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Amazing Greats: Crazy great Jesus stories.
NBA star James Donaldson: from the brink of suicide
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Our Amazing Greats host, Joe Micheals, really gets to the emotional heart of NBA star James Donaldson.
At 7’2 James played two decades in professional basketball, including the NBA's San Diego and Los Angeles Clippers, NY Knicks, Utah Jazz. Dallas Mavericks and the Seattle Super Sonics.
Prepare to be moved by James’ authentic story of depression and his being on the brink of suicide. Hear how God walks with him down his path of depression and how James came through it, committed to helping others deal with dark times. Plus he'll share his vision for Seattle as a mayor candidate and we'll ask him when the Super Sonics will be back to the city he loves.
"Amazing Greats" is a library of interviews with highly successful people who have amazing career and life stories and who share how God has impacted their journey. Hosted by broadcaster Ric Hansen & produced by Klem Daniels. Available on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, Google and our YouTube Channel.
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Hi there, and welcome to the Amazing Greats podcast, episode number 13, and Rick Hansen here. Wow, this one is powerful. Our amazing Greats host this time around is Joe Michaels, and he really gets to the emotional heart of NBA star James Donaldson. Prepare to be moved by James's authentic story of depression and his being on the brink of suicide. How did he get there after a huge successful career in sports, then as a businessman? His downward spiral started with a massive health issue, and then everything fell apart. Hear how God walked the dark path with James and how he found purpose in his struggles. From seven foot two inch NBA star to the lowest of lows, and now he's active in politics to help Seattle with plans for its future. Oh yeah, you're going to find out when the Sonics will return to Seattle. I think you really enjoy this episode. It's a great one and very impactive. And at any moment, if you find this interesting, hit the like button and please share this with your friends. Here we go with Joe Michaels and James Donaldson.
SPEAKER_03Welcome to Amazing Greats. Uh today we have the pleasure of speaking with James Donaldson, who has just written the book Celebrating the Gift of Life from Suicide to Purpose and Joy. James, welcome to our podcast today. Thank you so much, Joseph.
SPEAKER_02Great to see you. Great to meet you, actually. Yeah, yeah, good. Happy to be here.
SPEAKER_03So, James, um, congratulations on the book, first of all. And uh, you know, just the title itself is uh is a powerful story to unpack there. And I hope we can uh get to a few of the uh special messages that you want to share today. Um, but first of all, just tell me a little bit about did you where are you from? And um just a real quick synopsis up to the point where you met George Ravelling.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes, yes. Well, I'm uh from Sacramento, California, and uh the son of uh Air Force uh 20-year veteran sergeant. So uh we uh were actually in the base in Travis Air Force Base, my real early years after being born over in the UK. My dad was stationed, my dad was stationed there. So we came back to the States when I was two years old and over to Travis Air Force Base for a few years and then moved over to Sacramento about uh second, third grade or so, and grew up there. So that that's my upbringing there. Yeah, were you raised in a Christian home? Very much so. My dad, especially. He uh was very, very uh strong in his faith, uh, very involved with the church. I grew up in the Baptist church, Christian Baptist Church. Um he was a deacon, he was an usher, he was a treasurer, he fulfilled almost every office position there. Uh and so we went to church with him every single Sunday growing up as children. My mom went along with us most of the time. And then kind of later, as we got older, she stopped going so much. But uh, you know, we kept going as kids, and I kept going throughout the rest of my life. I still go every Sunday.
SPEAKER_03So I don't know if you were like me, but James, I was raised in a Christian home too. But uh God was kind of a concept for a long time until he really became personal to me. Do you have the same kind of experience?
SPEAKER_02No, I remember God being personal with me from my early, early years. Uh, you know, as an eight, nine, ten-year-old, uh I'd go into Sunday school. Uh matter of fact, uh, as I got to be a young teenager, I was teaching Sunday school to the real young kids for a year or two. And so uh, you know, I knew the Bible, I knew scripture, I knew the Lord, and uh it's been a constant, constant presence in my life uh of having that kind of faith.
SPEAKER_03Right. Um, and you were playing basketball, obviously, when you were a kid in in high school. But to the contrary, I I wasn't playing basketball.
