Substance abuse put former athletes on different paths to redemption

John Dudoit is a recovering substance abuser and former cocaine dealer who was a football star at Farrington High School in the late 1960s. Rod Aldridge, who like Dudoit is 66, is a recovering alcoholic who played basketball at the University of Hawaii in the 1970s.

They crossed paths at the Halawa Correctional Facility at the turn of the millennium but never met. Aldridge was a corrections officer, Dudoit an inmate.

Since 2010 they’ve worked together at Makana O Ke Akua, where Dudoit is president and Aldridge the intake director. The transitional homes on Oahu are primarily for men who are recovering substance-abuse offenders.

Some residents are there by court order as a condition of probation or parole. Some are “walk-ins” who decided on their own that a structured environment where drugs and alcohol are forbidden is what they need.

Dudoit founded the program 15 years ago after a similar one helped him.

Glen Soares, who played football at Pearl City High School and was later a local race car driver, is one of 160 client-residents at the six homes run by the nonprofit. His addictions led to prison and alienation from loved ones. Soares has not used drugs or alcohol since 2013 and will celebrate Thanksgiving with family at his sister’s house and at a picnic at Blaisdell Park with friends who are also in recovery.

“But I always will be an addict. It took me to fight with Satan on a one-to-one basis (to) assure me I would do nothing stupid,” said Soares.

How does he avoid temptation?

“Church,” he said. “And I serve people … any way I can.”

Said Dudoit: “My struggle didn’t start with drugs, it started at a young age and got to a point when I made a decision to become an addict. I used to deal drugs. Today I deal hope. Because there is hope.”

THE FOUNDER

“I can tell you right now, (prison) was the best two years of my life,” Dudoit said.

Really? In 1969 as a Farrington senior he made the Interscholastic League of Honolulu’s first-team football all-stars, as chosen by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and received college scholarship offers.

That sounds better than being locked up. But when you hear the rest of Dudoit’s story, you understand.

“At 15, I was on the streets,” he said. “Living on the streets and surviving.”

His father was an alcoholic who abused him and his mother, he said. Dudoit said he later learned that his grandfather had a child with his own daughter, and that child was Dudoit’s father.

Dudoit said that although his father made sure his family had food and shelter, he forced Dudoit’s mother to go to bars with him, leaving the boy and his sisters without adult supervision.

“She always had to be where he was,” Dudoit said. “I was the eldest, and it was pretty hard for us being home alone. I’d go hide, hoping someone would come and look, and no one came to look.”

Sometimes it was worse when his parents were home.

“Dad tried to shoot me, Dad tried to stab me,” Dudoit said. “One night I heard my mom screaming. I went in, turned on the light and Dad was strangling Mom with her hair. That’s pretty impacting on a child. I was maybe 10 or 11. It made me think that when I get big enough, I’m gonna call him out.”

He confronted his father when he was 13. The elder Dudoit was a former boxer but was drunk and fell, breaking his elbow.

At the time, Dudoit vowed not to live a life of abuse. It was a promise he did not keep.

“I had a great opportunity in life (after high school),” said Dudoit, who got paid enough working in sheet metal to buy a condo not long after graduating from high school.

He got married and started a family, but drugs became a bigger part of his life.

“I started smoking weed a lot, and to feed the habit you pick up more and some you sell.”

He tried cocaine and liked it, and began dealing that, too. Money came and went.

“It was amazing how cocaine opened doors,” Dudoit said. “I never made that much money. I survived but it became more to fill my need.”

A raid of his home resulted in a felony drug conviction and a prison term at Halawa in 1999. At age 47, he was ready to change.

“It gave me time to look at choices, gave me time to heal,” Dudoit said. “I took advantage of what they had to offer (in rehabilitation and education programs). … My drug life and criminal life lasted for about 33 years and it never went anyplace.”

His biggest regrets are about his only daughter. A homeless mother of four, she was in poor health from drug use and died at age 37 while in jail at the Oahu Community Correctional Center.

“I grew up being abandoned,” Dudoit said. “I know it was way worse for her. I was a drug dealer. I kept my promise not to be my father — I became worse than my father. She said, ‘Dad, I became an addict to get your attention.’”

When he was released in 2001, Dudoit chose to live in what he calls a “clean and sober” transitional home, similar to those he now runs. He told his parole officer he thought it would give him a better chance for continued recovery success.

“If I went home to my mom, what would make me listen to her? I knew in a (transitional) home there’d be guys who went through what I did and more support,” Dudoit said.

He also enrolled at Leeward Community College and earned a certi­ficate in substance abuse counseling.

He served an outpatient internship with his counselor and mentor, Bill Mitchell. He also was guided by Leeward educators Tom and Barbara Naki. They and others helped him start Makana O Ke Akua in 2003, a nonprofit funded by federal and state contracts.

Dudoit said Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings were his “foundation” to recovery while in prison.

“I have a higher power and a great support team,” he said.

Remarried, Dudoit spends most of his free time with his second wife, Debbie, their three sons, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

“I learned the secret to relationships: Shut your mouth,” he joked. “We’ll be celebrating (Thanksgiving) however my wife wants. I’m back in my children’s lives and my grandchildren’s lives.”

THE INTAKE DIRECTOR

His dad was a career Army officer, his mom a teacher, and both were religious. In Harold “Rod” Aldridge’s young mind, he was being smothered.

“I felt it was unfair my friends could run the street. I always felt like I was missing out on something,” Aldridge said of his teen years in Rome, Ga. “When UH recruited me I saw my ticket to freedom.”

He had his first taste of alcohol after his team won the high school state basketball championship.

“Country Club malt liquor, the tall can,” he said. “I drank just half of it. But I knew one thing: I had arrived. Everything was better. I could sing better, I could talk better.”

