Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

Son of former Runnin’ Rebel lived hard, played hard, died young

Itinerant player

Emily Berl / The New York Times

A mural along Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, Calif., depicts Jackson Vroman, the late basketball player. After a brief NBA career, Vroman traveled the world, playing ball, partying and drawing many friends into his circle. Yet his death at 34, in a Los Angeles swimming pool, casts a lonely light on his life.

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Jackson Vroman relaxes in 2007 in a Tao Beach cabana in Las Vegas with Farrah Eshakshuki, left, and Brittany King. The photo was shot a year after Vroman injured his wrist and left the NBA, destined for the life of an itinerant basketball player.

Sitting on a park bench overlooking Lake Ontario in Toronto on a brilliant summer day in 2015, I was approached by a woman looking for directions.

The woman mentioned that she had emigrated from Iran a couple of months earlier, and I replied that I knew of only one person who had recently lived in Iran, an American who had played basketball there.

By coincidence, she also knew an American basketball player in Iran.

He had circulated in her social group, and they had been at many of the same parties.

“You know, the one who died,” she said.

But I did not know whom she meant, and she was embarrassed that she could not pronounce his name. She pulled a phone from her bag, typed in some characters and slowly handed it to me. I could feel her watching my face as I read.

It became clear that the only American I knew in Iran was the same one she knew: a charismatic 6-foot-10, real-life globe-trotter named Jackson Vroman. But according to the words on her phone, Vroman was dead at age 34, discovered a month earlier at the bottom of a friend’s swimming pool in Hollywood.

I must have stared at the phone for a while because I eventually realized she was gently asking if I was OK.

Six years earlier, I had planned to write about Vroman. In October 2009, when he was heading to Tehran from Beirut, I spoke to him by telephone for about an hour during his layover in Amman, Jordan. He told me of his adventures playing ball internationally — of his two passports smeared with the ink of dozens of countries, of passionate basketball fans in Lithuania, of wild nights avoiding police in Iran and of a Lebanese night life that never shut down.

It would make a great story, I told him, and we decided to reconvene after the Iranian domestic league ended. But we never spoke again. He could never sit still very long, and I was focused on other work. We had one additional exchange on Facebook, when I passed along a greeting from Mike D’Antoni, who had coached him when he briefly played for the Phoenix Suns in the NBA. “Tell Mike I said, Hi,” Vroman replied. And then nothing.

But the chance meeting with the woman in Toronto would inevitably turn my attention back to an athlete who might have become a sensation in the NBA had he made his career here and not overseas. Imagine what the U.S. media would have done with a player who dressed in costumes in his spare time, hung out at art festivals, essentially worshipped a tiny white dog, partied relentlessly and — it should be noted — was a relentless rebounder.

The Toronto encounter would also lead me to to Jackson’s father, Brett, a former center at UCLA and UNLV, and the one person whose life, in some ways, was just like his son’s. And I would also get to know Brett’s second wife, Pari Habashi, a therapist who loved, nurtured and fretted over Jackson until the day he died.

In April 2015, the three of them attended the 40th anniversary of John Wooden’s last championship team at UCLA, one that Brett played on. Jackson was gaunt, not in playing shape and seemingly overcome with emotions and a growing spirituality. He went to where his stepmom sat, got down on his knees and hugged her.

“I remember he was just tired,” Habashi said. “I knew there was something different then. But he was so loving. He was hanging on Brett and hanging on me and saying, ‘I love you so much.’”

The next month, Jackson called his stepmother to wish her a happy Mother’s Day, and again told her he loved her.

“It was the last time we spoke,” she said.

Family business

Brett Vroman is now 61, a gentle bear of a man with silvery hair that he let grow past his shoulders for several months after his son’s death, one of the many ways he has spent the last two years trying to cope with the pain. He walks with a slight hitch from years of playing basketball around the world on gimpy feet and from folding his 7-foot frame into cramped airplane seats and hotel beds.

Over 40 years ago, he was a lithe basketball prospect out of Provo High School in Utah. He stood 6-10 in eighth grade, jumped out of the gym, and was eventually recruited to UCLA by Wooden and handed the impossible task of being the next Bill Walton.

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Brett Vroman, a mental health worker who once played basketball at UNLV, in the NBA and abroad, now lives in Bountiful, Utah. Vroman has spent the last two years coping with the pain of losing his son Jackson, who followed in his footsteps as an itinerant basketball player, chasing the game and happiness overseas.