SPEAKER_02I mean, uh, you know, my dad, my mom and my dad, they really stressed education for us. And even though my dad looked like a great athlete, you know, 6'3, 230 or so, he looked like he can do everything, but he stayed in great shape with all the push-ups and the sit-ups and the jumping jacks from his military training. Uh, so he looked great all the time. But no, uh, sports was something that came really late to me. Not until I got to my senior year in high school that I officially played my first basketball game. And that was after a whole year of practice during my junior year, just to get familiar with the game. Uh, and I was a big kid. I was already 6'9, 6'10, never played basketball before. The coaches were drooling. Oh, yeah. Hoping and wishing I would come out. But I turned them down my sophomore year, my freshman year, and finally agreed to start practicing during my junior year just to see if I can get the hang of it. So, how how did you get connected with WSU then? Well, you know, during that senior year that I played, I was uh, you know, I played okay, average enough, maybe, you know, 10, 12 points, 10, 12 rebounds a game, but it wasn't anything spectacular. Matter of fact, I was overshadowed by Bill Cartwright, who was uh went on to great NBA fame for many years for the Chicago Bulls. Yeah. Um, Bill and I grew up in Sacramento together. He was actually in a suburb, uh Elk Grove, uh of southern Sacramento. So we played against each other during my senior year or twice, a home and away game. And um, you know, so Bill was the Bill was the talk of the town from the time he was in the fourth grade or so playing basketball. And then here I come along. Uh so no one really knew about me, but because Bill Cartwright was in the same league in the same town, uh, scouts were flop flocking to Sacramento from all over the country. Um, one of those scouts happened to be from WSU, uh, George Ravling and his staff, and they saw me as a kid that uh had tremendous potential. Uh, we just didn't know how to tap into it. Uh, and so he took a flyer on me. He said, Hey, uh let me get you an athletic scholarship at WSU. Uh, you're good, you're gonna sit the bench the first couple of years and just practice and get bigger and stronger and tougher and learn the game. And that's exactly how it all played out. So I didn't really play serious college basketball until I was a junior at WSU.
SPEAKER_03And obviously being in Washington State, that caught the eye of the Sonics, right?
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes. Uh, it turned out that George Ravling was uh a good friend, a childhood friend of Lindy Wilkins, who was the coach of the Sonics at the time. Uh the Sonics went on to win the NBA champion championship in 1979. I was still at WSU finishing up my senior year. Uh, but the Sonics went ahead and drafted me, uh, I think, on the maybe the advice or uh the nudging of uh Coach Ravling to his good friend Lenny Wilkins just to see if he'd take a chance on me. I wasn't a first-round pick, I was a fourth-round pick, and probably the fourth or fifth pick that year in the draft. Uh, and the team had just come off their world championship season. So there was no room at the end, as we say, uh for a young guy like me. So uh on the advice of my of my agent representative, I decided to go over to Italy and play my first professional year in Italy, 1979, 1980.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, but just to break into that uh lofty uh group of guys that won a championship, that's that's pretty amazing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, it really was. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's probably the best way for me to break into the NBA at the time, because there wasn't a high expectation on me of what uh I needed to provide right away. I could still learn the game, I could still progress, uh, which I did. And uh having a coach like Lindy Wilkins was probably the best kind of coach for me because he was, you know, uh he was structured, he was disciplined, he was the strong, silent type, and he had a whole team of veteran players around that I was easy, easy enough to come into and under the wings of so many of them as they took me in and helped show me the professional game. So were you an all-star as a Sonic?
SPEAKER_03Because you were the all-star, you were you're part of the All-Star team, correct? Yes.
SPEAKER_02That was in 1988, uh, when I was with the Dallas Mavericks at the time.
SPEAKER_03With the Mavericks, okay. Was that was that the highlight of your career? I'm sure you have a lot of them. Uh, what what would you say is is uh was the high point?
SPEAKER_02You know, on an individual basis, it probably was the high point of my career. Uh, basketball's a very much a team game. I'm very much a team player, a team person. So, you know, the real highlights, I think, were we having our teams go as far as they did. We never won a championship in my 14 NBA years. We got close. Um, you know, we made it to the Western Conference Finals with the Mavericks and lost to the uh Showtime LA Lakers in uh seven games. And then we made it to the Eastern Conference Finals and lost to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in seven games when I was with the New York Knicks. So close, but no cigar.
SPEAKER_03Oh, wow. Well, it's it's an amazing career. Hey, I gotta just a sideline. When you guys are on the road, my my impression is you guys probably hang out with the competition. I mean, go to barbecues at their house and everything, and then just beat the heck out of them uh when you get on the court. But I'm guessing you there's a lot of fraternizing with the other teams and you have a lot of pals on the other teams. Is that generally the rule in major league sports?
SPEAKER_02Typically, yeah, especially if you went to school with some of your uh your your from former colleagues or you played against them in the at the university college level. I had several friends around the league that I would I would uh catch up with after a game, maybe go over to, you know, go over to their home for home cooking or something like that. Yeah uh or go out on the town to a nice restaurant and just be able to get together like that. Uh that was really, really great to be able to do that. And of course, I had a lot of um extended family relatives. I mean, relatives come out of the woodwork when you start when you get to that point. Yeah. Uh so almost every MBA town, I had a so-called relative. Uh yeah, right. Who would get up?
SPEAKER_03Hey James, you got a couple of tickets for Friday night.
SPEAKER_02That's exactly right. Yeah. So I, you know, I was never one to turn down home cooking, so I I take them up on it.
