A sobering thought: In spite of my UW loyalty, I’m rooting for Steve Sarkisian

I am rooting for Steve Sarkisian.

This is surprising for a couple of reasons:

1. As a Washington alum, I’m pretty petty.

I tend to stop rooting for Husky coaches the minute they become former Husky coaches. In fact, the delight I’ve felt over Alabama losing four games in Kalen DeBoer’s first season is at least 4X greater than any concern I’ve felt over Washington losing seven this past season.

2. I didn’t like Sark all that much when he was at Washington.

I appreciated the way he resuscitated the program after Tyrone Willingham’s 0-12 death march. However, by his fifth season in town, I’d come the conclusion that Washington wasn’t going to get over the hump with him as head coach. In large part, I felt this was because of him.

And then, one Friday in 2017, I realized that my feelings about him had changed. This discovery occurred in an odd and fairly public moment: I was talking on the radio. You see, back then I was still hosting a three-hour show every afternoon on 710 AM alongside Jim Moore and Dave Wyman. Usually, we spent our time making fun of each other or revisiting the time Jim gave $10,000 to a guy who’d claimed he developed proprietary technology to extract gold from previously unprocessable ore. On this particular day, we were at the Seahawks’ headquarters and we began discussing Sarkisian, who was in his first year as Atlanta’s offensive coordinator.

We began to talk about how he’d rebuilt his coaching career after a drinking problem had cost him his job at USC, and I decided to talk about the fact that I had quit drinking several months earlier. The back of my neck got warm as if I had a bad sunburn, the spots behind my ears were especially hot. I was almost light-headed.

“What made you think you had a problem?” Jim asked me.

I kept talking. I explained how I did not think I’d ever had a healthy relationship with alcohol. I’d been a binge drinker since I was a teenager. The frequency with which I drank was not the problem; it was the volume I consumed when I did. But binge drinking is such an essential part of American teenage culture — or at least the American teenage culture that I experienced — that it can be easy to convince yourself that a problem is just a phase.

For the 20 or so years after I graduated college, I tinkered with different limits and set rules to try and offset the fact that left to my own devices I’m more than willing to drink myself stupid. By 2016, I knew for absolute certain there was an issue. I was trying to rein in my consumption and the result was that I was drinking less frequently, but on those occasions I did drink, I was getting more drunk. I was blacking out. I was drinking by myself. Actually, I preferred to drink by myself.

In April, my wife had come home on a Saturday night and found me passed out on the bathroom floor in our Seattle condominium. I told her for at least the fourth time that I was afraid I had a drinking problem. I went to the bookstore and bought a book on quitting. I planned to stop, and then three weeks later she came home and found me smoking a cigarette in the corner of the parking lot, so intoxicated I couldn’t speak.

I remember only snapshots from that conversation. I saw her stepping out the north entrance to our condo building with our dog Peach. She saw me, and I knew I was in trouble. I remember trying to speak but being unable to finish a sentence. She told me I just walked off in the middle of the conversation, but I don’t remember that.

I am deeply embarrassed that had to happen before I was able to address the problem, but that’s apparently what it took. I went to a 12-step meeting the next day. It wasn’t the first time I’d attended one, but it was the first time I kept coming back. I went to meetings all over the Seattle area that first month. I started seeing a substance-abuse counselor named Richard Sirota over in Bellevue. I attended the SMART recovery meetings he oversaw in Factoria, using an approach rooted in cognitive-behavior therapy. That wound up being a program I stuck with. The first time my wife went out of town, I made sure to go to a meeting each day she was gone.

While I had spent a great deal of time talking to other people who struggled with alcohol, that Friday afternoon on the radio was the first time I discussed it publicly. In retrospect, it made me more certain about my recovery.

For years, the one thing I feared more than the possibility I had a drinking problem was the idea of telling people I couldn’t drink. It felt like an admission of weakness. It felt like I would be cordoning off an entire region of my life and my history forever. That I would become a less-complete person.

More than seven years sober, you could not pay me to have a hangover. I feel much better in both a physical and emotional sense. The decision to stop drinking has been one of the best choices I’ve ever made, which brings me back to Sark.

Sark is now the head coach at Texas, which just beat Arizona State in double overtime to advance to the college football semifinals for the second consecutive year. By all appearances, he is thriving and I’m not just happy for him, I’m cheering for him.

We spend a lot of time talking about the damage that alcohol can do, and how difficult and fraught it can be when someone with a problem tries to quit. I don’t think we talk enough about how dramatically and quickly things can change when and if you do.

I have no desire to try and discern the impact that drinking did or did not have on Sarkisian’s tenure at Washington. Even if I was inclined to make such a judgment, I lack the knowledge to accurately gauge the impact. I knew Sark liked to drink on a strictly second-hand basis.

What I can speak to is the transformative power of sobriety, and that’s why I’m rooting for Sark. Because I saw – like everyone else – how he lost his job at USC, and I can imagine the embarrassment and pain he felt. I also know what I feel like now to be out from beneath the burden I was placing on myself by drinking. I feel so different about so many things.

I’ve got nothing in the world against people who drink. I would if I could, but I can’t be trusted to drink responsibly so I don’t. Understanding and accepting this has made me a happier, more capable person and a better man. The very thing that I worried would make me feel like I was a lesser person has allowed me to strive for things that would have been impossible if I were still drinking and I know that I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Danny O’Neil was born in Oregon, the son of a logger, but had the good sense to attend college in Washington. He’s covered Seattle sports for 20 years, writing for two newspapers, one glossy magazine and hosting a daily radio show for eight years on KIRO 710 AM. You can subscribe to his free newsletter and find his other work at dannyoneil.com.

This story was originally published January 2, 2025 at 11:39 AM.