THOMPSON TAKES MESSAGE ABOUT CHOICES TO CHERRY POINT

CHERRY POINT -- Former basketball great David Thompson believes life is
about choices. He admits to having made some bad ones.

On Tuesday, he spoke to Marines about his bad choices, abusing drugs and
alcohol.

"Life is a series of choices," said Thompson, who was voted Most Valuable
Player in the ABA and NBA. "A lot of success and happiness in your life
will depend on your ability to make the right choices."

His appearance at Cherry Point's station theater was part of an annual
Alcohol and Substance Abuse Prevention and Control program conducted by the
Marine Corps. Since his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, Thompson
has become a motivational speaker who shares his experiences, from his
sheltered upbringing to his rise and fall as a professional athlete.

The youngest of 11 children, Thompson grew up in Shelby in a Christian
home, where his father was a Deacon at a Baptist church.

"At the age of 5, I sang in the church choir, and also at the age of 5 I
was taught how to play basketball by my older brother," he said. "Since my
brother was seven years older than I was, and was a much better basketball
player than I was at that time -- let's make that clear -- he always ended
up beating me by one or two points. That would really upset me, but it made
me play hard and it spurred on my competitive desire."

Thompson credits that competitive spirit with not only his considerable
list of accomplishments on the basketball court, but throughout his life.

He began to reap the benefits by the time he was in high school.

"I worked hard in school and made good grades," he said. "I was highly
sought after by most of the major colleges throughout the United States."

But, it was on a visit to one of those schools that Thompson said he made
the first of his wrong choices.

"I was introduced to alcohol," he said. "I drank some cheap wine. I was
sick for two days. I lied to my parents and told them I had the flu. The
first experience was such a bad one, I didn't drink for some time."

The combination of his exceptional basketball performance and his 92 grade
point average ultimately gave Thompson his pick of universities in his home
state and he chose N.C. State.

"I was smart. I made the right choice," he said.

Going away to college represented Thompson's first time away from what he
characterized as "that good, strong Christian influence" of his family.
During the first week, he was drinking again. Orientation week parties gave
way to fraternity parties and one nearly cost him everything, he said.

After drinking too much, Thompson decided to take a shortcut home on a back
road. He said he swerved to avoid an oncoming car and hit a tree, totaling
the car but somehow avoiding injury. He walked back to his dormitory,
called the police and reported the car stolen.

"I was lucky," he said. "If I had stayed at the scene of the accident, I
surely would have gotten a ticket, but most of all, I could have lost my
life, and that really shook me up, and I decided to stop drinking, and I
stopped drinking -- for two whole days."

With the Wolfpack, he earned the nickname "Skywalker" for his 44-inch
vertical leaps and racked up an impressive list of awards by the time he
graduated. He was drafted by both the NBA's Atlanta Hawks and the ABA's
Virginia Squires.

"I was the No. 1 draft pick in both the NBA and the ABA," Thompson said. "I
signed with the Denver Nuggets for the highest amount of money ever given
to a rookie athlete up to that time."

In 1975 he signed a contract for $2.5 million. Three years later, he signed
a contract for $4 million. Thompson estimates, with endorsements, he was
making close to $2 million a year. He had all the material possessions he'd
ever dreamed of -- a luxurious house complete with an Olympic size swimming
pool in Denver, a condo in Seattle and fancy sports cars.

"I got involved with drugs and alcohol and ended up losing all of those
very things I worked so hard to gain," he said. "Not only did I lose those
material things, I lost things that were far greater than material things,
because material things can be replaced. I lost my self-esteem and self-worth."

He said he also lost his freedom for four months. He went from the highest
paid professional athlete to a jail cell.

"That's where drugs and alcohol will take you," he told Marines. "They will
take you from the top all the way down to the bottom. All it will do is
ruin lives, destroy careers and break up families. Most of all, drugs and
alcohol kill."

After 14 years of sobriety, Thompson's advice to the Marines was to avoid
drugs and alcohol in the first place.

"You never know where it's going to lead," he said. "Let me tell you,
overcoming my drug and alcohol problem is the most difficult thing I've
ever had to overcome."

While he may not have a lot of the material things he once had, Thompson
said he considers his life "far richer than it has ever been."