These battered hands are all you own
This broken heart has turned to stone
Go hang your glory on the wall
There comes a time when castles fall
And all that’s left is shifting in the sand
— Elton John, Measure of a Man
A cold, raw rain collapses from the sky on a dreary April afternoon as Nick Correia stands outside Newport Creamery in Fall River.
No coat. No phone. His meager belongings flung over his shoulder in a plastic trash bag. He’s 31 years old. He has six dollars.
Listen: This Day In History
He crosses the parking lot, shuffling into McDonald’s where he uses his life savings on a hamburger and a cup of Hi-C orange. He sits. Dripping. Eating. Thinking.
Moments earlier he’d stormed out of High Point detox, his rage fueled by a desire for the dose of methadone they wouldn’t give him and a couple of jabronis who had been talking tough while watching the ESPN 30 For 30 documentary “Unguarded” about the life of Chris Herren.
Correia’s anger simmers. The Herren Foundation had paid for his rehab.
Back at the desk, he’s demanding methadone.
“I told you I’m sick!” he steams. “I want it.”
They take his vitals. Say he doesn’t need it yet.
“Get me my bags, I’m out.”
His last line of heroin had been at 4 a.m. that morning. He tosses his burger wrapper and starts walking. After a few turns, he finds himself on Meridian Street, where his grandparent’s old home sits, abandoned.
As a kid, Nick came here on Sundays, when his grandma would serve up a big meal and his grandfather would take him on walks with his cousins. These memories hail from a life that seems separate from his own.
He finds refuge from the rain in the old barn.
“What if I just live here? If I can find a way to get heroin, I can live here.”
His mind races. His aunt had dropped him off at detox at 8 a.m. that morning and had undoubtedly gotten a call when he’d left so abruptly. No one knows where he is. His mother must be worried. The weight of guilt descends on his shoulders, heavier than any barbell he’s ever hoisted.
He walks back out in the rain. Trudges back to Newport Creamery. Asks to use their phone. His mom picks up.
“Please pick me up,” he begs. “I don’t feel good. I can’t go there. I’ll figure it out.”
It’s Saturday. He promises he’ll be back in rehab on Tuesday. She comes to get him, driving quietly back to their house in Freetown.
In his room is a statue of Baby Jesus. He falls to his knees. Salty tears replace the raindrops running down his face.
“God, please help me,” he prays. “I don’t want to do this anymore. Why can’t I quit? What’s happened to my life? Why can’t I live a normal life?”
You’re out of time, you’re out of place
Look at your face
That’s the measure of a man
The sun is shining through the new windows of the New Bedford High Fitness center on a balmy Tuesday afternoon. About 40 Whaler football players are splayed across the floor, stretching.
In front of them Nick Correia stands, commanding their attention.
His red “Whalers are Coming” T-shirt is stretched over commanding biceps, a red New Bedford hat covering that small bald spot emerging on the back of his head, but you’d never know it behind his full, fire-engine beard.
It’s been a little over a year since Nick started working out Mark DeBrito’s football team, and the gains are evident.
Sophomore Shomari Jefferson weighs just 136 pounds. A year ago he was squatting 185 pounds. Now he squats 385.
Junior quarterback Tru Williams has increased his squat from 380 pounds to 515.
“He’s a great guy,” Williams says earnestly. “He does a lot for us on and off the field. In the weight room he pushes us. He cares a lot. I’d like to thank him for that.”
Wide receiver Barron Hilton is squatting 160 pounds more than a year ago. Lineman Carlos Alves has increased his squat by 180 pounds and his bench press and clean lift by 60 pounds each.
“He motivates me,” says Alves, using everyone’s favorite word to describe Nick. “He pushes me to my fullest. He’s always believed in me and never doubted.”
Nick paces the room, checking in on stations, delivering goosebump soliloquies on Whaler pride.
“He puts a fire in our belly,” says lineman Anthony Soares, who has increased his three main lifts by a combined 140 pounds. “But he cares more about personal growth. He’s been in this awhile and has that Whaler pride. Since we started working out with him it’s been different.”
But it was sophomore backup quarterback Ethan Medeiros, who has added 160 pounds to his squat, who put it best.
“Not many people believe in the New Bedford program. He does. It’s nice to see that.”
This coat that fits you like a glove
These dirty streets you learned to love
So welcome back my long lost friend
You’ve been to hell and back again
God alone knows how you crossed that span
The house Nick Correia grew up in was once the first stagecoach stop in New Bedford. His father, Arthur, a Vietnam veteran and Purple Heart recipient who is built like a fire hydrant at 5-foot-6 and 270 pounds, spent 25 years working for the New Bedford Public Schools maintenance department. His mother, Dorothea, was a teacher at Pulaski for 37 years. They all lived near Cafe Roma in the North End.
