daily mail book review - Wrestling with Angels

by Ruth Walker, US Books Editor, DailyMail

On the face of it, John Hanrahan was the man all the other boys wanted to be. A strikingly handsome, champion All-American wrestler, he was the first in Penn State history to notch over 100 victories on the mat, putting him on course as a hopeful for the 1984 Olympic Games. He was also a successful model, earning more money than he’d ever imagined by appearing on billboards around the world in glamorous fashion campaigns. And, of course, he was dating the most beautiful women.

Then, in the midst of qualifiers for the ’84 Olympics, Hanrahan simply vanished. “I slipped into the New York streets without telling anyone,” he recalls in an exclusive interview. “Not my coaches. Not my teammates. I didn’t show up for the US Open four weeks later. I was done.” In his new memoir, Wrestling with Angels, Hanrahan finally reveals the depths of his despair, the drug overdose that killed him, and how – he believes – a violent encounter with two powerful angels brought him back. He then rebuilt his life from rock bottom, eventually becoming a personal trainer to the stars, including actress Julia Roberts, Hollywood producer David Geffen, and even John F. Kennedy Jr.

Hanrahan admits that walking away from wrestling left him unmoored. “In truth, I spiraled,” he says. “I disappeared into a devastating drug binge while my coach searched for me. I had crossed a line I couldn’t uncross. That’s when wrestling gave way to modeling full-time… and to something darker.”

Hanrahan’s introduction to drugs came back in grade school – smoking a little pot in an effort to fit in with the “cool kids.” That soon led to harder substances and, once his collegiate wrestling career was in the gutter, his cocaine use spun out of control as he chased the high that sport had once given him. Meanwhile, his modeling career was taking off, giving him the illusion he was still in control.

“Life became a… debauched series of events,” he writes in Wrestling with Angels. “I hung with Playboy centerfolds. I had dinner with Andy Warhol – soft-spoken and seemingly shy – and Grace Jones, elegant in a sheer hooded top that framed her chiseled face. I yachted to the Bahamas to spend time at a countryside castle with a beautiful Italian divorcée. Took private planes for Key West getaways. I got flown out to L.A. and sent on a cruise ship for a one-week shoot for an Italian designer, and we partied at every port all the way to Acapulco.” The hedonistic globe-trotting blurred together. “When one of the female models climbed into my bunk the first evening, it became the Love Boat. I had no interest in love.”

Yet amid all the glitter, Hanrahan felt a growing dread. Something told him he was on borrowed time. As his drug use grew ever more toxic – “going for three days straight with a supply of cocaine enough to kill a horse,” he admits – he began scrawling goodbye notes on scraps of paper, to be read if his body was ever found. The messages were to his family and loved ones, saying things like, “If I die, don’t blame yourself for somehow failing to save me – you didn’t do anything wrong.”

Whenever a binge didn’t end in his death, Hanrahan would be disgusted with himself. “I’d gather up the notes and all the drug paraphernalia, clean off the tabletop, and throw the pile down the incinerator chute in the hallway,” he writes. “Then it would start over again. The urge. New bags, new straws, new notes.” It was a vicious cycle of addiction and self-loathing.

Finally, one night in 1985, John Hanrahan did cross that point of no return. This time, there were no goodbye notes. There was only his neighbor doctor Joel — a psychiatrist as well as a fellow addict — a bag of pure Colombian cocaine, and a box of orange-tipped syringes. Hanrahan hadn’t injected drugs since a terrifying experiment as a teenager. “I recoiled a little,” he writes. “Despite the kilos of cocaine I had ingested, I’d still only injected cocaine one time as a teenager. I was so freaked out by it, I never tried it again.” But that night, desperation won out. He prepared a needle.

What happened next defies belief. Hanrahan overdosed — his heart stopping as his soul, he says, left his body. He describes being suddenly out-of-body, in the grip of something otherworldly. “There was this force pulling at me – two of them – and I couldn’t sustain it,” Hanrahan recounts of his near-death experience. “My fingers just ripped and I lost control, and I got pulled upward, whisked away and taken to three different dimensions.” One was a vast, kaleidoscopic space. Then he was escorted by what he describes as “the angels” through a corridor toward a brilliant presence — “a power, like a physical force of the universe.”

“There was no doubt in my mind it was the source of truth and love, because that was all that was streaming through me,” Hanrahan says. “It was just the most warming, loving embrace that I could ever imagine. I felt like I was in a place where I was meant to be.” The presence was pure light: “It was just so totally illuminating and just kind of flowed through me and understood me.” In that instant, he saw his entire life flash before him — and also saw the anguish that his loved ones would feel at his loss. “I could see all their prayers – they were shown to me as objects, almost like stones stacked up in a pillar,” he remembers.

