Chris Herren

Requiem for a Golden Child: The Rise and Fall of Chris Albert Herren

By any measurable standard, Chris Herren lived a life that most of us can only dare to dream of. He had a talent that made him more than special to many sports fans in and around Fall River, Massachusetts. For his fans, it made him a redeemer. There was no corner he wasn’t allowed to cut, no wrong he could commit in their eyes, and he was never going to be told no. All this at the tender age of only seventeen. Why? What can a seventeen year old have done to merit such adulation; what special gift had he been given? The fact is, Chris Herren could play basketball. He could take over any game at any given time; abuse any opponent than might dare guard him with his sick, freakish athleticism. In basketball-mad Fall River, as the star player of the beloved B.M.C. Durfee High School, this gift was the most precious anyone could ever have. For one year, Bill Reynolds followed Herren and the other members of the Durfee team of the 1993-1994. His subsequent book, Fall River Dreams, chronicles Herren’s saga throughout that, his junior year. Reynolds noticed his elite status early on as he observed, “He is a star in his own movie and he knows it.” Yet, this stardom in Fall River meant very little to the outside world and after he left Fall River, Herren began to live the same life as the rest of us mortals and he was jarred, roughly, into the world of reality of which he was oblivious during his high school days. The years of cutting corners in high school caught up with Herren in the real world, culminating with his arrest in December 2004 on heroin possession. In a little over a decade, Herren fell from his lofty, shining spot on Mt. Olympus and tumbled down into the trampled, dark mud with common junkies. The clouds he alone was privileged to trod upon in Fall River did not follow him to the outside world; he was forced to walk on the hard, unforgiving pavement like the rest of us. Chris proved unable to walk on that road like a common man. I wanted to find out why.

To understand Chris Herren, you need to know where he comes from. For him, the past refuses to stay put where it belonges, behind him. It manifests itself daily and refuses to let “Chrissie” live without its heavy load pressing down upon him. Every time Herren stepped out onto the court, a great Durfee bloodline stepped out with him. Herren’s father, several uncles, and, most significantly, his brother Michael all starred for Durfee in their own times. Michael held Durfee’s all-time scoring record and guided his team to back-to-back state titles and a record forty-six consecutive victories. Every shot Herren took, every word he said was carefully weighed against those of his elder brother. As Reynolds says in his book, “He is not just another high school junior trying to find his own identity.” Fall River made Herren’s identity for him long before he ever played his first Durfee game; he was ordained as the Next Great Hope for Durfee basketball and he spent his whole life trying to meet that lofty standard.

Fortunately for Fall River, yet unfortunately for Herren, ultimately, he was able to meet and exceed that standard. He broke Michael’s scoring record and won his own state title his senior year. This success bred in Herren an attitude, one that he flashed constantly. On the court, “He loved to trash talk. He liked nothing better than to belittle opponents.” Even his iconic coach, Skippy Karam, a legend in Fall River, a 600 game winner who had coached Durfee since the 1960’s wasn’t above his attitude. Karam always found himself fighting Herren “the little rebellions . . . Herren will often talk back to him.” Even the coach must be forced to play a supporting role to his own player; for in Herren’s own movie, he is the unquestioned star. As Skippy himself told Reynolds, “Thirty years of coaching and that’s what it’s come down to. I’m Chris Herren’s coach.” Make no mistake about it, Herren was bred to be a Durfee star; he had the pedigree, the hunger, and the dreams of a whole town behind him. They were all supposed to come together in the perfect combination to make him into a stud. Yet, for Chris, the magnificent life of basketball greatness that was supposed to be his eluded him, quite by his own doing. The stud that was supposed to be let out to a green, grassy field after a long, winning career had everything fall apart around him. He is now reduced to wasting all his spirit and talent that could have taken him to the top of the world by pulling a wagon.

How differently Barry Machado lived as a Fall River star in his own right. Machado excelled at baseball and basketball for Durfee and played on Skippy’s very first team. Machado, unlike Chrissie, was also gifted student and used his brains and athletic ability to escape Fall River for the Ivy League world of Dartmouth and later graduate school for history Northwestern. He then entered academia and spent a long, successful career teaching at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va. During the course of our phone interview, it became clear that Machado’s Fall River and Herren’s were two entirely different worlds. When asked if he and his teammates expected any special treatment during their playing days, Machado responded, “No, not in my time. I was blessed to play with a group of kids who didn’t expect any special treatment. It was only later, when the sports teams became more successful that newer players began to expect things.” As Machado’s background indicates, he took academics very seriously and credits his time at Durfee for steering him down that path, “First class teachers influenced us. These teachers, mostly Irish spinsters, made a big impression on us that getting an education and going to college was important.”

