his actions.
“I’ll envision my mother and father standing over my lifeless body and it tears me apart,” he says.
He’s become some sort of a missionary, sent to appear on “The Ultimate Fighter” as a living, breathing example of the dangers of drugs.
He’s only lost one fight – to veteran Jeremy Horn – and believes he can go a long way in the sport.
The farther he goes in the sport and the more successful he becomes, the greater the impact he can have upon young people who are walked the path he once traveled.
“You know, when I think of the impact I might be able to have on people’s lives, it’s incredible,” McGee says. “There are people out there using who are looking for a reason to quit, to get sober. And I could be that reason for them. It’s a great motivation for me. I know God is with me now and I know the plan.
“Imagine the good I can do. If I can come back from where I have been, think of what you might be able to do. I’m an example. I was as messed up as you can get, but I turned my life over to God and I recovered. And being in the UFC and being on this show, this is going to be seen by a lot of people and if I can help just one of them avoid what I’ve been through, it will all be worth it.”