SPEAKER_03I don't blame you there. That's yeah. So, James, from the lofty highs of uh NBA All-Star and and um, you know, a remarkable career to uh to some losses in your life. Would you would you can you can you take us from one extreme to the other and um share a little bit on how, well, maybe what what you care to share about what happened and uh how you dealt with the pain of it and and what you learned. I know that's a big bite there, but um just wherever it leads you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, you know, life was going very, very well uh throughout my NBA years, especially. I actually played 20 years uh professional basketball after 14 in the NBA, six more years overseas in Europe. So two years in Spain, two years in Italy, two years in great uh Greece. It gave me the opportunity to travel the world to learn about other cultures, other people, other histories, uh, other civilizations, and all those friends in those Mediterranean countries where they'd be so proud of their history, thousands of years of Greek history or Roman, Roman history. And they would they would share it with me and tell me about it and let me know about it. And so I learned. I and I learned to speak the languages also. Wow. Uh became very fluent in Italian and Spanish. Uh Greek was a little bit more of a challenge, but I learned uh, you know, basic uh conversational Greek. And um, so I spent six years overseas. I finally retired from professional basketball in 2000. And so my life was going very well. Um, I had started up my business already, the Donald Donaldson Clinic, which was a physical therapy sports rehabilitation clinic. Uh, I started it up in 1989 after a really serious knee injury in 1988 that um had everyone doubting whether I'd ever play the game again or whether I'd walk normally without a limp or a frozen knee or something like that. I had a rupture of patella tendon. And this is, you know, you you can't play sports without a without a patella tendon that's functioning the way it's supposed to.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Uh the doc the doctors put me all back together again. And after six or eight months of real arduous physical therapy, two or three days a week, two or three hours at a time, uh, I had what's called a light bulb moment. And here I am, 32 years old, old for a basketball player. And thinking, well, if I can't come back and play again, and I had my doubts also, what am I going to do? I mean, I I was a college grad. I had other interests, but I didn't have a plan for my basketball career stopping so suddenly. And so the world of physical therapy came to mind because I was surrounded by these great physical therapists and exercise fizz people, athletics trainers, uh, surgeons, everybody. And like Humpty Dumpty, they put me back together again. Uh, and with all the hard work I put into it, I was able to come back and resume my basketball career for another 10 years on a surgically repaired uh patella tendon. Um, and so that's what got me into the world of physical therapy. And as I'm in the rehabilitation centers, I'm thinking, wow, this is what I want to do. I mean, I want to start up a business of physical therapy, helping other people out with these serious injuries that they may go through and be able to really um give back to the community that way. The Donaldson Clinic was born out of that, and that ran successfully for 28 years until 2018. Uh, and I was, you know, the owner of it. I had my name on it. I we had a big staff of uh 35, 45 employees, multiple locations around Seattle at some point, uh, up to five locations. And it really was going well. And that's really what I took a great amount of pride in doing after my basketball career. So um, so the business was already kind of matured by the time I officially retired from basketball, and I was able to jump into it full time and really devote all my time to it at that point in 2000. So my life's going well. I'm still in great shape. I'm, you know, in the gym five, six days a week, a couple of hours at a time, lifting weights and doing all those things. Uh, I'm running outside jogging with my jogging partners two or three, four days a week, uh, two or three miles at a time, no problem. And uh healthy as can be, uh, you know, vegetarian for 35 years or so, doing doing all the right things, never smoking, never drinking, never taking drugs. And um I was uh really in top-notch shape. And when I hit 57 years of age, which which is not old at all, I don't think, but uh six years ago. Yeah, six years ago for me, I'm out there trying to play a round of golf with my friends. And uh I I came to the golf course that morning just really uh, you know, feeling nauseous, uh, sweating profusely, my back was killing me. And uh I just told the guys, I said, hey, I I don't think I can play today. I think I'm gonna go see my doctor and see what's going on. So I made the 10 or 15 minute drive over to my doctor's office. I don't remember this drive at all, but apparently I did. It was only me in the car. Um, and I got to his uh his office and I vaguely remember seeing the reception counter. This is January 3rd, 2015, uh, and everything went black. Boom. And according to the doctors and the staff, I fell out right there in the reception area and totally blacked out. They did a quick diagnostic scan on me and determined it was my heart that was having an issue, a major issue of uh an aortic uh dissection and uh an aortic uh aneurysm. So it was swelling and swelling to the point of almost bursting. And if that thing would have burst, you get about 10 heartbeats left before you just bleed out on the spot. There's absolutely nothing anybody can do.
SPEAKER_01And so they determined that's what was going on. I still had a thin membrane uh holding the aorta together. Um, and they rushed me by ambulance to the emergency room.
