Chantix Worked on My Third Try: A High School Coach's Quit Story

Chantix Worked on My Third Try: A High School Coach’s Quit Story

I coach football and track at a public high school in Atlanta. Every day I stand on a field and tell sixteen-year-olds to take care of their bodies, push through pain, make good choices. For fifteen years, I did that while sneaking Newport 100s in the parking lot between practice and film sessions. I’m Tyrone Washington. I’m thirty-eight. And I’ve been smoke-free for eleven months after Chantix finally worked on my third try.

I need to tell the full story, not just the victory lap, because the full story is the part that matters.

I picked up my first cigarette at twenty-three. I’d just finished playing college ball at Morehouse. Four years of keeping my body right, no smoking, limited drinking, early mornings in the weight room. Then I graduated, didn’t get a call from any pro teams, and suddenly I was just a regular twenty-three-year-old without a plan. I got a job coaching JV at a high school in College Park while I worked on my teaching certificate. My roommate Darius smoked Newports. One night we were on the balcony of our apartment, I was feeling sorry for myself, and he offered me one. The menthol hit my throat and something in my brain lit up like a scoreboard. I bought my own pack the next day.

By twenty-five I was smoking half a pack a day. By twenty-eight, a full pack. Newports, always. The green and white box was as much a part of my daily carry as my phone and keys. I’d smoke before school, during my planning period (I’d walk to a spot behind the gym where the cameras didn’t reach), at halftime if I could get away from the field, and all evening at home.

The hypocrisy ate at me. I’m standing in front of a classroom teaching health class, and there’s a section in the textbook about the dangers of smoking. I’m reading statistics to these kids about lung cancer and heart disease and how nicotine rewires your brain, and the whole time I’m thinking about the pack in my glove compartment. One of my players, a junior named DeAndre, saw me smoking by my car after a game once. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. That look was worse than anything he could’ve said.

My first attempt to quit was at thirty-two. I tried cold turkey, told myself I was disciplined enough. I’d been an athlete. I had willpower. Willpower lasted about sixty hours. The withdrawal was unlike anything I’d experienced. Pounding headaches, sweating, this restlessness in my legs like I needed to run but had nowhere to go. I caved at a gas station on Memorial Drive, and I smoked three cigarettes back to back in the parking lot. Felt sick afterward, which didn’t stop me from smoking the rest of the pack that day.

My doctor at Grady brought up Chantix at my annual physical when I was thirty-four. Varenicline. It’s a prescription pill that blocks nicotine receptors in your brain. The idea is that it reduces cravings and also makes smoking less satisfying if you do slip up. You start taking it a week before your quit date, gradually increasing the dose, and then you quit and keep taking it for twelve weeks.

First time on Chantix, I followed the instructions carefully. Started the pills, set my quit date, told my girlfriend Aisha I was quitting. The first couple weeks on the medication were okay. The nausea was real. They tell you to take it with food and a full glass of water, and they’re not kidding. If I took it on an empty stomach, I’d be nauseous for an hour. But the cravings did lessen. I could feel the medication working, like someone had turned the volume down on the part of my brain that screamed for nicotine.

I made it five weeks. Then we lost in the state playoffs. Second round, by three points. A game we should’ve won. I’d put two years into building that team. I was gutted. That night I went to a bar with the other coaches, and by the second beer, I had a Newport in my hand. Didn’t even think about it. My body just did it. And once I broke the streak, I couldn’t get back on track. I stopped taking the Chantix and was back to a pack a day within a week.

Second time on Chantix, two years later. Thirty-six years old. Same routine: start the pills, set a quit date, grit my teeth through the nausea. This time I made it nine weeks. Nine weeks. I thought I was home free. Then the holidays came. Thanksgiving at my mom’s house in Decatur, and my brother Terrence was out back smoking, and I stood there with him “for the company,” and one turned into three, and three turned into a pack the next morning. The nine weeks evaporated. I won’t say I cried, but I sat in my car in my mom’s driveway and punched my own steering wheel until my knuckles hurt.

After that I didn’t try to quit for almost two years. I figured Chantix didn’t work for me. I figured I was just going to be a smoker forever. I’d made my peace with it, or at least that’s what I told myself. Aisha left. She didn’t leave because of the smoking specifically, but it was part of a bigger picture of me not taking care of myself, not following through on things I said I’d do. She was right to leave. I see that now.

