Drugs Cost Him One Career but He Focuses on New Life : Rehabilitation: Jimmie Andrews had it all. But drug abuse cost him his family, home and a shot at a pro sports career. Now on the road to recovery, he refuses to dwell on lost chances.

Jimmie Andrews insists he has no regrets.

But every once in a while, the strapping 38-year-old Pasadena man can’t help but wonder about the untold dollars he might have made had he not fumbled away his life for so long.

“Of course I think about what might have been,” says Andrews, who had a shot at playing professional football and baseball, before drugs and alcohol landed him on the streets instead. “The traveling, being on TV, getting tickets for my friends and family, being in the limelight.”

Indeed, before he hit the skids, Andrews seemed to have it all: good looks, good grades, a loving family, a college scholarship.

However, by 1988, after years of abusing drugs and alcohol, Andrews had become a squatter in an abandoned, ramshackle house on the corner of Park and Garfield streets in Pasadena. That July, he went to jail for possession of cocaine, and Andrews knew he had really hit bottom.

It was the third time that he had been arrested on drug possession charges, and during his nine-day stint in jail, he vowed not to return to the streets.

So far, he hasn’t. And though he isn’t making millions in the major leagues, Andrews is making it through each day.

With the help of a rehabilitation program, he has been sober and straight for 19 months. He works at a Pasadena alarm systems company, spends weekends counseling substance abusers, coaches Little League football, has a new girlfriend and is planning sto finish college.

To those who have helped him rebuild his life, Andrews stands as a success and a model.

He agreed to tell his story so others might learn from his experience.

Andrews’ odyssey--from the working-class life he shared with his parents and four siblings, to a six-month bout with homelessness, and back to a workaday existence--began after he graduated in 1970 from Blair High School in Pasadena.

Having earned varsity letters in football, basketball, track and baseball, he entered Pasadena City College. He was a conference All-Star on the baseball field, but quickly became distracted by vices off the field. To uphold “an image,” he says, he began to get high at night, sleep in the next morning and skip class. His grades plunged, and he lost his eligibility.

Devastated, Andrews cut back on the partying, got his grades up and, at the urging of a friend, went out for the football team in the fall of 1971. “I was an All-American defensive back,” Andrews recalls proudly. “I still hold the interception record at Pasadena College.” His athletic success at PCC won him a full scholarship to play football at a four-year school, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He also made the baseball squad. “I was on my way to playing professional sports,” Andrews says.

But, again, the stature jocks enjoyed on campus intoxicated Andrews. He found himself, at 21, caught up in the glitz and glitter of Las Vegas. “The college and the strip was all Las Vegas had,” Andrews says. He adds: “If you weren’t Wayne Newton, you were an athlete” or considered a nobody.

On the gridiron and on the diamond, Andrews excelled. “He definitely had an opportunity” to be a pro in both sports, says Fred Dallimore, now head baseball coach and formerly an assistant football coach at UNLV. “He had unlimited potential as an athlete.”

But drugs began to drag him down once more. The woman Andrews had married between his junior and senior years left him. His grades sank again, and he lost his eligibility.

Andrews returned to Pasadena without completing his final semester at UNLV, moved in with his parents and worked as a security guard and track and field coach at Alhambra High School. “During that time I was dealing with feelings of failure,” Andrews says. “I went from a glamorous life” to a workaday existence.

For the next 13 years, Andrews was what he calls “a functional addict.” He went to work each day. But, he says: “When I’d get off work I’d have to have a drink or smoke a joint. Sometimes in the middle of the day I’d go home and get high.”

To support his habit, he tried selling drugs, but usually ended up consuming most of his merchandise, Andrews says. In 1978, he tried crack cocaine. “That was the roller-coaster down,” he says.

Andrews fell into debt and found himself working solely to buy drugs. He moved from apartment to apartment, and finally back to his parents’ house because he no longer could pay rent.