At first, Hanrahan was unable to speak in this state. But eventually he found himself able to form words in his mind. He begged this source of love and truth for mercy: “Please don’t let my family suffer — my mother and father, brothers and sisters.” The very moment that plea formed, Hanrahan was slammed back into his body. He came to on the floor of Joel’s apartment, with a very freaked-out Joel hovering over him. Around 10 minutes had elapsed while he was “gone.”

Hanrahan told Joel everything he experienced — but the psychiatrist, was dismissive, chalking it up to hallucination. “I tried one more time to explain, but none of my words did the light justice,” Hanrahan writes. Frustrated, he got up to leave — and realized in that moment that something miraculous had happened. His body felt completely clean. The effects of the three-day toxic binge that had nearly killed him were just… gone. “My mind was clear and sober. In place of the high, I felt the light,” he recalls. “I had brought the light I had lost and then found again back with me to this realm.”

In an astonishing postscript, the very next month, that same doctor Joel was arrested and later charged with second-degree murder of another man – whom he strangled with a cable cord. (He was ultimately sentenced to 10 years in prison.) Hanrahan could only shake his head at the cruel twists of fate that had placed his life in the hands of that man on the very night he overdosed.

Having been granted what he felt was a second chance at life, John Hanrahan vowed to change everything. “I promised to share and reflect this source of love with the world and help others recognize what I’d seen… This was my purpose – I just knew it. It was awe-inspiring,” he says of the resolve he felt upon surviving. In the coming years, he got sober and slowly rebuilt his life from the ground up. He left the chaos of the modeling world behind and eventually found his true calling: training and coaching others to be healthy. With hard work and humility, Hanrahan became one of the nation’s top fitness and wellness experts.

By the 1990s, Hanrahan had built a celebrity clientele that read like a Hollywood Who’s Who – from rock legend Rod Stewart to talk-radio icon Howard Stern. He worked with Pretty Woman star Julia Roberts, British actress Natasha Richardson, filmmaker Tim Burton, Hollywood power player David Geffen, and many others. One of his closest high-profile clients was John F. Kennedy Jr., the American scion he met in New York. Hanrahan recalls JFK Jr. as an exceedingly down-to-earth daredevil. “I’ll never forget him pedaling off to Central Park on his bike with his rollerblades still on his feet,” Hanrahan laughs. “But that’s just who he was – fun-loving and fearless.” Sometimes, Hanrahan admits, he worried about the charismatic young Kennedy, who seemed to thumb his nose at danger. JFK Jr., he says, “sometimes felt like an accident waiting to happen.” (Tragically, in 1999, Kennedy’s adventurous streak did catch up with him when he died in a plane crash at age 38.)

For all the close bonds he formed with clients like JFK Jr., Hanrahan kept the story of his near-death experience strictly to himself for decades. He was grateful to be alive and devoted himself to helping others get fit, but he struggled privately with the why of his survival. He also felt deep shame about the drug-fueled circumstances of his brush with death. “Nobody really wants to be told, ‘I’ve met God and you haven’t,’” he explains, “and I wasn’t willing to open myself up to even my most receptive clients.” Every time he considered sharing the truth, the thought of admitting that he had literally died from a cocaine injection made his resolve falter. In his book, he writes about the imposter syndrome that haunted him: “Every day I heard a voice inside me say, ‘God forbid they should ever know who I really am.’ I absolutely didn’t want anybody to know.” So he stayed silent, throwing himself into work and family life.

Hanrahan eventually married a gorgeous top model, Kirsten, and together they had two sons, Connor and Liam. It was only when his older son Connor faced a life-threatening battle with drug addiction years later that John finally realized his story might save someone. Seeing his son struggle in despair, Hanrahan decided it was time to open up. “I shared my story with Connor because I knew his loneliness had done what it did for me: left him with nothing but despair,” he says. In that raw, honest moment, Hanrahan at last embraced the role he believes the light intended for him. “I became the complete messenger I was meant to be when I met Connor in the light of truth and love,” he writes. “I remembered how the loneliness overwhelmed me, drowned out my prayers, made me feel helpless – made me feel hopeless – and pushed me deeper into darkness, until I came as close as humanly possible to the point of no return.”

Through sharing his journey with his son, John Hanrahan found new purpose. Today, having been to the brink of death and back, he feels an obligation to convey the message he was sent back with. In his view, that message is simple but profound: we are all connected to each other on a deep spiritual level, and no one is ever truly alone. It’s a lesson written in pain and paid for in full by his own resurrection. Now in his early 60s, Hanrahan continues to coach and inspire others on their wellness journeys. And after decades of silence, he’s finally telling the full truth in Wrestling with Angels: A True Story of Addiction, Resurrection, Hope, Fashion, Training Celebrities, and Man’s Oldest Sport – the memoir of an extraordinary life nearly lost and joyously reclaimed.