By the time Herren entered high school, Durfee had changed for the worse. The teachers who had so impacted Machado had “passed on” and no one who shared their same enthusiasm for education rose to fill their void. As Machado said, “When teachers don’t set a serious approach to academics and don’t stress the importance of getting an education, the kids pick up on that.” No kid more so then Herren. Machado attended Durfee 1958-1962, bridging the gap between two legends, Skippy’s predecessor, Lukey Urban, and Skippy himself. While both men were excellent coaches, they viewed the role of schooling very differently. Urban took academics seriously, and sent his own son to Columbia University where the boy excelled at both academics and athletics. He always stressed to his team the importance of getting an education. Skippy Karam, however, did not share his mentor’s enthusiasm for schoolwork. Even in the short time he played for Karam, Machado could sense the paradigm shift regarding education at Durfee, “Karam had little regard for academics. His attitude rubbed off on the guys. From Urban to Karam there was change in mindset in regards to academics.” It is in Skippy’s world and under his example that Chris Herren grew up. Of no help was that Herren also lacked grounding from the two principal institutions that defined Fall River: strong families and the Church. When asked if the Herren family was religious, Reynolds responded, “Not likely.” Herren’s family itself also had an ugly underbelly. According to Machado, during his one year stay in Fall River, “Billy [Reynolds] fell in love with Herren’s mother. I think they may have even dated for while.” When the author of the your own book is dating your mother, your home life is not going to be a reliable refugee from the pressures of your life outside.

I tracked down Bill Reynolds himself and sought his opinion on Herren. “The first thing you have to know,” he said, “is that in the time I was there, Fall River was a dying, old New England textile city. The only measure of pride they had was Durfee.” Conditions in Fall River were perfect for creating Herren. The town was struggling, Herren was a member of Durfee basketball’s First Family, he was a wizard on the court, everything came together to create a dream world in which Herren could float along free from molestation. Reynolds continued, “Times were different when Machado was there. Machado came of age in a time when everything was more put together. By the time Chris Herren got there, everything had unraveled, the school, the town, everything.” Fall River was broken, Durfee was broken and the people turned to Herren and his bright promise to mend everything and heal the hurt of a town gone belly-up. As Reynolds put it, “They saw him as their savior.”

Machado thinks the elevation of Herren by those in Fall River is not a unique situation, but rather another manifestation of a broader cultural shift in America as a whole. “Chris Herren,” Machado continued, “is an example of a change in American youth. He fell prey to pop culture that told him that because he was a star he could cut corners.” Although Fall River is certainly a unique sports culture, both Machado and Reynolds felt strongly that, as Machado put it, “Mass culture made Chris Herren, not Fall River or Durfee.” Sadly, this is all too true. I can remember very clearly several years ago picking up an issue of Sports Illustrated and there on the cover was a 16-year-old high school junior from Akron, Ohio named LeBron James. No less an authority than ESPN.com’s Senior National Sports Columnists Gene Wojciechowski has noticed this shift as well. In an interview with the class, Wojciechowski, affectionately known as Wojo, discussed at length how ESPN has contributed greatly to the spread of the cult of the high school sports star by its new policy of airing live marquee high school football and basketball games. This, he said, creates an heightened sense of importance and focus on young athletes who are not equipped to handle the attention that comes with all that coverage. This cultural obsession with high school athletes found its genesis at the same time Chris Herren began his Durfee career.

Machado feels most strongly that the Chris Herren’s of the world are being ruined by their own celebrity. “I don’t think we are doing America any favors by glorifying high school sports. It is a sad, sad thing to peak in high school and now with the message we are sending to high-schoolers that their athletic achievement now is as good as it is going to get, I see it more and more.” He continued, “I think it is a sign of cultural madness. I have no respect for a society that views high-schoolers in this way. Society gave Chris Herren a sense of entitlement and it ruined him.” Reynolds makes the point that while Herren certainly made his own choices, it is hard to blame him for acting the way he did. It would be impossible for most any impressionable seventeen-year-old not to think they were especially exempt from the laws of normal society when everyone he interacted with told him that he, in fact, was. So while Chrissie played for Durfee, he was a prince, he was everyone’s Golden Child. Yet even a Golden Child must grow up and begin to view his life objectively. Tragically for Chrissie, objectivity was not something he possessed after a lifetime in Fall River.