“When he would ask me for money, I would give it to him,” says his mother, Lillie Mae Andrews, 71. “It took me awhile to get on to him. I would try and talk him out of doing drugs, but it didn’t do any good. It was about the worst thing I ever experienced.”

In 1983, Andrews left his job at Alhambra with a $6,000 retirement check from the school district in hand. He didn’t put the money in the bank. Instead he bought drugs.

In the meantime, he told his parents that the check hadn’t come. “When they found out that I had gotten the money and blew it, they said, ‘Get help or get out.’

“So, I got out.”

He took a job as a bus driver for the Southern California Rapid Transit District in 1985. There, he says, he continued “drinking and drugging “ before and after work.

Then, on April 13, 1987, at age 35, the once healthy, vibrant athlete found himself in the intensive-care unit of Huntington Memorial Hospital after suffering a cocaine-induced heart attack. “When they told me I was in stable condition . . . I got loaded in the hospital,” Andrews says.

“Addiction is serious stuff,” he adds, shaking his head and recounting how he had smoked crack with tubes running through his body and a medically implanted balloon holding up his collapsed heart.

RTD officials would not comment on Andrews, other than to say he was fired in July, 1987.

When his disability payments ran out, he found himself on the street--no job, no money, strung out on drugs--and, this time, with no place to turn.

“My kids would come to me and tell me that they had seen him and that he looked real bad,” Lillie Mae Andrews says. “They said he was shabby, like a bum on the street. He was my son and I didn’t know how to help him.

“I cried about it and prayed about it day and night. But nothing did any good until he made up his mind that he had had enough of it.”

On July 11, 1988--he remembers the day vividly--Andrews found himself at Union Station/The Depot, a Pasadena shelter for the homeless.

Waiting to get a sandwich, Andrews reluctantly sat through a meeting for substance abusers. “The guy that was running the meeting told me: ‘Jimmie, not only will you keep getting sandwiches if you come back, you can get sober and your life will get better.’ ”

Andrews did go back, and his life did get better.

At Union Station, he entered a rehabilitation program and began working part time as a gardener with his father, Ted Andrews. After two months of sobriety, he moved into Hill House, a transitional home for men in Pasadena. He continued working with his father while he saved money and looked for full-time work.

When Andrews was on the streets, he was part of a San Gabriel Valley homeless population believed to number in the thousands. INFO Line, an information and referral hot line for emergency and non-emergency care in Los Angeles County, received about 2,000 calls from people seeking shelter in the San Gabriel Valley and Whittier during the first nine months of 1989.

Officials at Union Station say Andrews stands out because he has used discipline garnered from his days as an athlete to help him toward recovery. But he is not the only success story: About 50 of the 500 people sheltered in the last two years have been sober and off the streets anywhere from six months to a year or longer, says Cindy Abbott, Union Station’s director of operations.

In September, 1988, with the help of Foothill Jobs, a nonprofit, Pasadena-based employment agency that assists San Gabriel Valley residents in need, Andrews landed a minimum-wage job as a telephone salesman at a Pasadena alarm systems company. He also rented an apartment with two friends he met at the drug and alcohol rehabilitation program.

After several weeks on the job, Andrews decided to tell his boss that he was on parole. “Being in the alarm business and having people trust me with their security--well, you can imagine what was going through my mind,” says Chuck Scholl, owner of Alarm Engineers Inc. “It was my worst nightmare.”

Although Scholl says he considered firing Andrews, he decided instead to give him a chance.

During the last 17 months, Andrews has proven to be such a valuable employee that he has been promoted and now runs the entire telephone sales department. His salary has more than doubled, and Scholl gives him much of the credit for increasing Alarm Engineers’ annual revenues to nearly $2 million, up from $750,000 before he arrived.

Still, Andrews is battling almost two decades of living on the edge. And though he is confident that he will never go back to his old life style, each day without alcohol or drugs is a victory.

“I don’t feel bitter about not playing pro ball, not being married, not living up to my potential,” Andrews said. “I’ve gotten what’s important to me. I’ve got my family--and I have myself back now.”