SPEAKER_02I underwent a 12-hour emergency open heart surgery to repair that and woke up after a five-day medically induced coma. I woke up two weeks later with no idea of what had happened to me. Uh, and it took a couple more weeks for me to get regain my senses and to realize where I was and what had happened. And I spent two and a half months in intensive care. And that was the beginning of my serious downward spiral, both physically and mentally. Uh, an accumulation of things over the next two or three years that really took me to the verge of suicide, which I can I'll get into more detail here. Uh so 215, 2015, I was virtually just totally wiped out the whole year. I was flat on my back the rest of the year, trying to recover from the major open art surgery. I was no longer able to be the driving force of my business, and I left it to a management team that I had in place to manage the business for me. They did a fairly good job, as good as good as managers can do, who aren't we who aren't tasked with making the major heavy-duty decisions every day, but they managed things along. Um eventually we started uh you know having cash calls. We were running a little bit low on our reserves, uh, payrolls coming around every couple of weeks. It's 50, 60 grand right away. You gotta pay it, pay everybody. I spent all my NBA life savings, hundreds of thousands of dollars I had saved up, into my business to try to save the business and the 25 employees that I felt very loyal and very obligated to. Um, and that was taking a toll on me, uh, both, you know, especially emotionally and mentally, um and financially. So I had exhausted my savings at some point. But let me take you back to 2016, which was another serious downward spiral. Uh in 2015, I had uh we had the repair of the aorta on the ascending aorta, the one going up.
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_02Uh March of 2016, we repaired the descending aorta, which was uh damaged as well. But there was no way my body would take uh take such stress of trying to repair both both of those in that major surgery. So we did the most serious one first and knew we would have to do the next one uh the next year when I had recovered. Right. So March 2016, I'm back in intensive care for about a month, um, trying to recover, still not back at my business, my work. Uh at this point, uh, you know, I lost my mother. She passed away during that time, uh, kind of unexpectedly. But, you know, when you get an elderly parent, you you know that one day they're most likely, well, they are gonna pass on at some point.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And no matter how you try to prepare for that, you you just can't really prepare. It's just it's such a loss, and uh it's gonna just hit you, and everybody responds differently. Uh also, I was married at the time to a wonderful woman, and she had uh a young boy from a previous marriage who was about 12 or 13 years old. We were married for five years, only five years. So I was a stepdad for five years. Uh, in June of 2016, after I was finally, you know, up and on my feet again after the second surgery, she picked up and just walked out of the marriage without uh any explanation, no notice, no message, nothing. I didn't see anything like this coming. I never thought that this would ever happen to me or to us. Um, to give you a little context, uh, I, you know, during those years, I was doing a lot of work over in China, working with uh international studies. Abroad programs bring in a lot of Chinese students here to the states to go to high school and to the universities around the states. So I had heard, you know, basically just whispers and through the grapevine that, you know, you have to be careful if you marry somebody from one of these countries, uh, an immigrant, who wants to come to the United States, because there's numerous cases of them coming here, getting their green card, getting their U.S.
SPEAKER_01citizenship, and then just abandoning the marriage. I never ever, in my wildest dreams, thought that that would be the case with us, but it turned out to be. Uh, once she got her green card, once the little boy got his green card, they became U.S. citizens. She left the marriage and never looked back, and I've never spoken to her since. Yeah, and this was tough because this was really the beginning of the downward spiral mentally.
SPEAKER_03Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, you know, we handled all the divorce proceedings via email, the divorce attorney and her. I was out of the picture just waiting to countersign on all the documents that she signed off on. Um but for the next uh the next several months, six months, eight months or so, I'm coming home to a big empty house all by myself. The the sound of laughter, of children playing, you know, the boy and his couple of his friends over to the house, uh, home cooked meals on the stove, you know, the great smell of food coming, uh, those were gone. Those were gone. And I'm coming home to an empty house, big house, all by myself, uh, after a long day at work. Now I was still functioning well during my workday. Uh, people never had any idea what was going on. Uh, you know, I still looked fine, I still laughed, still lighthearted, but they had no idea. Um and so I'm coming home, and the nighttime was the worst time because now things are quiet, I'm settled down, I have nothing going on except for my thoughts, and the walls of the house are closing in on me. And this went on for several months uh throughout the summer of 2016, uh, the fall, the winter into 2017. And I just kept on trying to, you know, shake it off and feel like everything is going to be okay. Um and I think I did okay for the most part. But, you know, still some other big impending things were happening. Uh, financially, I was financially strapped. I had spent my life savings, so I'm having trouble keeping up with my mortgage payments, fell way behind on my house mortgage payments. Eventually, the house went into foreclosure and I lost it uh to a short sale and through bankruptcy. Uh and so my whole world was just turned totally upside down. Um I don't know how I how I made it through, other than, you know, I tell folks and I write about it in my book, even with God's grace. I mean, when absolutely nobody else was around, uh, I knew God was there with me. You know, I just I felt his presence. Uh, and of course I asked questions once in a while, why are you putting me through this or why are you allowing me to go through this? Right. And I didn't know the answer at the time. I found out later.
SPEAKER_04But um what was the answer?