When he got to Hawaii after two years at a junior college near home, drinking helped him assimilate.

“I met Miss Mai Tai and Miss Chi Chi,” he said. “I blended in easily. Hawaii has a very cordial, festive lifestyle, and I embraced it totally.”

Aldridge played for the Rainbows from 1972 to ’74, when they were still the toast of the town in the wake of the Fabulous Five years. He started at forward when Tom Henderson — an Olympian and NBA champion — was one of the guards. Aldridge averaged 10.2 points in his 53 games.

After a game or, actually, on any night, it was off to spots like Bobby McGee’s, Spats, Anna Bannana’s, The Blue Goose, The Point After.

“I was in heaven,” Aldridge said. “I tried a few other things, experimented with your usual party drugs. But I had a fear of incarceration. I can always push that drink away. Or so I thought.”

After graduation he joined the UH coaching staff. Then head coach Bruce O’Neill was fired after an investigation found 64 violations of NCAA rules. Aldridge was on the road recruiting when he learned he had lost his job, too.

He became a car salesman and married a local girl, Karen. They had two children and in 1991 he went to work as a Department of Public Safety corrections officer at Halawa.

But his drinking never stopped. Eventually it cost him his marriage, his job, his home and his health. He was in and out of hospitals and spent some nights in jail.

A chance encounter with a former teammate, Artie Wilson, helped wake him up to his dire situation.

“After years of drinking I was living on the street. Artie saw me sitting at a bus stop and tried to get me into his car. Eventually I decided I needed to try to get out of hell,” Aldridge said.

The epiphany came at age 54 while he was in a hospital bed in 2006.

“I was down to 170 pounds (from 240) and looking like death warmed over,” said Aldridge, who is 6-foot-7. “My kidneys were working at 30 percent. My pancreas was the size of a grapefruit. I’d been to every ER on this island, except maybe Kahuku. My condition had deteriorated so much that I was spitting blood, peeing blood.”

He completed a four-month inpatient rehabilitation program at Hina Mauka, followed by eight months of outpatient treatment at Kaiser Permanente, leading to a clinical discharge.

Aldridge is now closing in on 10 years without drinking alcohol or using drugs.

“I realized how many people have the same problem and I wanted to be part of the solution,” said Aldridge, who worked at a transitional home in Kaneohe before joining Dudoit at Makana O Ke Akua.

“My background helps me understand men coming out of incarceration,” he said. “To me it’s about giving back.”

Not every client-resident succeeds at recovery, but Aldridge believes in the program’s potential to change lives for the better.

“The home is a place to practice and adapt and learn,” he said. “We understand a lot of guys are here because they have to be and don’t want to be. I promise them they’ll get everything God gives, plus some. You have to follow the rules and I’m not OK with you not doing your chores. But we have unconditional love here. It’s not about who you were in the past.”

Aldridge started his Thanksgiving celebration Wednesday night with “sober support” friends at a church. Today there’s an event at the McCully Street home where he works and then later in the day with family.

THE RESIDENT-CLIENT

“If you saw trouble you saw me,” said Glen Soares, who started using alcohol and marijuana at age 15. “I was the baby of six. I felt left out. I didn’t feel loved.”

He said his father forced him to play sports. Although he didn’t enjoy the game, Soares was a pretty good junior varsity linebacker at Pearl City High, playing next to Jason Scott Lee, who went on to a successful acting career.

Soares’ sports ability got his father’s attention — when he was around.

“He would disappear for months at a time,” he said. “One time, when I was 13, I blackmailed him. I told him let me drive the car or I’d tell my mom about his mistress.”

Soares’ mother’s efforts to make up for his father’s absence turned into enabling, he said.

“My mom protected me through all my wrongs,” he said. “When the cops came she would hide me. My dad would say, ‘Take him.’ ”

During the 1980s, Soares lived with a brother in Soledad, Calif., where he developed an expensive cocaine addiction and was caught stealing tires from a warehouse where he worked.

“I was just 20 and was sent to a prison with murderers. The worst six months of my life,” Soares said. “It was an eye-opener. But it didn’t open my eyes enough.”

Soares returned to Hawaii in 1986 and “got right back into it,” he said. He was introduced to methamphetamine in 1989.

Eventually, using led to dealing. “What we were calling batu took over the west side. At the height, I’d sell a pound of ice every day and be counting $60,000.”

Soares got to keep about $1,000 of it, “but almost all of it went back into drugs,” he said.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Soares fathered two children with whom he now has no contact.

“When I lost (my daughter) I wanted to die,” he said. “I really got into meth.”

He was sent to Halawa prison in 2013 after a drug distribution conviction and a parole violation.

Soares has not used drugs or alcohol since. After nearly three years at Halawa, he was transferred to Laumaka Work Furlough Center, across the street from OCCC.

Since last year he has lived in a Makana O Ke Akua home in Waipahu. He worked as a buser at a restaurant and recently got a new job as a merchandise stocker.

“For the first time I saved money,” said Soares, 52. “I actually have a bank account I don’t even touch. I can actually have money on me. I enjoy eating good food.”

And he regularly visits the grave of his mother, Elaine, whose funeral he could not attend because he was incarcerated.

The kid who forced his father at age 13 to let him drive won a stock car race at Hawaii Motor Speedway in 2000 and six more in 2003. “I was just finishing up drug court,” Soares said.

He still loves “any kind of racing,” and his newfound financial stability allowed him to see an NHRA event in Las Vegas this year.

But many other things are not the same as 15, six or even two years ago.

“I believe coming out of all this I’m a different man, a changed man,” Soares said. “I want to thank John for giving me a chance.”