Wait, what year is it? It can’t be 2024. That’s just not possible.
Look, see, that’s Willie Cauley-Stein out there in a rowdy Rupp Arena, in a packed Freedom Hall, in the semifinals of another national tournament, gliding along like a 7-foot-tall unicorn and grinning like the most carefree person on earth. That’s him hanging out the window of a car and slapping hands with strangers who spotted him and screamed, “Willie, we love you!” as he rolled through Kentucky’s campus.
Are we sure this isn’t 2015?
“That couple weeks was just a movie,” said Cauley-Stein, time traveler. “It was the best decision ever. I wish I would’ve recorded literally everything, every day, so I could go back and watch it again and again. It was that special.”
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For most, The Basketball Tournament is an annual summer sideshow, a bunch of college alumni teams competing for a $1 million prize while creating television inventory in the dog days of the sports calendar. But for Cauley-Stein, who went from All-American at Kentucky to No. 6 pick in the 2015 NBA Draft to All-Rookie team to full-time starter to suddenly and mysteriously out of the league in what should’ve been his prime, an invitation to represent his alma mater again was life-affirming. When former teammates James Young, the Harrison twins and Tyler Ulis joined him on a team whose name was a nod to their old coach, John Calipari, La Familia took off on a nostalgia-fueled run like the DeLorean in “Back to the Future.”
It transported Cauley-Stein back to a place where he felt loved and a time when he had hope before he lost the game — and himself — at the bottom of a pill bottle.
Willie Cauley-Stein returned to Kentucky this summer to play for La Familia in The Basketball Tournament. (Courtesy of The Basketball Tournament)
“I could easily be dead,” Cauley-Stein said. “So that joy you saw from me in the TBT is different because I know the bullet I really dodged. I asked for help before it was too late, and I got better, but the basketball thing has been a lot harder to get back. So when they asked me to do this, it was too perfect. It just replicated those old times, just exactly how it was. Boom, I got showered with all this love that I needed, absolutely needed and played the best basketball I’ve played in years. That s— was dope.”
He played in 422 NBA games and started 255 of them, but Cauley-Stein’s last appearance in that league was March 2, 2022. It was an unceremonious ending, one measly minute of action to conclude a 10-day contract with the Philadelphia 76ers. A last gasp after he stepped away from the Dallas Mavericks in late November 2021 — the team cited “personal reasons” — and then it waived him in January. What almost nobody knew at the time, and what he never previously has discussed publicly, is that Cauley-Stein was in the middle of a 65-day stay at an inpatient rehabilitation center for substance abuse.
He thought the substance he had been abusing was bootleg Percocet, a combination of oxycodone and acetaminophen, which is bad enough. He had been eating those by the handful to numb his pain, he told the rehab center upon check-in, so it could expect to see that on his drug test. But it didn’t.
It turns out, he had been buying fake pills, laced with fentanyl. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s website describes fentanyl as 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin. “One pill can kill” is the DEA’s slogan, and the agency estimates about 70 percent of the 80 million fentanyl-laced fake pills it seized in 2023 contained a potentially lethal dose.
“I didn’t know until I turned myself in. I looked at my wife and said, ‘Oh, my God’ because I hear stories all the time about kids going to a party, never taking a drug before, deciding to pop a Percocet, and it ends up being fentanyl, and they die. From one pill,” Cauley-Stein said. “Dude, I was taking hundreds of them, for months and years. It could’ve so easily been me.”
One of the friends Cauley-Stein made in rehab was only out for five days, he said, after a 75-day stay, before he overdosed and died.
“You could kind of tell the way he was walking around that he wasn’t ready to leave yet, that he still wanted to do it,” Cauley-Stein said. “Not me. There’s nothing you could ever tell me to get me to do that again. I want no part of it.”
That’s because the drugs took away much more than his pain. They robbed Cauley-Stein of his light. He was a fan favorite at Kentucky and early in his pro career with the Sacramento Kings because of a playful personality and curious mind. He was endlessly quotable, and therefore also a media darling as he waxed philosophical one minute and rattled off silly asides the next. He once bleached his hair blond, prompting Calipari to compare him to Dennis Rodman. He painted bold and colorful works of art, dabbled in fashion design and took piano lessons one offseason.
From 2015 to 2019, “life was good,” Cauley-Stein said. “It was all love.”
His fourth season in the NBA was his best. He started 81 games and averaged 11.9 points, 8.4 boards, 2.4 assists and 1.2 steals. He thought a big contract was coming. Instead, the Kings moved on, and he signed for slightly above the league minimum with the Golden State Warriors. That’s why he wasn’t home Aug. 23, 2019, when three of his friends were shot — and one killed — while they slept at the home Cauley-Stein leased in Sacramento.
“That kind of started a spiral of mental health,” he said. “Trying to deal with that and hoop at the same time — for a new team, on a bad deal, and then my wife got pregnant — it was just too many weird things and big changes, and I got on the pain pills trying to just run away from reality.”
Then the grandmother who raised him, Norma Jean Stein, was diagnosed with bone cancer. It ravaged her, and Cauley-Stein could not bear to watch her wither away. So he retreated further into a pharmaceutical fog.
“I was doing so many pills, I was asleep all the time,” he said, “or when I was awake, I wasn’t really there. I didn’t handle that the right way. I missed really getting to say goodbye to my grandmother. I could’ve been around her more, FaceTimed her more, done so many things just to be with her at the end, and I did the exact opposite. I was a coward, man. Every time I talked to her, she looked different, looked worse, and I didn’t want to see her like that.”