SPEAKER_02Well, the answer was as the darkness eventually started lifting at the end of 2018. Uh, now by then I had pulled the plug on my business, so it was over. I had filed for bankruptcy, and it was over. Uh, I had lost my home facing eviction, so it was over. Uh, the darkness started lifting just a little bit at that point, and I could see that I had a reason to still be here, and that was to share my story and to let people know that they can make it through these difficult times, too. You know, uh, God gave me a vision of a foundation, a nonprofit foundation, which I set up. And it was allowing me to go around and speak to school age children, especially, about depression and anxiety, uh, especially middle school and high school students. And so I was doing that before our pandemic shutdown. Um, but that was the reason I think God left me here. He said, James, you got a platform. You know, you're a former athlete, you're a business guy, you're community guy, you're well educated, well-spoken, you're uh larger than life, taller than life. Yes, uh, African-American man, and you can use this platform, and you will use this platform to speak out about mental health awareness and suicide prevention, especially to our communities of color and to our uh men of color, uh, where mental health is such a big, big taboo and big, big stigma. We just won't talk about it and won't acknowledge it.
SPEAKER_03So we have a why do you think that is, James?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think a lot of our communities of color have been so so so uh you know directed by their faith, uh, which is good, you know, prayer is good, God works, but God also gives us the you know the intelligence and the wisdom to make good choices, which is to reach out for help.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_02And so I think sometimes we get so bound to our traditional faith of saying, God will take care of me, I'm gonna pray about it, when you actually need some medical attention. You might need some medication, you might need some behavior health counselor, you might need all kinds of things that are readily available, but if you're not going to go there because of the fear of what people may say or what your community community may think, you're not gonna do that. Um, I know in our in our black community growing up, I mean, just talking and casual fun with each other, you know, we can easily, you know, cut our eyes at a glance to somebody and say, you crazy.
SPEAKER_01You crazy, man, you're crazy.
SPEAKER_02You know, even though that doesn't really, you know, hurt you at that point, it still stings a little bit when somebody calls you crazy. Yeah. And then when you do come down with mental health issues, the last thing you're gonna get you're gonna do is let anybody know that you might be crazy. I I think crazy, you know, facetiously, but you might have mental health challenges. So that's a big, big reason why communities of color.
SPEAKER_01I'm talking about black communities, brown communities, Native Americans, especially, uh, Asians, especially, they we just just will not talk about this thing, especially the men.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well, I and I and I guess as a man, I'm I'm thinking of male pride to a certain degree and thinking we can handle anything. And I'm also thinking, um, you know, in in communities of color, maybe maybe there hasn't been the the resources, the funds available to have the luxury, if you will, of of having, you know, that kind of counseling. Maybe it's out of reach. I mean, you, you know, it's uh there's basic needs, and perhaps this is something that is just more difficult.
SPEAKER_02Right. It's still it's still relatively new and coming to the communities of color. Uh, you know, I had a behavior health counselor that my doctor assigned to me, but I found out with working with behavior health and mental health professionals that less than 2% nationwide are mental health professionals of color.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Uh I'm talking about all every ethnic group is in that little 2%. So it's a lily white profession.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02And you know, many times they have no idea how to relate culturally to somebody who's of a different ethnicity. I had the same issue with my behavior health counselor. I had uh you know, a young, you know, mid-20 something-year-old uh Caucasian gal who had just graduated and just started practicing. She knew absolutely nothing about you know me and my culture. Uh alone me, let alone me being an older man compared to compared to her. She had no idea about you know African American communities.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, of your life experience, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely not. I mean, her best advice to me, and I say that kind of uh you know, uh tongue in cheek, was to go home and count sheep every night so I can get to sleep. I'm like, come on. Yeah, I I need I need hundreds of thousands of dollars to put into my business. That's what I need, you know. So she couldn't relate to that.
SPEAKER_03Did you have an issue of faith during this time at all? Did you did you uh lose your connection with God? I guess they call it the the dark night of the soul, or uh have doubts about God's provision?