What made me try a third time was a kid named Jaylen. Senior, defensive end, one of the best players I’d coached. Jaylen had a full ride to Georgia State. During his physical for the athletic scholarship, they found something on his lung scan. Turned out to be benign, thank God, but for about two weeks we all thought this eighteen-year-old might have lung cancer. His mom smoked in the house his whole life. Secondhand smoke, eighteen years of it.

That destroyed me. I went home that night and looked at my pack of Newports on the kitchen counter and felt something I’d never felt before. I wasn’t scared. I was angry. Angry at the cigarettes. Angry at myself. Angry at the whole industry that got me hooked and kept me hooked and was going to keep me hooked until it killed me or I killed it first.

I called my doctor the next day and asked for Chantix again. She was hesitant. She said it hadn’t worked twice and maybe we should try a different approach. I told her I wasn’t the same person I was two years ago. She prescribed it. I started the pills on a Monday in April 2025.

This time, I did everything different. I told the entire coaching staff I was quitting. Not in private, not quietly. I told them in the staff meeting on a Thursday morning. I said, “I’m quitting smoking and I need you all to hold me accountable. If you see me with a cigarette, I want you to take it out of my hand.” Coach Davis, our defensive coordinator, said, “Bet.” And he meant it.

I also started running again. Not coaching running, actual running. I hadn’t run for myself since college. The first time I tried to jog a mile on the track, I couldn’t finish. A fifteen-year smoking habit had turned my lungs into something that couldn’t carry me around a quarter-mile track four times. I walked the last two laps. I came back the next day and tried again. Took me about three weeks to run a full mile without stopping.

The third Chantix attempt, the nausea was worse. Or maybe I just noticed it more because I was paying closer attention to everything. I had weird dreams, like real weird. Vivid, long, elaborate dreams about things that made no sense. I dreamed I was coaching a football game on the moon. I dreamed I was back at Morehouse but all my classes were in a language I didn’t speak. I dreamed about my dad, who passed when I was nineteen, and he was sitting in the bleachers at one of my games. That one I didn’t mind.

The hardest moment was at a Fourth of July cookout. Atlanta in July is miserable. Ninety-five degrees, humidity that feels like you’re breathing soup. I was at my cousin’s house and the combination of heat, boredom, beer, and the smell of other people smoking pushed me right to the edge. I went inside, locked myself in the bathroom, and splashed cold water on my face. I looked in the mirror and said out loud, “You are not doing this again.” I said it three times. Then I called Coach Davis and told him I was struggling. He talked to me for fifteen minutes about nothing. Just regular conversation. By the time I hung up, the craving had passed.

The turning point was about eight weeks in. I was running on the track after practice, working on my third mile, and I realized I was breathing through my nose. Steady, controlled breaths. Not gasping, not wheezing. Just breathing like a normal human being. I finished three miles that evening. I sat on the bleachers afterward and thought about DeAndre, the kid who’d seen me smoking years ago. He’d graduated and gone on to college. I wondered if he still remembered that moment. I hoped he did. I hoped it hadn’t made him start.

Eleven months now. The Chantix course ended after twelve weeks and I’ve been medication-free since. The cravings still come. They’re quieter now, like a radio in another room. I can hear it, but I don’t have to listen.

I run three miles four times a week. My resting heart rate has dropped. I can actually demonstrate drills at practice without getting winded, which my players think is hilarious because apparently watching a thirty-eight-year-old coach try to do footwork drills is peak comedy. I’ve saved about two thousand dollars. My car doesn’t smell like smoke. My clothes don’t smell. I’ve gotten my sense of taste back, and my mom’s cooking is even better than I remembered.

I told my health class this year that I used to smoke. I told them I quit. I told them it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, harder than two-a-days in August, harder than losing in the playoffs, harder than anything. A couple of them looked at me like I’d grown a second head. A girl in the second row said, “Coach Wash, you smoked?” I said, “For fifteen years.” The room got quiet. I told them my story, all of it, including the failures. I think it landed harder than any textbook chapter ever could.

If you’re reading this and you’ve tried to quit before and failed, I get it. I failed twice on the same medication that eventually worked. The difference wasn’t the drug. The drug was the same all three times. The difference was me. I was ready. I had support. I did the uncomfortable things: told people, asked for help, ran when I wanted to sit, sat in bathrooms and talked to myself in the mirror.

Find your anger. Not at yourself. At the addiction. Let it fuel you. And if the first try doesn’t work, or the second try doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean the third try won’t. It took me three rounds of Chantix, and the third one stuck.

You are not alone. Every person who’s ever quit has a story full of false starts and bad days. The ones who make it are the ones who keep trying. Be one of those people. I’ll be here, running laps, breathing easy, cheering you on.