Villanova '85 - McLain's Drug Story

New York Times

Published: March 12, 1987

Gary McLain, a starting guard on Villanova's 1985 national collegiate championship team, said he used cocaine during the Final Four tournament in Lexington, Ky., that season and was high when the team visited the White House for a reception. 

McLain, 23 years old, from Hempstead, L.I., told of his drug dependency and subsequent rehabilitation in a first-person story for the March 16 issue of Sports Illustrated magazine. McLain wrote the story with Jeffrey Marx, a reporter with The Lexington Herald-Leader. ''I had played well on coke, I had played bad on it,'' McLain said. ''It didn't seem to matter. So I did about a quarter gram of blow before the national semifinal in the bathroom of room 135 of the Ramada Inn, about three miles from Rupp Arena. In the locker room I was all quiet and subdued. Everybody was saying, 'You all right? You all right?' I said, 'Yeah, I'm with it.' But in the meantime, I'd gotten it in my head that if we lost it didn't matter. I just wanted the season to be over.'' 

McLain scored 9 points and had 2 assists as Villanova defeated Memphis State, 52-45. The Wildcats then upset Georgetown, 66-64, to win the national title, with McLain getting 8 points and 2 assists. McLain began the article by recalling the team's subsequent visit to the White House: ''I was standing in the Rose Garden, wired on cocaine. . .  President [Ronald] Reagan was welcoming my teammates and me at the White House and giving his little speech about how inspirational our victory was. And the cocaine had me floating in my own private world.'' 

McLain said he was treated for drug abuse at the White Deer Treatment Center in Allenwood, Pa., last summer after he had been dismissed from his job as a broker trainee on Wall Street. McLain, who admitted he smoked marijuana in high school, said he was not the only basketball player at Villanova who got high but did not identify the other players in his article.