There were definite similarities with Walton. He, too, was a gifted big man with a shaggy blond mane and a rebellious streak.

“I prefer to say I was a free spirit,” Brett Vroman said. “Jackson was the same way.”

As a skinny freshman at UCLA, Brett Vroman contributed to that 1975 national title. But he clashed with the Bruins’ next head coach, Gene Bartow, and transferred to UNLV. Today, he claims the distinction of being the only person to play for both the revered Wooden and the provocative Jerry Tarkanian.

While Brett was at UNLV, he married a young woman named Lesle Davis. He was then drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers, but did not stick. He played 11 games for the Utah Jazz in 1980 and then crossed the Atlantic to carve out a career in Europe, taking along his wife and young children: Jackson and his older sister, Lauren.

As adventurous as the European lifestyle could be, things deteriorated when Brett Vroman’s playing days ended. By the late 1980s the family had settled back in Utah, but Brett struggled to adjust as he studied to become a mental health worker, the same job he holds today. After 13 years of marriage, he and Lesle Davis split up when Jackson was in the first grade.

Davis, who declined to be interviewed for this article, took the children to live in Alaska but eventually sent both of them back to Utah to live with their father.

For Jackson, the estrangement from his mother lasted over a decade and ended only when he visited her and his half brother, Robin Anselme, at his mother’s Florida home a few years ago. He described the meeting in 17 words on his Instagram account: “Emotional day reuniting with my brother and mom I haven’t had contact with in over 15 yrs.”

But the true impact of that long separation was left unsaid.

A career of his own

Jackson’s adolescent years in Salt Lake City were turbulent, and at one point he and his sister were sent to live with their aunt, Shelley Vroman. Jackson clashed with his father at times, and basketball could be the most contentious subject of all.

Still, with the help of his stepmother Jackson managed to get admitted to Snow College in Ephraim, Utah, where he played for a coach named Curtis Condie. And after two years there, Condie recommended him to Iowa State’s coach, Larry Eustachy, thinking Eustachy would appreciate Jackson.

Sure enough, Eustachy fell instantly for him. Tough, emotionally vulnerable, loyal and rebellious all at once, Jackson Vroman reminded Eustachy of himself.

On a recruiting visit to Utah in September 2001, Eustachy watched Jackson do battle in a tournament in Salt Lake City.

“He got in a fight and decked some gang member,” Eustachy recalled. “Brett was worried and asked me if I was still interested in Jackson. I said: “Interested? I love him.’”

Jackson’s college career had its mishaps, but he blossomed into a star. In June 2004 he was drafted by the Chicago Bulls at the beginning of the second round and immediately traded to the Phoenix Suns for Luol Deng.

Jackson proceeded to play a half-season for the Suns and D’Antoni before he was traded to the New Orleans Hornets in January 2006. Brett proudly recalls his son dominating Tracy McGrady in one game, and playing even better against Tim Duncan.

But in February 2006, Brett was watching on TV in Salt Lake City when Jackson took a pass from Chris Paul in a game against Brett’s old team, the Jazz. While attempting a dunk, Jackson shattered his wrist. By the time it healed, the course of his life had changed. He was about to dip his size 15 basketball shoes into his father’s footsteps. He was headed overseas.

Play hard, party hard

Basketball abroad was a wild and sometimes dangerous experience for Jackson Vroman. In 2008, while playing in Lithuania for BC Lietuvos Rytas, he took a knee to the chest in a scramble for a loose ball. On the team bus afterward, he struggled to keep from passing out.

Eventually the bus was rerouted to a hospital in Vilnius, where it was discovered that his chest cavity was filling with blood. He ended up with a 12-inch incision in his side and a pair of half-inch hoses sticking out of his torso to drain the fluid.

His father offered to catch the next plane to Lithuania, but Jackson said it was not necessary. In our 2009 conversation, he told me he paid cash to the hospital’s staff to get morphine for the pain. But he said he also sent a friend, with $10,000 of his money, to Amsterdam to get hashish and marijuana. It was not the last time he would seek to self-medicate.

After he healed, Vroman signed a $700,000 deal with Saba Mehr, a team in the Iranian professional league. Relations between the governments of the United States and Iran were openly hostile at that time, and Jackson even posted an irreverent photo of himself next to a sign that read, “Down with USA.”

A shift in focus

Following two seasons in Iran and two summers in Lebanon, Jackson moved on to China, where, beginning in 2011, he played for an assortment of teams — the Shenzhen Leopards, the Jiangsu Dragons and Shandong — for lucrative sums. But he did not like China and, among other things, he missed his beloved dog, Hugo Bauce.

