Court McGee, bloodied here in a fight last year, has been sober since 2006, a year after he overdosed on heroin and was left clinically dead. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
McGee weighed in Tuesday for his big fight against Robert Whittaker on Wednesday night in Indianapolis. (Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)
Court McGee’s body was limp and lifeless on the bathroom floor. His cousin tried to pry the door open, but McGee was wedged between it and the toilet.
In shock, McGee’s cousin called her uncle – McGee’s father – pleading for help. Court McGee had just overdosed on heroin. He was clinically dead.
“I consciously made a decision to tell her, ‘I don’t know,’” his dad Ron said. “Because I’d had it.”
That was rock bottom. Today, McGee is lucky to be alive. No longer a junkie, the 28-year-old is a successful UFC fighter who spreads his anti-addiction message to anyone who’ll listen. But that night in 2005 he was just another statistic, dead on the dirty bathroom floor of a trailer.
Paramedics rushed to the scene, performed CPR and applied a defibrillator. Those methods didn’t work until a police officer who responded saw the syringe and told the EMTs it was an overdose. Then McGee was injected with an opioid antagonist, which worked to reverse the effects of the heroin and he was resuscitated.
“If that cop wasn’t on duty that night, there’s a possibility I wouldn’t be here,” McGee said. “There’s a lot of things that could have happened that didn’t. … I was given a second chance at life.”
Before that, he had thrown all of it away. McGee started with alcohol and that escalated to prescription drugs after a surgery. When that wasn’t enough, he began snorting pain pills.
His addiction caused his high school sweetheart, Chelsea, to leave him and he lost his job at an excavating company. His parents kicked him out of their home and Ron said they even had to put a lock on their bedroom door “so he wouldn’t go snooping around in there.” McGee was in and out of jail on multiple charges.
“I was strung out, the heroin addict, the drunk, the liar, the cheat, the thief,” McGee said. “That’s who I thought I was. I never thought I was going to amount to nothing.”
And that was just the beginning. Instead of turning his life around then, McGee fell into an even darker place. He began using heroin.
“I didn’t have any direction in my life,” McGee said. “I was miserable. Heroin took that pain away. Once I did it, I was hooked. I said this is my friend now. This took care of all my problems.”
Until it nearly ended his life for good. Then the slow recovery process came – and not without relapses. McGee fell back into substance abuse three more times, including five months after the overdose when he had a sip of a Long Island Iced Tea in Las Vegas and the next thing he remembers is waking up four days later in Iowa with no pants on foraging for crystal meth.
But now McGee has not had a drink or used a drug since April 16, 2006. Chelsea eventually returned and is now his wife. They have two kids together. His family trusts him again and the father who once gave up on him is in Indianapolis for his big fight against Robert Whittaker on Wednesday at UFC Fight Night (FOX Sports 1, 8 p.m.).
“It took me a year to get over that I felt bad enough about it that it was time to let him go,” Ron said. … “It does make me proud that he’s come along how he has and how much he helps other people.”
McGee is 4-2 in the UFC and could become a welterweight championship contender with a win Wednesday. But a title shot is far from his mind. Using his profile as a professional athlete to tell his story is far more important – for him and those going through what he did not long ago.
“He’s found a way out of it and he understands how miserable these people are that are stuck in this cycle of addiction,” Chelsea said.
When the two dated a decade ago, Chelsea never realized how deep into drugs her boyfriend really was. McGee just didn’t know a way out, he didn’t know where to turn for help. He’s hoping people look at him as an example that things can change for the better.
After getting clean, the Utah native went back to help coach his old high school wrestling team, then took up Brazilian jiu jitsu and boxing. Before long he was winning pro MMA fights and in 2010 he won the UFC’s “Ultimate Fighter” reality show.
Along the way, he’s told his comeback story, intent on touching as many addicts as he can.
“My job now is to carry the message to people who struggle out there,” McGee said. “My job allows me to do that and it allows me to be a dad. It allows me to be all these things I never thought I could be.”