One Sip After Three Years and I Was Drunk That Night - AA Speaker - Larry V. - Cleveland, OH
Podcast: Sober Sunrise - AA Speaker PodcastPublished On: Fri Mar 13 2026
Description: After three and a half years without a single drink, one sip at a party lit the fuse — and a football coach's long losing streak against alcohol finally brought him to Alcoholics Anonymous. We just launched our new Episodes page — search hundreds of AA speaker meetings by topic, speaker, or step ☀️ Sober-Sunrise.com Larry V. spent 41 years in the football business while alcohol quietly destroyed everything on the other side of the scoreboard. After white-knuckling three and a half years of sobriety on pure willpower, one sip of a friend's drink at a party set off a phenomenon of craving that sent him into the worst stretch of his life — fired three times, a double hit and run, a shotgun in the family room, and total isolation in an apartment with a barf bucket by the bed. A random picture of a former Brooklyn Dodger in the sports section of a newspaper led him to make a phone call that connected him to a rehab in small-town Wisconsin, where he surrendered for the first time and hasn't had a drink since November 1975. Today Larry stays close to his home group, keeps in weekly contact with his sponsor, and carries AA meeting guides from all over the world — because the same energy he used to find the nearest bar, he now uses to find the nearest meeting. Larry V. from Cleveland, OH speaking at the Newburgh Group in Cleveland, OH - January 24th 2009 Music: Deep by KaizanBlu
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