Ex-Husker track star battling addiction

Tressa Thompson may come back to life in the eyes of her father, family and friends.

The three-time NCAA shot put champion and record-setter from the University of Nebraska, by way of Bloomfield, is in a drug rehabilitation program in San Juan Capistrano, Calif.

After years of living in the vortex of cocaine and meth, stealing, lying and cheating, Thompson now boasts she might try a comeback — almost eight years after she reached the peak as an athlete.

“She’s changed. Really changed,” her father, Jim Thompson, said Monday from Bloomfield.

“It’s been eight years or more since we really knew Tressa.”

Tressa Thompson, 32, once the best women’s shot putter in the world, was the subject of Monday’s episode of “Intervention,” a show on the A&E Network.

The hour-long show followed her for four days in late October.

Throughout the show, Jim Thompson blamed part of his daughter’s troubles on her sexual orientation. 

Tressa said her loneliness led to  her troubles with meth. Stealing money from her mother and friends. Stealing a gun from her father and pawning it to buy more drugs.

She lost the trust of her family.

“Where I once saw a beautiful and outgoing and fun-loving person, I see a dangerous and hazardous person that I hardly recognize,” Tressa’s sister, Rachel Pinkelman, said on the show. 

The first female to throw the shot put 59 feet indoors and the first to throw it 60 feet outdoors had been in and out of the courts since 2000.

In and out of various failed attempts at drug rehabilitation.

After the “Intervention,” she entered the Hope By the Sea Clinic in California.

She’s now advanced to another program.

She’s been sober since Oct. 24.

The former track, basketball standout and two-way player on Bloomfield’s football state championship team in 1992 was shown during the show shooting up meth. She was thrown out of a girlfriend’s house when she was caught stealing money to buy more drugs.

Confronted by her father and her mother, Syble, Tressa admitted using drugs but said she couldn’t stop.

Jim Thompson said a friend, Susie Burbach, contacted the TV show by e-mail last summer.

“They get about 30,000 hits a year and they picked Tressa and put her on top of their list,” he said. “Maybe it was because she was so good. She was headed to the Olympics in 2000. And she had given up her values, destroyed her life and destroyed our family.”

Tressa said in an e-mail to Long & Strong Throwers Journal that  she believed the show was about good athletes gone bad. 

The show helped steer Thompson to drug rehabilitation in California.

In the summer of 2000, Tressa only had to lift the shot put over the edge of the ring in the U.S. Olympic Trials to qualify for the Summer Games. But just before the competition, she tested positive for cocaine and was banned from competing for two years.

“She got involved in drugs with a moron of a cousin in Omaha and it’s been her life ever since,” Jim Thompson said.

Tressa tried a variety of jobs. She helped her sister and her husband on their farm at times. She helped Jim on his farm. She helped a girlfriend with chores.

“But she couldn’t keep a job because of the drugs,” Jim Thompson said. “The drugs are destroyers. She’d be up for days at a time. She went a month without sleeping. She did sleep in her car.”

On the show, Tressa explained that after shooting up, she often spent 24 hours in her car.

“My needle couldn’t suck it (the drug) up fast enough. I draw the blood into the needle. Push the needle in. Feel it go up my arms, across my chest. It’s a warm feeling. When it gets to my legs, I sigh. It’s a relief.

“It’s the only way. My whole life is an addiction to adrenaline. Meth gives you that adrenaline rush. It’s the only way to handle life,” she said on the show.

Last fall, when confronted by a  family that had struggled not only with Tressa’s drug use, but her lesbian lifestyle, she consented to try rehabilitation once again.

In the November e-mail to Long and Strong editor and publisher Glenn Thompson (no relation), Tressa explained: “Over the last eight years I have done a lot of damage to my brain. I really have been frying it. Do you remember the commercials, ‘This is your brain (the egg) on drugs (eggs frying in a pan?’ This is exactly what meth does to one’s mind.”

Tressa had lost almost 50 pounds during her years of using drugs. She was back up almost 20 pounds just 30 days into rehab. She had six root canal operations as her teeth started to deteriorate, one of the results of meth use.

Through the years, she was picked up for shoplifting, a felony burglary charge, which later was dropped. She was charged with assaulting an officer and evading  arrest and theft, possession of drug paraphernalia and other misdemeanors to go with a felony prescription drug charge.

She had a heart attack.

“There were suicide attempts, wrecking cars, loan sharks, all that,” said Jim Thompson. “It was eating all of us up. I was scared for Tressa. Her addiction was like a death to us.

“I have to learn new ways, like Tressa does to save her life.”

Mark Colligan, the Husker throwing coach and Tressa’s personal coach after her days as a 10-time All-American at Nebraska, said he felt like he had lost a friend.

“She was my closest friend, apart from my wife, and I felt like something had to change,” he said.

“I have always said, if she gets healthy, I’ll be here. That hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it will this time. I hope.”

Reach Ken Hambleton at 473-7313 or khambleton@journalstar.com.