Unfortunately, and although the excesses in this area are now marginal, the NBA has a long history of players having sunk into hard drugs. One of them, however predestined at the top of the orange ball, now serves as a sad reference in the matter. Tale of a real tragedy.
When cocaine became popular in the 1970s and 1980s, it gradually flooded all walks of life. From the Florida banker to the New York sportsman to the Californian taxicab, deadly white powder has irretrievably gained ground in the country of Uncle Sam. And, unsurprisingly, the NBA world has not been spared – very far from it. The tragic death of Len Bias at 22 is only the tip of a terrible iceberg, which has seen the consumption of “C” rot the ABA and the NBA for more than a decade.
If a player is to illustrate this sad decadence, logic dictates that it should be Marvin Murphy. A 2m03 athletic prospect full of talent, the winger rolled over his NCAA years with a monstrous double-double of 20 points and 18 rebounds on average. At the time, he was described as better in pure talent than Julius Erving, star of the moment.
Selected in 2nd position of the 1974 NBA Draft, Murphy nevertheless chooses first to spend 2 years in ABA, on the side of the Spirits of St-Louis. There, he was a hit from the start (24-15 in his rookie season) and saw a bright future. Then, with his teammate Gus Gerard, he plunges into drug hell. The beginning of the end, already, at only 23 years old.
Cocaine ruins the career and the life of the prodigy
Raised on the dreary streets of Providence, “Bad News” (his nickname was given to him because of the permanent troubles he caused himself) was passionate about the “gangster” lifestyle and did not intend to live old. He never hid it, even many years later:
I was young, I was crazy and I thought I knew everything. For me it was already played. I never thought I would live past 30. I wanted to die in a gunfight. I did not want to live long, it was not my ambition. Live fast and die young, that was my goal.
As is often the case with addictions, Murphy does not realize the seriousness of the situation. Worse, he intensifies his consumption without any limit, conquered by the effects of cocaine:
The coke intensified everything about me. My libido, my awareness, my energy, my self-confidence… And I thought that made me better on the court. At the end of my career, I sniffed it during matches. I was in Boston, next to a guy like Nate Archibald, and I was powdering myself while it was playing in front of me. I hid her under a towel. The whole dressing room moved away from me, and obviously my career was quickly over after that.
Quickly, the addiction spirals out of control for Murphy, who is nothing more than a ghost, a shadow of himself:
I used to dress well, eat well, take care of myself. Everything changed, it turned me around. I was kind and loving, I became dishonest and vicious. I was sociable, I became antisocial. I was snorting day and night, I had no control. If we played on Friday and Saturday, I didn’t sleep and took drugs until an hour before the game. My body was imploding.
In 1980, at only 28 years old, the NBA career of “Bad News” came to an end. The announced heir of Julius Erving had been caught up in his demons, in what constitutes one of the biggest mess in history. Without the basketball to maintain any semblance of routine, Murphy sinks in and takes several stints behind the desks. It is there, in the prison of Fort Stockton, that the turning point takes place:
I fought with a fellow inmate. And in prison the guards don’t try to break up fights, they just pick up bodies. I almost killed this guy – in fact, I was trying to kill him. He was unconscious and I banged his head on the cement. Suddenly, I let go, and I didn’t know if he was dead or not. It was the turning point for me. I had hit rock bottom, and I could only go up. I couldn’t fall any lower.
After this episode, “Bad News” quit drugs, finished his sentence and reintegrated into society, trying in particular to educate young people not to take the same destructive road as him. But in the mid-2010s, Murphy’s troubled past caught up with him. His liver, exhausted by the excesses of yesteryear, was rotting him from the inside. After a valiant battle, the former Celtics and Clippers player died in 2014 at the age of 62, leaving the memory of a great talent, marred by white powder.
Nearly a decade after his last breath, Marvin Barnes remains one of the most significant tragedies in NBA history. And an example from which the new generations must at all costs draw inspiration so as not to fall into the same depths…