Still, Jackson kept playing, and making good money. Which meant he could still do the things he wanted to do, such as partying in Las Vegas or inviting the Vroman clan for a weeklong vacation in Lake Tahoe, Calif., in summer 2013. He could be remarkably generous, and he paid for everything on that trip, including a chef.

At one point during that stay, he found an old set of horseshoes. But before his family could play, Jackson dragged his cousin Ben (a former kicker for the University of Utah football team) to a hardware store. “We couldn’t just play,” he recalled. “We had to paint them first. That was Jackson.”

But eventually, after eight years overseas in six countries, Jackson Vroman’s career began to wind down. He was feeling it emotionally. Uncertain what to do, he told his father he was thinking of asking Eustachy for an assistant’s job at Colorado State. But Jackson Vroman never did.

Instead, he moved into the homes of wealthy friends in Los Angeles and worked out less frequently. He also told his father he was occasionally feeling faint, sometimes even passing out when he stood up. Years before, Brett had been found to have atrial fibrillation, a heart condition he controls with medication. He wanted his son to consult with the same doctor who had treated him.

But that never happened, either. Jackson was too busy planning beach trips to the south of France and emerging as a fixture at the annual Burning Man festival, where his giant costumed frame stood out in the swirling Nevada desert.

And his drug use mushroomed. He told Brett that he had participated in an indigenous ayahuasca ceremony, involving a strong hallucinogenic brew.

Then, two months before he died, Jackson overdosed on a combination of GHB, a depressant; ketamine, an anesthetic; and cocaine, and was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Brett didn’t learn of the overdose until someone told him at his son’s memorial service.

A solitary death

On the night Jackson died, he was staying with a friend in Hollywood. In the early hours of June 29, 2015, according to home surveillance video viewed by the Los Angeles Police Department, he went outside with his dog, sat by the pool and smoked a cigarette.

About 3:25 a.m., he staggered to his feet, lost his balance and fell face first into the water. His body floated for several minutes and then sank. On so many other nights he would have been surrounded by adoring friends. But the video surveillance from the pool showed that no one else was present, except his frantic dog.

“That is why it was ruled an accident,” Detective Lt. John Radtke of the police department said. Jackson Vroman was pronounced dead by Los Angeles County Fire and Rescue at 10:11 a.m.

At first there was speculation that he had tripped and hit his head. But months later the autopsy and toxicology reports revealed the presence of that same perilous cocktail of ketamine, GHB and cocaine. Their effects likely exacerbated an enlarged heart (different from his father’s) that was not diagnosed until after his death. It is the same ailment that, along with drugs, killed basketball star Len Bias in 1986.

In the days after Jackson’s death, two lavish memorials took place in Los Angeles.

A few of Jackson’s closest friends spread some of his ashes at Burning Man. The rest were taken back to Utah by his father and stepmother and buried on a hill next to Brett’s mother, a writing teacher whom Jackson adored.

Brett had so badly wanted for his son to come home to Utah, but never this way.

“I don’t know if laying the tombstone had some kind of subconscious impact on me,” he said. “But I’ve been struggling so much with missing him lately.”

Brett and Pari originally commissioned an artist friend of Jackson’s to fashion a headstone depicting Jackson with his arms spread out like the wings of Icarus, the mythological figure who flew too close to the sun and crashed back to earth. They then opted for a simpler headstone, but last month Brett had the image tattooed onto his forearm.

He sometimes wears his son’s silver sneakers and can still roar with laughter and tremble in tears at thoughts of his son. To deal with his grief, he sought therapy and the counsel of a Native American shaman, something Jackson would surely have appreciated.

And basketball, with all its familial meaning to the Vromans, remains a comfort. Brett watched the recent NBA playoffs closely and called it “the best entertainment there is.”

Back in January, he also gave private coaching lessons to an 8-year-old boy, the son of a friend. I asked him if he had done the same with Jackson. But he said by the time Jackson became serious about the sport, he was much older than this boy.

He did, however, recall a story from when his son was about the same age.

Brett had kept all of his own trophies and medals in a box and Jackson loved to admire them. One day Brett came home to find his buddies at the house, waiting to pick him up for a fishing trip.

And there was Jackson holding court in the living room, displaying the trophies and regaling everyone with stories of his dad’s past athletic glory.

“He was so proud,” Brett said. “He wanted to be like me.”