Dorothea’s sister was married to New Bedford High basketball coach Ed Rodrigues, and Nick was 8 years old when he went to his first New Bedford vs. Durfee game in 1989. Two-time state Player of the Year Mike Herren was suiting up for the Hilltoppers and Nick went with his grandmother, an old Greek woman with an affinity for hoops, and the legendary Amy Goncalves.
“You walk into this place and you feel like you’re in an NBA game,” Nick recalls. “Those guys were larger than life. I didn’t miss a game after that.”
Nick loved sports. He started playing football in third grade and joined his first CYO basketball team in sixth grade. Before that there were legendary 1-on-1 games in his uncle’s driveway, the hoop lowered to seven feet.
“They’d be dunking,” recalls Brian’s cousin Ryan Rodrigues, a former New Bedford star who now serves as an assistant coach at Wareham. “He just loved sports. He was never the greatest athlete, but he tried 120 percent.”
That was evident by his junior year when he decided not to go out for basketball; he likely would have served as one of the last guys off the bench. He played varsity football as a senior and spent one semester on the team at Western New England as a tight end and defensive tackle.
Before his senior year he’d picked up a new passion: Weightlifting. Still scarred by bullying he went through as a short and chubby seventh grader, he had his dad — who rumor held could bench 500 pounds — dust off some old barbells from the basement.
“I started lifting and I liked it,” he says. He joined Gold’s Gym as a freshman. He started noticing his shirts fit better. People paid him a little more attention. Then he discovered creatine and protein powders and packed on 40 pounds of muscle.
His new physique came accompanied by a newfound status that led to a blossoming social life. He took his first drink as a sophomore. Smoked weed and ate psychedelic mushrooms by the time he graduated in 1999.
“Partying was my thing,” he says now. “I noticed when I drank and partied and I was blacking out, I got a lot of attention. I was one of the cool guys. I liked it.”
He lasted just one semester at Western New England, graduating to harder drugs like cocaine and oxycodone. He never missed a practice, despite a sports hernia, yet he rarely lived up to his other responsibilities.
“I never made it to class,” he says. “Never. I didn’t care. I thought it was a joke.”
He spent a year at Fisher Community College, but then was back living with his parents. He acquired a pretty convincing fake ID and started partying at clubs in Boston and Providence.
“You think you’re cool,” he reflects. “But in reality, it did nothing for me. When I drank I felt extremely compulsive and wild.”
But then along came an opportunity that should have straightened him out — and for a while it did.
Back on the beat, back to the start
Trust in your heart
That’s the measure of a man
There’s an old AAU rule that says a coach can’t have more than five players he coaches in high school on the same AAU team. But Ed Rodrigues wanted to keep his eight New Bedford players — including Brian Rudolph, Wilson Pilarte and his son Ryan — together on the Bristol Stars. So he asked his nephew, who had been helping out with his weightlifting program, if he could coach them.
“I took it very serious,” says Nick, who was just 21 at the time. “I never missed anything. I was being responsible.”
Brian was 13 when Nick became his coach.
“He would work us out three times a week in the weight room,” he recalls. “He would get us in the gym. He’d rebound for us and look up different drills. He’s intense about it. He pushes you to a level you don’t think exists.”
“If you can’t get motivated playing for him, then you shouldn’t play sports,” adds Ryan. “He’s the type of guy who it could be an 8 a.m. game in an AAU gym in the middle of nowhere and he’ll get you motivated.”
“He gets you,” Wilson says. “That’s his gift in life is to motivate people and push them to the next level.”
Under Nick’s direction that Bristol Stars team reached the next level, becoming the first squad in program history to reach the Division 1 Nationals in Orlando, where they beat a team from Louisiana 49-46 despite facing three players who were 6-foot-8 or taller. After the game, one of Roy Williams’ North Carolina assistants asked about the “Randolph” kid who had scored 16 points with 14 assists, 10 steals and eight rebounds.
“His last name is Rudolph, sir,” Nick responded. He was 22 years old.
In the Charlie Webber Tournament in Washington, DC, the Stars lost 66-60 to a DC Assault team featuring Michael Beasley and Nolan Smith. On the court next door, Ty Lawson and Kevin Durant flew down the court for a team from Texas.
In 2004, Nick was brought on as the wide receivers coach for the New Bedford High freshman football team. After the season, he remembers coach Steve Esteves telling him, “I was really nervous having you on the staff because you’re a wild card. But you were unbelievably awesome and I hope you come back.”
Esteves knew a little about what Nick did so well disguising from his players: His issues with alcohol and drugs were only worsening.
“I was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” he says. “I could hide things.”
Soon he was brought on as a graduate assistant for UMass Dartmouth basketball and was at the forefront of recruiting Little East Conference Freshman of the Year Brandon Stephens. A year later he was promoted to part-time assistant and the team was playing into the Sweet 16.