SPEAKER_02No, um, no, that's the one thing that stayed intact throughout. Um, I was still going to church every Sunday. I still looked apart and acted the part. Everything looked great on the outside, but on the inside, you know, as we say, I was tore up from the floor up. Uh, people had no idea what I was going through. And so um, you know, I want to take you back to 2018. So I pulled the plug on my business. Uh the holiday season of 2017, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, this was the absolute worst time. I really did not think I was going to make it through that month of the holidays at that time of year. I'm totally alone. Everyone's busy with holiday, you know, festivities and things. Uh, I couldn't sleep through the night to save my life. I'm waking up every night at two or three in the morning, uh, couldn't get back to sleep. And then I that's when I realized something was seriously wrong. But I just couldn't sleep and I couldn't get back to sleep. And my mind is racing 100 miles an hour, you know, with only with only two tracks or two thoughts. One, how to get more money together for my business. Right. And by now I'm going down this this you know, seedy, shady world of you know, hard money lending and high interest rates and loan sharks, um, whatever. Wherever I could find money, I was trying to get it. Uh and the other thought was how to exit this world. And I started putting plans together of ways to uh you know end my life and commit suicide. I had three or four different plans all mapped out, all ready to go. And then an impulsive voice uh started coming into my mind. And I'm not an impulsive guy by nature, I'm very thoughtful, very methodical, very plotting, you know. Um, but that impulsiveness really scared me because it would tell me on occasion, just go ahead and do it. You you got your plans already mapped out. Go ahead and do it. Do it, do it. And I'm like, whoa, this is getting scary now. And so at that point I knew something was really wrong with me. And that's when I reached out to my medical family physician to see if he could help me. Uh, and I thought I was just having a sleeping disorder. Maybe he'd give me a sleeping pill and I'll get through the night after talking to him. And luckily, luckily for me, he was a very uh compassionate, intuitive, uh, inquisitive kind of doctor. And he took the time, an extra 15 minutes or so, his appointments are backing up on him. But he said, Hey, let me hear what's going on and let's talk about it. And he, and on the spot, after all of that, he said, James, you have got depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideations. Seriously, and we need to get you some help right now. So that was, you know, right at the beginning of 2018. Um, so I made it through Thanksgiving, I made it through Christmas. It was tough, tough, tough thing to do. Right. Um, and also at that time, uh a young student athlete at my alma mater, Washington State University, named Tyler Helensky, uh, who was the heir apparent to be the starting quarterback on the football team, took his life in January 2018 on campus.
SPEAKER_03Yes, I remember that.
SPEAKER_02Whoa, that that shook me to my core. I mean, it just grabbed me and said, hey, James, you gotta you gotta work your way through this thing. Um, mainly because people were running around the next several days, couple of weeks, trying to tell Tyler's story, how great a kid he was, why they didn't see this coming. How come he didn't tell anybody? And I didn't want that to be me and my story. I I was bound and determined at that point to make it through this thing so I could tell my story. And that's when, you know, after another 10 months of total darkness, the darkness started lifting a little bit, and God revealed to me, James, you've got a platform. You go out and tell your story and help us help as many people as you can.
SPEAKER_03Right, right. And and um uh is your book written kind of targeted, I'm sure, to a lot of people that are suffering this way, but it seems like you have a special heart for kids. Is that is that true?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, I really do. Um, you know, here in the state of Washington, we we lose two school age kids every single day to suicide. Um excuse me. And these are kids between the ages of eight and eighteen. And if you can imagine an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old having suicidal thoughts, but as I was going around to some schools before the pandemic shutdown, uh, I'd be in front of an assembly of four or five hundred kids, and invariably, each and every time, there'd be four or five kids who would come up and talk to me, pull me aside individually. They didn't want the other kids to hear. Yeah, and they would tell me, you know, I'm suicidal right now, and I don't know how I'm gonna make it through the night.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02You know, a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old.
SPEAKER_03It's heartbreaking, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02Yes, and so I couldn't do much except, you know, identify the kid to the to the school principal and ask them to keep an eye on this kid. Several of the kids I exchanged uh, you know, my secondary phone number with uh so they can text me and call me. We did that for several weeks after each one of these appearances. Um and then I made sure they were on solid ground and you know, continued to encourage them to hang in there. So, yes, my main focus group is our young, our young children, uh, middle school and high school kids. And the other focus group is working with our men, trying to get men to realize it's okay to ask for help. It's it's okay to let your ego down, get take it out of the way, and reach out to your loved ones, let them know what you're going through, to your wife, to your significant others.
SPEAKER_01You guys, we have to do this because so many of us suffer alone, or we get into self-destructive behaviors of drinking and drugs and promiscuity and crazy gambling, crazy stuff that we do that is just very self-destructive because it takes us away from the pain temporarily, but that pain is still waiting for you as soon as you go back.
SPEAKER_03Right, right. So, uh, celebrating the gift of life from suicide to purpose and joy. That's the book. And I'm sure there's a lot of uh helpful information in there and resources, I'm trusting, as well. Yeah. For people that are hearing this and and thinking, um, you know, uh this might apply to someone who needs to read it. Um, we can all benefit, all benefit from this. Well, just because of time, I'd like to shift a little bit to um you running for mayor of Seattle. Um yeah. Tell me, tell me like your number one purpose that um you have for being what would what would be like your the number one item on your platform?
SPEAKER_02I I think the thing that helped me to work through my uh you know, my dark, dark valley of darkness, I call it, is that during that time I had totally lost my purpose, uh, my reason for living. Uh there was no tomorrow, there was no hope, it was hopelessness. And it wasn't until I regained a purpose, and that was starting up my nonprofit foundation. And that was my purpose now. This was my next chapter of life that I wanted to really embark upon. And another purpose was, you know, looking around at our city of Seattle and realizing that wow, we we are in a in a bad way with our elected officials and people trying to speak for them, uh, for our for our population here. Um, I've always been interested in politics. I've run a couple of times before.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_02And so I stay involved with everything that's going around town. And so uh that's what really motivated me. Uh, and I added it to my array of purposes that I still have to still be here. Uh during last summer of 2020, we had the so-called summer of love, we call it up here, which was a disaster. It really motivated me to say, okay, that's enough. Let me get involved with this thing, bring some real good, clear-headed, common sense leadership to our elected official positions. And so I went ahead then at that point to start thinking about running for mayor and put together a team, a campaign team that's going to help me do that. And so we're right in the middle of all that now. And uh, I think that we have a message that resonates for the vast majority of our, I call them our non-vocal majority of residents around Seattle who just won't speak up. But they're miserable and they're angry and they're frustrated. And I say, okay, I'll be your voice, you guys. Come on.
