On Aug. 2, Lee’s father and stepmother found him on the floor of their basement. He hadn’t responded when they called him for dinner, so they went searching for their son.

The 31-year-old’s skin was blue and he had no pulse.

“I gave him CPR until the paramedics got there. He got a shot of Narcan that revived him,” recalls his father, Bob. “We had the scare of a lifetime.”

Lee, who didn’t want his last name used for this story, had overdosed on what he thought was heroin. It turned out to be lethal Fentanyl, making it even more miraculous that he survived.

The near-death experience was the scariest of his adult life, which has been marked by multiple rehab stays and possession-related arrests instead of typical milestones like a career and marriage.

Until that fateful summer day, he had been clean for seven months. But for more than a decade, the former high-school athlete struggled with opioid addiction. And when he looks back at the root of his devastating drug use, he offers a shockingly innocent source: an injury on the football field.

“I broke my ankle my sophomore year in high school during a football game. The doctor wrote me a prescription for 90 10-milligram Percocet pills,” says Lee, who is currently undergoing a 12-step program at St. Christopher’s Inn in Garrison, NY. “Then and there, I loved the feeling of it.”

In the span of a few years, he went from gregarious jock to junkie. His love of sports was usurped by addiction. He’d shop for doctors who would prescribe him pills because of phony MRIs he printed out from the Internet, and then began snorting and eventually shooting heroin. Experts say Lee’s story isn’t unique.

Professional athletes such as former Boston Celtics NBA star Chris Herren have gone public with heroin use that began with painkillers.

At St. Christopher’s Inn, the number of heroin addicts who started with pills to combat a sports injury can, at times, account for 20 percent of them. Program director David Gerber is all too familiar with the narrative.

“We’re seeing an awful lot of competitive kids who get these injuries and they get these pills,” Gerber says. “The pills help them stay on the field and do nothing to treat the injury; they’re masking the pain. The euphoric effect is what they remember. The season is over and they’re still taking the pills and the desire [to get high] begins to outweigh the desire to play the sport.”

Dr. Michael A. Kelly, chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, travels the country lecturing about opioids, which have caused 64,000 overdose deaths in 2016 alone, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

“The number of kids getting in trouble with opioids, who used pills post-op for a sports injury, is ridiculous,” says Kelly. “The stories I have heard in the last few years are just heartbreaking.”

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This spring, the crisis compelled Harford County, Md., to erect a billboard featuring a young soccer player and emblazoned with the warning, “Treating injuries with prescription painkillers can lead to heroin addiction. Don’t let your athlete become addicted.”

If only Lee’s parents had known the dangers.

Always taller and bigger than his classmates, Lee — now 6-foot-4 — naturally gravitated toward sports. In Little League, the hulking youngster had a powerful pitching arm and his father fondly calls him “the Mariano Rivera of his day.” He played defensive end on his football team at Tuckahoe High School in Eastchester, NY, and also pitched and played third base for the baseball team.

“Sports were my childhood,” says Lee, who loved attending Yankee games with his dad. “I was on travel teams, and I played baseball in Florida during the summer. It was really something I wanted to do.”

He admits to smoking marijuana and drinking in high school, and initially thought of the pain pills as a harmless accessory to his partying repertoire. But by his senior year, he started skipping football practice and was skipping school.

“Sports weren’t a priority anymore,” he says. “Partying and being the big man on campus was the priority. It always bothered me because I knew I had potential.”

His parents say that even though he was popping pills, he didn’t lose the charming demeanor and sense of humor for which he was known.

“We didn’t even know that he was taking pills in high school,” says his father. “We thought he was just smoking marijuana and would straighten out. A lot of kids on drugs become nasty, but not Lee. He was always respectful and enjoyed spending time with the family.”

Lee didn’t graduate from high school because he had skipped so many days, but he passed his high-school equivalency test and briefly attended the State University of New York at Cobleskill.

But that didn’t last long. “I was taking pills all day,” he says. “I failed out.”

He began working in the cash-heavy catering business, which only fueled his habit. He was snorting about 10 $20 pills a day and couldn’t pay his rent.

“I would download all the movies I could in a two-week span, so I’d have movies to watch when the cable went out,” he says.

Yet he still had one rule: No heroin.

“I had that typical [impression of], ‘Oh my God, heroin. Stay away from that guy.’ It wasn’t until someone put it in my face and was like, ‘This is only $10 and it equals three pills.’ That was it.”

When he was 25, he snorted it in his friend’s bedroom. He soon moved on to injecting it with a fellow prisoner he met during a three-day jail stint after being arrested in Hackensack, NJ, for drug possession.

“When I was in jail, I only made more connections. I learned how to further damage my body. I don’t blame anyone. I made the choice. My problem with my drug use [was] that my tolerance would go sky-high,” says Lee, admitting that he took the same hard-core approach to heroin that he did with sports: “It was all or nothing.”

“It’s crazy how smart you think you are,” he says, revealing that he’d come home with visible track marks on his arms. “When I was using intravenously, I was unemployed and telling my mom, ‘I got an injury helping somebody move something.’ But she knew.”

Dr. Christopher Gharibo, a pain-management doctor at NYU Langone Medical Center, says there was a naiveté about opioid use until about seven years ago.

“It’s a very big issue now,” he says. “We began to wake up in 2010 — back then it was known as the opioid era. We know now: There is no pain-free recovery. We are now focusing on functional restoration.”

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Authorities have tried to curb the prescribing of painkillers. In February, Chris Christie signed a bill that would limit initial prescriptions to a five-day supply. New York enacted a seven-day limit in 2016.

Dr. Gharibo sees at least one opioid-addicted athlete a week, but he’s hopeful these measures, along with the news cycle, chip away at these numbers.
He advises parents to advocate for their children by attending all doctors’ appointments and questioning the doctor about prescriptions.

Lee’s father takes those sentiments even further.

“At all costs just avoid taking any of the pain medications. It really is the start,” he says. “It’s such a platform for future drug use. Especially for kids, who are so vulnerable.”

But parents shouldn’t pull their kids out of their sneakers and cleats.

Phil Veliz — a research assistant professor at the University of Michigan — finds that playing sports generally deters kids from using nonmedical opioids.

“However, athletes who participate in high-contact sports — like ice hockey, football and wrestling — are more likely to get injured and may self-medicate with substances to relieve pain,” adds Veliz.

The past five years have been a blur for both Lee and his family, but they are hopeful that being at St. Christopher’s Inn — where recovery is fused with faith — will change Lee’s path.

“Spirituality is very important. There’s a reason I came back to life. There’s a reason I’m here after the last five years,” Lee says, adding, “I’m finally ready to move on with my life.”