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January 30, 2004

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Former drinker offers advice,
reflects on past experience

Last month Peter Holt, the owner of the San Antonio Spurs – as well as a Trinity trustee – went back into an alcohol treatment program after 16 years of recovery.

Mr. Holt has been lauded for his openness about his disease and for being an important spokesperson and role model for others who fight their own demons with alcohol. His story inspires me. So following his lead and given the year the campus has been having, I think it’s my turn to come clean.

I’m reluctant, because I’d rather be known as a Catholic, a husband, a dean, a dad and a Packer fan. But we are the sum of our parts – all of them – for better or worse.

In December I celebrated 20 years of being alcohol-free. So imagine my horror this fall when I was pictured on the cover of the Trinitonian at the bar in the Tigers’ Den (with members of the Student Court, of all people). My secret wish was that the headline had been clearer: “Dean drinks O’Doul’s – HONEST.”

Students on other campuses have lots of pre-parties with alcohol before events, as do we, but it is called “front-loading” on other campuses.

I have plenty of excuses for my former lifestyle: heredity and family dysfunction and tragedy, a bar on every corner in Wisconsin, and a drinking age, then, of 18 (even though I was in bars at 16). But in the end it comes down to this: In college I learned that drinking was the one thing I thought I was really good at doing. (Many sloppy and dangerous nights would suggest otherwise.)

Recently someone forwarded me an article that said most Greeks curbed their drinking once they graduated. How lucky. I wasn’t Greek – maybe I should have been. I lived the dream of the typical partying college student, but my drinking kept going after commencement.

Eight months later, broke, and back in Madison after a failed stint in L.A., I knew I had a decision to make. Alcohol ruined my first family; it wouldn’t ruin the next one, whoever they would turn out to be.

So on Dec. 15, 1983 I walked away from it. The next night I went back to work serving drinks in a bar. I decided then that I would probably be around alcohol the rest of my life, so I’d better get used to it. I didn’t know then, though, that my professional curse would be to constantly deal with people just like me.

Maybe I have something to offer those of you who would be my protégés. I consider myself an expert of the worst kind – I did my own research. I learned that I was one whose college drinking patterns would never change.

How, then, does someone like me complain about today’s student drinking? Me, who took several trips to the hospital with drinking-related injuries, who spent most Sundays piecing together the weekend and who had little regard for others when I was drinking?

Maybe I have something to offer those of you who would be my protégés. I consider myself an expert of the worst kind – I did my own research. I learned that I was one whose college drinking patterns would never change.

I hope you don’t have the alcohol gene (if there is such a thing), that you have better relationships than I used to, that your grades are better than mine were and that you have fewer regrets and clearer memories. Don’t waste your college years … wasted. Use Mr. Holt and me as positive role models. Don’t be like us.

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