‘You can get better or you can die’: Scott Parks reveals why he’s been off KC radio
Scott Parks, the co-host of the “Dana & Parks” radio show on KMBZ, revealed on Thursday why he had been absent from the radio program for a month.
Addicted to alcohol for much of his adult life, Parks told The Star just before he returned to the air that a family trauma led him to break his sobriety. He was in rehab locally for 30 days.
“The gist of it, quite frankly,” said Parks, 52, “I put something above my sobriety. When that happens, you’re basically left with a couple of choices. One is either get better and go to a rehab facility — which I did. Or you can die. And I chose to go to a rehab facility for the last month.”
Parks said he was in rehab from Sept. 25 to Oct. 25, and announced that news at the top of the show, which he co-hosts with Dana Wright from 2 to 6 p.m. weekdays.
“It is the elephant in the room,” Parks told The Star.
At the beginning of Thursday’s show, he told listeners, “I have made no secret over the years that I have struggled, and was in recovery, for alcohol, and had actually been sober for three years. It was a point of pride with me.”
He said that in late July, “a trauma hit my family,” which he did not detail. He began drinking again.
“I have also heard it said that your disease is waiting out in the parking lot doing push-ups, waiting for you to come outside,” he said. “That’s not true. Your disease is in the parking lot doing push-ups, squats and burpees, and he brought his friends and he’s pissed.”
He said he relapsed in late July, and his addiction to alcohol “crushed me, put me on the floor, put its foot on my neck and refused to let me get back up.”
It was Wright, he said, who first noticed his relapse and confronted him and, in spite of Parks’ anger and protest, called Parks’ brother. On the talk show, which discusses and debates current events, the two are friendly foils to each other — Wright expressing liberal viewpoints to Parks’ more conservative.
“As hard as it was to confront what was happening,” Wright said, “I kept thinking, ‘I cannot be the one that has to pick up the phone and call them and say you have not come into work and we don’t know why.’ I was terrified we were heading there. … You were furious when I called your brother.”
“That was the alcohol talking,” Parks said.
Parks’ brother, along with their mother and Parks’ two daughters, held an intervention, Parks said.
“To you and my brother and my family, you saved my life,” he said to Wright. “And I cannot pay you the debt that I owe you.”
Parks told The Star that his recent stay in rehab was his first, having always returned to sobriety on his own.
“Quite frankly, it’s going to be my last,” Parks said. “I don’t plan to lose.”
Parks said that other than explaining his absence, he hoped that revealing his own experience might help someone else.
“I just hope that I’m able to help someone who’s driving home in their car this afternoon, thinking that they’re all alone in this world with that problem. They’re not,” Parks told The Star, and said something similar later on air.
“If I can reach one person who is driving home and has a pint of vodka in the console, and doesn’t even know why, and let them know you can beat this — or, at least you can maintain this, you don’t ever have to feel like this ever again, maybe it’s time to turn my life around — I’d argue that it’s worth every minute that we use on the radio for that.”
This story was originally published October 26, 2023 at 3:10 PM.
