"I thought I was sick — that I had the flu," Garrick told me a few years ago, looking back. "I hadn't realized I was addicted. I was going through withdrawal. My body was so dependent on (Percodan) that it couldn't function without it. . . . The steroids were part of it, too. My glands had stopped producing" hormones.

Garrick did two monthlong stays in drug rehab after leaving BYU, once at the school's expense, and many more times he weaned himself off the narcotics himself. He also attended narcotic and alcohol support groups. But he was arrested a couple of times for using phony prescriptions to obtain drugs.

As Edwards says, "The sad part about that damn stuff is I don't know if they can help it. There are people who can get over it but not many. They just seem to drift in and out of it."

Garrick's narcotics addiction would always be a Catch 22: Narcotics gave him such sweet relief from intense pain but also fed his addiction.

This was what his life was like by the time he reached his mid-30s as I recorded in a story six years ago:

He couldn't straighten the knee nor could he bend it enough to sit in the back seat of a car. He couldn't stand for more than 15 minutes at a time. He couldn't play court games, couldn't climb stairs, couldn't shop, couldn't run unless he "galloped" and was willing to endure even worse pain afterward. By the end of the day, as he sat in a chair, the pain would well up until beads of sweat formed on his forehead and upper lip. It kept him awake, staring at the ceiling, until the wee hours. Every day he buried the knee in ice for a couple of hours.

The pain was unbearable, a constant, nagging thrumb and ache in his life.

"It was the only relief I ever got," he once told me. "I'd start to cry when the painkiller took effect because I was pain-free. I used to wonder, 'Does everybody's body hurt like this?' I used to look at someone and wonder, 'Is he feeling a lot of pain right now?' "

His second wife, Traci, recalls, "He had bags of ice on his knee every night. To watch him run or do anything, you knew he was in excruciating pain."

What Garrick needed was a knee replacement, but he couldn't afford the steep price tag. In 1995, after reading a Deseret News story about Garrick's plight, an old family friend named Paul Jewkes offered to pay for the artificial knee. At 71, he sympathized with those who suffered from chronic pain because he was suffering from pancreatic cancer (which eventually took his life).

It took six hours — twice the normal time — to replace the knee. The surgeon, who found old staples, stitches and gauze inside the knee from previous surgeries, told Garrick he should have been in a wheelchair for years before that.