SPEAKER_03What's like the number one issue that you think that we need to address first?
SPEAKER_02Well, uh, my my campaign has a kind of a three-prong issue uh approach. The first one I really want to do, because I'm a former business person myself, is to revitalize our downtown business core. Uh, downtown is a ghost town. I don't know if you know Seattle or not, but oh yeah. It is all boarded up, graffiti everywhere, garbage, trash. Uh, it's just terrible and terrible. Uh vacant buildings everywhere. So to revitalize our downtown business core, which means helping our, you know, our big businesses feel safe about bringing their employees back one of these days, but also helping our small businesses stay in business and keep them going. Uh, get our tourism back. Uh the tour boat cruise industry has been canceled in the last couple of years. But the next year, you know, these are tens and tens of millions of dollars of tourist dollars that come into Seattle every single summer. So I want that's my that's my first approach. My second is to regain our trust in our law enforcement. Um, our crazy elected officials here are continuing to defund the police and to strip them down to barely nothing anymore. Uh, we've lost 200 police officers in 2020 alone, and another 70 officers already in 2021. Uh, we can't we can't afford dissetion. I mean, who wants to be a police officer anymore when you don't have the support of the city council or the mayor and the media? Everybody's really jumping on on your case every single time. So I want to restore our police department. I'm a big proponent of training and ongoing training, continued training. When I was a professional athlete, we trained every single day, you know, and I was never perfect, you know. I always still made mistakes, but we trained and we trained. So the same with the police officers, they need to be training, training, training. I want to take them off the beat uh a couple of weeks every quarter, sit in the classroom, de stress, see a mental health counselor, get some additional training. So those are the things I want to do with the police. And I've got their support and their backing already. The third big issue is homelessness. Uh, we have such a lenient government here. Uh City officials who just let the homeless roam all over town, camp anywhere they want to. And it not only looks terrible, it's very unsafe for a lot of our neighborhoods and our young children, especially. So that's my next thing is to round up our homeless folks, put them into shelters. There's a lot of buildings now that are that are near empty or abandoned. Let the city pick those buildings up, and these will be places that we can house the homeless and finally get them off the streets. So and mental health issues are a big problem with the homeless. So I think uh with me having my story and my compassion and empathy for anybody going through any kind of mental health challenges, uh, is going to resonate very well with our Seattle electorate.
SPEAKER_03Right. Certainly, one of the issues uh last summer uh was the Black Lives Matter issue. Do you think that racism has made any progress in the last couple of years? Do you think we're we're any any better off uh now? Uh I mean, a lot has been exposed, but but are we are we any better off now than we were in 2019?
SPEAKER_02Well, I I think our society is making race an issue much, much larger, much more significant than it needs to be. Uh, I don't think that we live in a racist society. I I know there are racist individuals who live in our society, but overall, I don't think that that we have such a thing as systemic racism that is in every institution there. You know, it's the people who make up these institutions. And some of them, yes, they have issues with race. We need to weed them out or to train them or to identify them and to make sure that uh, you know, those situations get taken care of. But I think we live in a in an America now that race is less of a significant factor than ever before. Uh the opportunities that are there for every ethnic group are uh, you know, just abound. Uh all we need to do is be able to, you know, walk through those doors that we were reluctant to walk through before, apply for the jobs, apply for the position, and you know, be qualified. And we're much more likely to get those positions now than ever before in our history. Uh education is a big key with me, it always has been. And so we need to educate ourselves. Uh, I had a conversation the other day with a uh African-American group here in Seattle that I'm a member of for the last 30 years. And I told him, I said, you know, our group, you know, the reason nobody knows who we are and what we do, and we focus on education is because we've become passe and we've become irrelevant. You know, we we have our bars set too low. We're congratulating kids just for graduating from high school. You know, we have a 50% dropout rate in high school around the state of Washington for kids of color. So it's no big deal to graduate from high school. And you can't compete in today's modern world with a high school degree. Uh, all these kids I help come from China, uh, and the kids coming from India are taking all the high-tech jobs and going to the best schools. All these kids flooding across the border right now will be taking the non-skilled low-wage jobs, uh, even though it may be a $15 an hour minimum wage. Employers are going to pay them under the table $6, $7 an hour. They'll take it. And that knocks our brown and black kids out of the picture. We're not qualified. So we need to do a better job and not be so dependent on the government and not be a victim. This victim mentality drives me crazy. I could have easily been a victim with all the things I went through, but I refuse to be a victim. I said, hey, I can get through this, I can overcome this, I can be better, and I feel like I'm better than ever before because I have these real life experiences now that I didn't have before.