But in the middle of all that, Nick’s best friend, Patrick “Alex” Sullivan, died when the 18-wheeler he was riding in jackknifed in Virginia.
Their last conversation had been an argument. Nick couldn’t forgive himself.
“I never cried,” he says. “Instead I got wasted.”
On the way to the funeral at St. John the Baptist Church, Nick guzzled a large cup of Captain and Coke. That’s when he found a golf-ball sized bag of cocaine in the backseat of his car, the remnant of a blackout some days before.
“That’s probably when I started the line of addiction,” he says. “I started doing a lot of it.”
For the most part, he knew how to keep it away from his coaching job. If he had to leave for a road trip to Keene, New Hampshire at 7 a.m., he was smart enough to stay in. But a weekend off? That was trouble. He went to about 50 Patriots games in those years. He says he remembers five. The beer guy in his section took to calling him “The Faucet.”
“We didn’t even know the significance of what was going on,” says Brian. “He was still a major part of our lives. He was always around helping us to get better. Usually when people are in that place they get selfish. He was still doing just about everything for us.”
“I didn’t even know he was into that stuff until the very end,” says Ryan. “He was still coaching, doing a good job. He got the best recruiting class ever for UMass (Dartmouth). He was a great recruiter.”
But soon the lines started blurring. He was buying cocaine from several dealers so none of them knew how much he was burning through. One game at UMD he reached into his pocket and his fingers touched a baggie of cocaine.
Already in a spiral in the wrong direction, things came crashing down during that summer when he blew out his knee playing pickup hoops. A torn ACL and meniscus led to surgery and a prescription for percocets, a form of oxycodone he’d dabbled in before.
“I went from working, playing, coaching and working out to sitting on the couch,” he says. “I liked the feel of the percocets once they got in my system. I was able to still function for a long time without the understanding of what was happening to me.”
15 milligram percs became 30 milligrams. Everything came to a head a year after the Sweet 16 run. On the way home from his cousin’s birthday party, he was pulled over and charged with a DUI.
He went into his first detox at High Point Treatment Center in Plymouth. But he left early.
“Mentally, I was f----- up at the time,” he says. “I look back at it and I can see it; what the partying had done to me.”
It’s the fire in the eyes, the lines on the hand
It’s the things you understand
Permanent ties from which you once ran
That’s the measure of a man
It’s a Thursday evening, the sun has just set and in the stairwell of an old, dilapidated mill building on Brook Street, a gaggle of teenage basketball players sprint up and down the wide stairways, weight vests strapped to their heaving chests.
Among them is Noah Fernandes, the Tabor Academy junior who has already received offers from Boston University and Columbia.
Noah has been training with Nick for over a year. He still remembers their first workout at Silvershell Beach in Marion.
“I never felt like that before,” Noah says. “I wanted to throw up. I didn’t want to go back. But you can’t get tougher workouts. His voice and his enthusiasm and his energy make you want to push yourself to do better than you think you can.”
Noah was so impressed with Nick he suggested his teammate Chris Herren Jr. start working with him.
“He’s a really good motivator,” Herren Jr. says. “He cares about me getting better and me getting stronger. It’s not just about lifting weights. He wants to motivate me with basketball and life.”
This North End gym is Athletes First. It’s here that Nick has started the Alex Sullivan Memorial Program, which raises scholarships so underprivileged kids can afford private workouts. It also focuses on academics and character. It started with six kids and is up to 25. He plans to start a similar program for basketball in memory of Nicholas Urbanek.
“New Bedford kids need it,” Nick says. “I want New Bedford to have the reputation that athletes aren’t just good on the field or on the court, but they’re good students and colleges want them. The days of saying ‘they’re only athletes’ are over. I’m trying to teach them to be a man’s man. Hold the door open for a woman. Watch your mouth.”
“He does it for the right reasons,” says Derek Baptiste, whose AAU program Mass Silk trains with Nick. “He cares. He really wants to see kids be successful, on the field and in life. He teaches life lessons in addition to working out bodies.”
That’s what attracted Mark to add Nick to New Bedford football’s offseason training program in 2016.
“It wasn’t just about the workouts,” Mark says. “He’s awesome at what he does. It was about the connection he had with the kids. He’s on them about grades, about doing the right things, being a good person. He’ll pick these kids up if they didn’t have rides. He’ll call teachers. He’s not really getting anything, he’s doing it because he loves New Bedford High. He bleeds red and white.”
On this Tuesday night, Nick is pushing Brian’s basketball players to their limits.
“We’re going to run until you have snot running from your noses!” he screams over a Beats speaker blasting 2Pac.
One straggler stops at the bottom of the stairs, hands on his knees.
“Do you believe in yourself?” Nick bellows.
“Yes sir!” he perks up.