When he left Fall River for a basketball scholarship at Boston College, Herren became just another freshman. For the first time in his life, Herren was forced to live his life without his special status and he was woefully unprepared for the consequences it would bring him. During his very first game for BC, one in which he started, Herren injured his wrist on a drive to the basket. The injury was severe enough to cause him to miss the rest of the season. It was this injury that catalyzed the downfall of Chris Herren. Reynolds revealed that, “At BC, after the injury, for the first time in his life, he didn’t have basketball to fall back on. And it ruined him.” Without basketball, “Herren quickly seemed to lose his focus at BC, missing too many classes and showing little interest in his academic work . . . his friends from Fall River were visiting him at BC, his grades were declining and he couldn’t seem to put his hometown behind him.” The old siren song of the special life he lived back in Fall River reached him in Boston and he could not pull himself away and bear upon himself the responsibilities of life in the real world. After his flameout, Herren retreated far, far away from Fall River into arms of Jerry Tarkanian at Fresno State in California. Life in California as Bulldog was worlds apart from anything Chrissie had ever known in Fall River as a Hilltopper. Here, Herren began to use drugs heavily; in 1999 he held a press conference announcing that he was leaving the team for a time to seek treatment for his substance abuse. While playing for Fresno, Herren was also involved in a federal investigation into points shaving.

Herren was eventually drafted into the NBA and played several very unspectacular years as a bit player for the Denver Nuggets and Boston Celtics. His draft class featured such players as Elton Brand, Lamar Odom, Rip Hamilton, and Manu Ginolbili. They all made it . . . Herren did not. As Reynolds puts it, “He failed in the NBA not because of a lack of talent, but because of his self-destructive behavior.” In December of 2004, this behavior led Herren to a place no one had ever thought the Golden Child of Fall River would ever be. One early Friday morning, at a drive-thru of a Dunkin’ Donuts in Providence, Rhode Island, Herren was found unconscious, slumped over the wheel of in his car with empty dime bags of heroin strewn all around the floorboard by his feet. The irony that Herren’s ultimate downfall came not ten minutes away from where a decade earlier, he had been a living legend is a cruel sting. Herren’s police report looked ugly, like something from a bad gangster movie: driving while intoxicated, driving while in possession of a controlled substance, possession of a controlled substance, driving with a revoked license, and refusal to submit to a drug test.

The saddest part of his story is that even now, Chris Herren has yet to find a way to make himself whole again. Reynolds became friends with Herren during his time in Fall River and today the two still keep in touch. When talking about what his friend is doing now, Reynolds spoke in a pained voice. “He lives in a tiny town in Rhode Island, not far from Fall River. He works for the University of Rhode Island at a sports institute of some sort working with their athletes.” He continued, “Chris is struggling. He has a wife and two kids, but he is still struggling. It is much more difficult for Chris than I ever thought it would be. All the problems he has now, he had when he was a kid in Fall River, but basketball masked them.” Without the masquerade of the basketball court to hide behind, Herren was left to his own devices. With nothing else to fall back on, no family, no faith, no academics credentials to speak of, Chris Herren fell into ruin. And I could not be sorrier.

Epilogue
The Fall River of today is a far cry from the Fall River of Herren’s day, let alone Machado’s. Reynolds and Herren go back to Fall River every now and again and watch a Durfee game. Gone are the names that used to be synonymous with Durfee basketball: Herren, Karam, Attar, Machado, Pavoa, Callahan, names that can be traced back through the generations of Durfee basketball. Today they have been replaced, Reynolds says, mostly by African-American kids from outside of Fall River who grew up ignorant of the proud Durfee tradition. That old, magical connection between the town and the team is now gone. Skippy’s retirement following the 1995 season served as the last hurrah for the Durfee fondly remembered by so many. The teams today are “awful,” said Reynolds. The chemistry that the boys of old displayed from growing up and playing together in the youth leagues has been replaced by a selfish, individualistic ballhogs who can think only of their next dunk. The town itself has changed to; it is unrecognizable to Reynolds from when he first came in 1993. Machado puts it best when he said, “Fall River is a city without a center and constantly changes. I go back and there is nothing to hold me anymore.”