SPEAKER_03I understand that in your book, one of the uh work pages is where you list people that you feel are making you a victim or your associated victimhood with, and then on a scale of uh one to a hundred, yeah, how much am I responsible for? How much are they responsible for? And try to quantify it that way. That's right.
SPEAKER_02You know, I think we yeah, I think when we get away from our mob mentality and sit there as an individual and be honest with ourselves, that's when we can start really evaluating who we are and where we are.
SPEAKER_03James, I got a uh yeah, I got a couple more questions to ask you just for time's sake. Sure. Um uh first of all, um uh give me the inside scoop on when the sonics are gonna be back. Give me give me some news here. Oh wow, wow. I'm a huge Sonics fan and I miss them dearly.
SPEAKER_02We you know it will be in our lifetime. How about that? You're not hearing anything on the down low that uh that you can share with us? Absolutely nothing. It's been so quiet. Uh they've got this remodeled key arena for the NHL ready to go. That's a good sign. Yeah, but have you been up on Queen Anne lately? They're the way they keep they keep putting these streets on a road diet, they narrow them down to one lane now. Uh Queen Anne Avenue is one lane now, trying to get off Queen Anne. Uh it's it's gonna be a nightmare trying to get any kind of crowd in and out of there. Yeah, so it's just not built. And the NBA has told me before, uh, as I was a board of director for our NBA Retired Players Association, Adam Silver told me personally that that remade key arena will not work for the NBA. We need we need to have something better. And so I know Chris Hansen and Wally Walker are still planning on building their arena in Soto. They are, which yes, from what I heard from Wally Walker uh a year or so ago. So that's what we need. And with that, I think five five to ten years maybe the Sonics can finally come back. We've we've been missing them so much.
SPEAKER_03For sure. So, okay, so if you could have dinner with anybody in history, now Jesus is off the Jesus is not at the table on this one, okay. Um, uh, who would you like to spend an evening with?
SPEAKER_02Well, it's a great question. Uh I would love to spend the evening with Martin Luther King Jr. Uh I'm I'm a student of Martin Luther King and all the work that he did, and how he can continue to have that faith and that love for humanity, the love for people who oppressed him, who hated him, uh, and who took his life eventually. He had such great love, and he kept saying that love is the way, uh, nonviolent resistance. And we don't we see anything but that now on the streets out here. Everything is violent and and protesting resistible.
SPEAKER_03But Martin Luther King would be my guy. You know, uh his his word, content of your character, just rings and rings with me. And uh certainly I don't have the experience, you know, coming from his um life experience, but but still, for anybody, the content of your character is so important. And and uh yeah, that that just rings in my ear.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and we're getting so far, we're getting so far away from that now where everything is based on the color of your skin, and it shouldn't be, it should not be.
SPEAKER_03Um, if you could relive one day of your life, is there one day that you'd like to have over again?
SPEAKER_02Wow, that that's a really, really good question. Uh wow. Well, you know, I was kind of a shy, introverted kid coming out of high school. And uh against and and and causing great pain to my parents, I refused to go to my high school graduation. And they really, really wanted me to go. And I just wouldn't go. I just wouldn't do it. Uh I was shy, I was very introverted, I didn't like attention, even though I was 6'9, 6'10, 6'11, uh, walking across the stage in a gown and a hat and getting my diploma. I just couldn't envision myself doing that. And so I forcefully told my parents I'm not gonna go and stood up to them for the first time. Uh I would have been the first in my family to, you know, graduate from high school. And my parents didn't. They had GEDs and those kind of things. Uh so I just wouldn't do it. And so I'd love to have that opportunity to redo that and to make them even more proud than they than they have been of me anyway. Oh, I'm sure they're plenty proud of you. Yeah, but you know, you hate to disappoint uh your parents and the people you love.
SPEAKER_03I I just want to thank you so much for being our guest today on Amazing GREATES. And again, the book, Celebrating the Gift of Life from Suicide to Purpose and Joy. Also want to make sure Oh, you go ahead.
SPEAKER_02I I want to say a place where you can get it and have me personally inscribe it for you and put my name on it is directly through my website, celebrating your gift of life.com. If you buy it on Amazon and Barnes Noble, they're not going to sign it for you. They can care less. Buy it directly from me, I'll sign it. We'll stay in touch. You've got my email address, I'll have your email address, and we'll we'll keep on on this journey together.
SPEAKER_03Ah, that's a great note. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, I'd also like to thank George Tolls, Rick Hansen, Clem Daniels. These guys are wiring all this together for us. And uh James Donaldson, thank you again. Thank you. You're very amazing. Great to meet you. Have a wonderful day.
