The Highs and Lows : Thrill of Victory, Agony of Addiction

Ken Bell sits taut on a bench, isolated among thousands. He has been Buena Park High School’s basketball coach for 23 years, and on this night in 1985, he is about to win his first Freeway League championship.

But on this night, the finest of his professional career, he is partially focused on his lowest day as a father.

He is focused on his 17-year-old daughter, Kim, who is in a Tustin hospital. His straight-A, straight-laced pride and joy is a drug addict.

When the game is over and Buena Park has won, Bell is hoisted on shoulders and crowned with a nylon basketball net. People lunge to shake his hand, hug him, kiss him.

But there is one kiss he does not receive. The pain and the drain of this, the longest season, pull on him. He excuses himself from the celebration. He tells his players he must make a telephone call.

They know.

Kim Bell waits for the phone to ring.

For as long as she had known her father, he had been a basketball coach and she had watched him struggle through many a losing season.

On this night in February, she, perhaps more than anyone else, wants him to win. She can’t be there to see it--her stay in Tustin Community Hospital’s drug rehabilitation program is not over--so she waits.

Finally, she can wait no longer. She walks down the hall to check her messages.

Only one message is printed on the chalkboard: Buena Park 51, Sonora 44!

“I think that was one of the first things that kind of woke me up and made me remember what it is like to care about somebody else,” Kim recalled recently.

Today, the vivid images of hospital life do not escape her. Nor do the pains of what brought her to the Tustin hospital the last week of 1984.

Kim Bell had become an unwitting partner with drugs and alcohol for 2 1/2 years.

Kim’s problems began in typical fashion--she wanted to fit in with her classmates and she wanted to escape the pressures of a family divorce.

Her father was a well-known basketball coach. Her mother was a school superintendent. Kim was different in her friends’ eyes.

By the time she entered Capistrano Valley High School, Kim had tired of the expectations. She had excelled at school and at home in the hopes of her parents reuniting, but a reconciliation never materialized. Somehow, she had a vague sense of responsibility for the divorce, which happened when she was 8.

So she remembers wanting to step out when she was a sophomore, and it didn’t take long to find a fast crowd to ride with.

Kim said she started drinking a couple of beers with friends, nothing heavy. As her use escalated to drugs, she didn’t notice the changes. By the time her parents caught her, Kim was a daily user. Her favorite drug was cocaine, but if she didn’t have money for a line, alcohol would suffice.

She would steal from her mother, Eloise, and younger sister, Stephanie, to get drug money. The women had to take their purses with them to the bathroom in their San Juan Capistrano home.

“In the old house, they got to hate each other,” Ken Bell said.

Said Kim: “When I got to that point where I was at my bottom, it was like, how did I get here, what happened? It was totally baffling to me.

“It is hard to say, but no matter what people told me, no matter what my mom and dad said about not using drugs, in the end it wouldn’t make any difference. That was my choice and I don’t blame my parents.”

Ken Bell said he didn’t notice the problem earlier because he just didn’t think it could happen to his daughter. Also, Kim was living with her mother, and when she started using drugs regularly, she stayed away from Bell’s Yorba Linda home for fear he would find out.

“She just made excuses not to come by on the weekends,” Bell said. “She’d say she had to work or had other things to do.”

But when his former wife called to say Kim was in trouble, he took the first steps toward her recovery.

He visited Capistrano Valley High to investigate. He discovered that Kim had not been attending classes and her grades had gone from all A’s to F’s.

The family found Kim’s diary, which revealed more than she dared to admit to them. It told of the heavy drinking, the cocaine use, the skipping of classes. They decided to go for a drug assessment at Tustin Community Hospital at the suggestion of a high school counselor.

After the assessment, doctors suggested that Kim stay indefinitely. But Bell brought her home because he wanted to evaluate the $37,000 program before committing her to drug rehabilitation. He said most of the expenses were paid by an insurance company.

The cost, however, did not make the decision difficult.

“It was a real scene,” Ken said of leaving Kim at the hospital. “She was crying and begging and screaming and cussing. You know, she really went berserk. That is just about the toughest thing I ever went through.”

For the next 2 1/2 months, Bell had two night games a week, a Monday night program for high-school dropouts and biweekly family counseling sessions at Tustin hospital.

Bell’s new wife, her teen-age sons, her parents and other relatives also attended the sessions, which are a regular part of the treatment. Their lives were altered greatly, Bell said.

Kim said she started to realize she had affected a lot of people who loved her. But she felt mostly for her father.

“I started feeling guilty about what I had put him through,” she said. “He called and he told me that he still cared no matter what mean things I’d said when he left me there.”

Bell was left with either internalizing his grief or talking about it. He decided to tell his team about Kim because he needed to talk. The players told him they understood.

As he reflects on that special season, he stops talking. The pain and strain come seeping out again in the form of tears.

He excuses himself. Sometimes this happens, he says.

“It made me a better coach, much, much more understanding,” he said. “It calmed me down. Made me step back.”

Bell takes an active role in drug rehabilitation programs at Buena Park High School today. Because of his experience, he knows the language of drug counseling--he knows the “enablers” from the helpers.

Every so often, he invites a special guest to speak to his health classes, and she also knows the language. She’s a 19-year-old Fullerton College student majoring in business who is getting good grades. She’s a bright, mature young woman with a lot of spunk. She knows what it’s like to be addicted to drugs, what it can do to those who love her, the trauma of rehabilitation.

Kim Bell has been there.