She died Dec. 1, 2021. Cauley-Stein checked into rehab six days later.
By that point, the pills hardly affected him anymore, at least not in any way he could feel. He took them just to function and to stave off what he assumed would be brutal dope sickness if he ever stopped. Incredibly, he said he took the pills to get through basketball practice, somehow still passing as a functional NBA player despite operating in a perpetual haze.
“The team could tell I had no energy, no love, no personality, no nothing. The drugs took everything from me,” he said. “I think I’m playing hard, balling, doing my thing, and then I hear, ‘He doesn’t look like he loves basketball.’ It didn’t occur to me until I went and got sober and did the work that I realized: ‘Oh, this is what people saw.’ The spark that I have when I talk, I didn’t have that. I couldn’t look people in their eyes because I felt like they could see my soul and see I wasn’t the same Willie.”
He knew that admitting his addiction might cost him his career in the NBA, but he also knew that not getting help might cost him his life.
“I could see where I was heading,” he said. “It was like I had a thousand pounds on my back. I didn’t like who I saw in the mirror, and I was going to have to keep on doing drugs to play. I told my agent, ‘I gotta get help.’ As soon as I called and put myself into the NBA drug program and told them everything, it was instant relief. I got swept with this feeling — I’ve done a lot of s—, but I’ve never had a feeling so good — like my grandmother was scooping me up and giving me the biggest hug.”
Your TBT 2024 DPOY:
Willie Cauley-Stein pic.twitter.com/m4jtiTslET
— TBT (@thetournament) August 4, 2024
That feeling gave way to some temporary embarrassment when he entered rehab, because it was obvious people there knew who he was. Step one of his recovery, as it turned out, was stripping away the ego of being a millionaire professional basketball player. He told the staff and his fellow patients to treat him exactly like the others.
“I’m one of y’all. We’re in here for the same reason,” Cauley-Stein said he told them. “I don’t want some special treatment. I wanted to do the work. So it was a lot of soul-searching and listening to people’s stories and sharing my story. When you hear your own story out loud, it’s like, ‘Damn, that’s actually crazy.’ But through that process, through therapy and a lot of work on me, I really found myself. I found purpose in life again.”
He discovered a love of golf through daily chipping and putting competitions with a fellow patient on the facility’s small putting green. He still takes lessons and plays every chance he gets, which is hardly a surprise. He famously played just about every sport available in high school, where he first fell for his now wife, Kelsey. They have a 4-year-old daughter, Kendrixx, and 1-year-old twin boys, Jaxx and Jett.
“I had to get right for them,” Cauley-Stein said. “It’s funny, I’m only 30, but my kids don’t really know me as this basketball star. What’s crazy, though, is I’m doing the best I’ve done in like 10 years. This is the best I’ve felt, probably, since I left Kentucky. And there’s still a lot of game in this body. I’m rested, I’m fresh. I’m ready.”
Cauley-Stein played 13 games with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, the Houston Rockets’ G League affiliate, in 2022-23. He played 20 games for an Italian club — and broke the Europe Cup single-game record with 20 rebounds — last season. Still hoping an NBA team will give him one more shot, Cauley-Stein planned to play at NBA Summer League this year, but then an old Kentucky teammate called. Twany Beckham, La Familia’s general manager, needed a star attraction to get people excited about TBT in Lexington.
NBA Summer League is a bigger deal, but Beckham offered a better deal.
“I was able to sell him on, ‘Bro, you haven’t been back in a long time,’ and knowing what kind of fan favorite he was and what this fan base’s love can do for somebody, I told him, ‘Willie, if you come back, you’re going to get something you’ve been missing,’” Beckham said. “I just painted a picture for him. Coach Cal used to preach that to us all the time: Really embrace this, because once you leave here, it’ll never be the same. You’ll never have love like this again or be on a team like this again. And that’s what I pitched all our guys on: You actually can come back and feel that love again.”
Cauley-Stein certainly did. The 2015 national defensive player of the year earned the TBT defensive MVP. He blocked seven shots in La Familia’s second game. He had 20 points, nine boards and four steals and three made 3-pointers — an unexpected addition to his game since the college days — against rival Louisville’s team in the quarterfinals. That game delivered the largest crowd in TBT history and allowed Cauley-Stein to trash-talk Cardinals fans all week on the golf course while also basking in the adoration of a grateful Big Blue Nation.
Just like the good old days.
“It was literally a blast from the past,” Cauley-Stein said, right down to one of the Harrison twins’ hitting the decisive shot to eliminate Louisville. “Poetic. Can’t get written any better than that. That was one of the funnest, most buzzing times I can remember, and it was for a bunch of washed-up dudes playing in July. I could just feel it in my body, the hairs starting to stand up. ‘Oh, my God, this is what it’s about.’ Being sober these last two years has been so great because you learn to fall in love with those natural dopamine spikes again.”
The simple pleasures, he calls them. Like the taste of great food or the refreshment of a drug-free night’s rest. Like going back to his alma mater almost a decade later and fans asking about his grandparents — or announcing that their family pet is named after him. It’s a little weird, sure, “But I’m in people’s families, man, and I love it.”
(Top photo: Tommy Quarles / Courtesy of UK Athletics)
