Racing motocross I have broken twenty-three bones. I’ve been in and out of recovery and rehabilitation. Every time I have shaken it off, but every time losing a little bit of myself. My partner and I licensed the Hustler Clothing line. We did that for three years. We started with nothing. In our first six months, we sold a million and a half dollars worth of T-shirts. I was the president of Hustler Clothing for the next four years. The business exploded. I had sales reps. A dozen domestically and licenses all over the world. At a pretty young age (late twenties, early thirties) I just had far more freedom than I ever thought possible but yet still felt trapped. It seemed like the more money I made, the less likely it would ever be that I would ever have another lifestyle or anything away from the culture that I was in.
During that time, I felt something tugging at my soul, and I didn’t know what it was. That deep down, this just isn’t right. The drug and alcohol abuse sped up so to speak. I had another severe motocross injury in 2005. My world literally came crashing down. My femur broke…my tibia, my fibula, and my ACL. I was life flighted to a little county hospital in Venturo, where I laid there for a week. They did an emergency fasciotomy on my leg. Some of the best physicians and technical people in the world did immediate blood transfusions and basically saved my life. I remember praying to God during that time that, “If you want me to quit drinking and you want me to get better, then you’re going to have to take control of the situation because I can’t.”
A friend and I had purchased some drag racing cars in California. We thought that since his family is from Tennessee that we could move back here and, in a sense, start over. It was also during this time that I was making inroads to the start of a new life. I got a neighbor who sold fences by the name of Chris McDaniel. I had never met anybody like this guy before. He pulls up in this butternut yellow Dodge truck and screeches to a halt, jumps out and tells me that we’re going to be best friends. We’re going to fish and hang out. I didn’t know what he was on, but I was skeptical.
He started talking about Jesus and some of the trials that he had been through in his life and early on we were closely akin to each other. He had lost a brother to a drug overdose. He himself had walked in darkness a lot of years. So I thought if somebody could go through that much pain and suffering and have that much joy in their life, there’s got to be something bigger. I had a searching heart. I did some consulting work back to Hustler, and I had just gotten the notification that my position was being terminated unless I moved back. I started looking at my Bible, and I started reading through it. I called my friend Chris on the phone and was in tears. I said, “Man, I’m pretty much at the end of myself, and I don’t know what else to do.” He convinced me that at that point there was only one thing that I could do., which was to give my life to the Lord. Chris recited the sinner’s prayer over the phone, and I prayed that prayer together with him and that’s when I accepted the Lord.
I publically stepped out the following Sunday and walked down the aisle to one of the church deacons and publically prayed and confessed my faith. It was a couple of weeks later that I followed through in obedience and was baptized. When Christ comes into your heart, you are filled with a desire to want to help people and to love them and to step outside of yourself, that there’s a bigger purpose to life than me and what my desires are.
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