“Then GO!”
Another kid finishes his stairs. He’d been up running at 6 a.m. that morning. Now it’s 8 p.m.
“I think I can do two more,” he tells Nick.
Rudolph is standing next to him and looks over incredulously.
“I love this guy,” he smiles. “I always tell people he’s the greatest person I know.”
You’ve come full circle, now you’re home
Without the gold, without the chrome
And this is where you’ve always been
You had to lose so you could win
And rise above your troubles while you can
Nick remembers the first time he bought $40 worth of heroin.
“The drug dealer told me I was making a big mistake,” he says. “He said, ‘Just stay with the percs.’ I said, ‘Please, I don’t need a lecture. I’m sick.’”
Nick snorted it. He didn’t like it as much as the percocets, but it was cheaper. The friend he went to buy it with that day? He’s dead.
Nick says he knows 25 New Bedford High students from his era who have died already, most from an overdose or gun violence. He’s been in handcuffs 12 times himself.
He first went to a full rehab after Brian reached out to Chris Herren. Nick stayed 60 days at the Miller House after 10 days of detox, all paid for by the Herrens.
“If it wasn’t for them, I never get sober,” he says.
But the first trip to rehab didn’t take. He had a couple drinks after working a camp at Mass. Maritime and it began again. He started doing cocaine again. He would wake up at 4 a.m. and pull the heroin out of his nightstand and do a line so he wouldn’t be sick when he woke up. He was making about $800 a week in cash between working construction and bouncing. At the end of the week, none was left.
“At times I’d be with him and he’d be barely conscious,” says Ryan. “I was with him at his worst point. That was bad, man.”
Nick was 31 and his friends were buying houses, having kids and settling down. He was living at his mother’s house, broke and single.
“It’s hard because you keep getting deeper and deeper into that hole,” he says. “I didn’t want to live a few times. I took a bottle of pills and whatever happened, happened. I played blackjack and rolled the dice.”
“I prayed for him a lot of times when he was in his dark times,” Wilson says. “It was tough. I wouldn’t hear from him and he’d disappear and I’d pray he’d get out of it.”
Nick had been through eight detoxes -- sometimes he’d agree to go to detox just for the $40 he was offered for that “one last high” -- and two prior stints in rehab before that day at Newport Creamery. Fulfilling his promise to his mom, he entered CAB Health and Recovery Services in Tewksbury on May 1, 2013, a Tuesday. That’s also the last day he did drugs or had a drink.
“I knew it was over,” he says. “Something happened to me on that walk. I don’t know if it was a guardian angel or fate. But something changed.”
He started speed walking the halls, which led to working out again. He listened to Elton John’s Measure of a Man on repeat, hearing his own life in the lyrics. His confidence grew. He graduated and moved to the North Cottage halfway house.
“I was doing things differently,” he says. “I felt good.”
After he left the halfway house, he traveled with his employer, Acushnet Construction, who he says stuck with him through thick and thin, to Martha’s Vineyard for a job that lasted from Thanksgiving until May. He celebrated a year sober by benchpressing 405 pounds.
He also got a text message that day from Chris Herren.
“Big day for you. I’m proud of you. Congratulations.”
It’s still saved on his phone.
It’s the fire in the eyes, the lines on the hand
It’s the things you understand
Permanent ties from which you once ran
That’s the measure of a man
It was during that time of recovery he met his fiancee, Jenny Botelho, at the Portuguese Feast.
“She filled something that was missing,” he says.
He first got back into coaching by working out players from the Scream and Explosion AAU softball teams at Crossfit Dartmouth, his first coaching experience in two years.
“It was just fun,” he says. “I forgot how much I missed it.”
Nick first started telling his story publicly with a talk at the Zeiterion and video with Michael Rock on Fun 107′s website. He credits the folks at Crossfit Dartmouth for supporting his recovery and giving him the confidence to tell his story without embarrassment.
He has spoken to students at Fairhaven High and New Bedford High. After one talk, a custodian came up to thank him, tears in his eyes. He’ll never forget the student who came up to him at New Bedford and asked if they could talk privately. He spilled out a story of a father, an alcoholic who he hadn’t seen in seven years who had been hit by a car.
“Go visit him,” Nick offered.
He was in his element. He was helping.
“We need more Nicks,” says Wilson. “We need people with his mentality and his motivation. He can change kids’ lives. I was one of those kids who could have taken a different road.”
“I’m so happy for him,” adds Ryan. “I couldn’t be more happy for him. He’s a great motivator and a great person. I love Nick.”
You’ve come full circle, now you’re home
Without the gold, without the chrome
And this is where you’ve always been
You had to lose so you could win
And rise above your troubles while you can
Now you can love, now you can lose
Now you can choose
That’s the measure of a man
Sunday, December 8, 2013 at 04:03PM