By Les CarpenterChris Herren already knows how this is going to end when the Boston sky darkens Tuesday evening and one by one the downtown buildings - from the Prudential Tower to the state capitol to UMass-Boston - are bathed in a purple glow for his anti-drug project. He will feel the tears slide down his face. He will choke up. And he will wonder how so much has happened so fast.
"Let's face it, not even 4½ years ago I was on the side of the road, with a needle in my arm and dead for 30 seconds," he says.
Herren is never far from that day. The car accident in which he was high on heroin and a policeman found him unconscious, slipping into death, is the moment that saved him. And left with another chance after an adult life of addiction that destroyed his NBA career, he decided to work to save others. This is how he invented Project Purple, which tries to help addicts get off drugs and find proper care, and keeps teenagers from tumbling into the same drug-filled abyss as him.
His dream is to make the color purple for attacking addiction as popular in sports as pink is in fighting breast cancer.
He will start with his old team the Boston Celtics, who are honoring him as a "Hero Among Us," on Tuesday night. It will be a moment cloaked in irony, for it was on the Celtics - his favorite team from childhood - where his NBA career finally blew up. He forever remembers the nights his teammates prepared for the start of the game while he stood outside the arena in his Celtics warmups, waiting for a dealer to bring him heroin.
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