DON'T BE SURPRISED IF you see Chris Warren in the TV finals of a PBA national event. And don't be surprised if he captures a title ... or two ... or more, as he did a few years ago when he was one of the toughest and most popular players on the pro circuit.

Be surprised, however, if you ever see the 5'5", 118-pound: righthander with a beer in his hand. Or a mixed drink. Or doing a line of cocaine. Or partaking of any other kinds of illegal drugs.

And be surprised that Warren is even clean and sober, much less working his way back up the success ladder on the lanes.

"I stopped bowling competitively and on tour in 1996 because I wasn't making money and wanted to spend more time with the family," says Warren, a regular on the tour from 1986 to 1996, winning five PBA titles and an ABC Masters championship. "I wanted to do something other than bowl. It was starting to be too much of a burden. But then I drank too much, partied too much, and did too many drugs after I got off the tour.

"But my problems started long before I was on tour. I had a drug and alcohol problem since my late teens. When I first went out full time, I got a sponsor, [Ken Urban], and the only thing he requested was that I didn't do drugs. I abided by that and didn't do it, and when I got back off the tour I got back with the same crowd I used to hang with. There for a while I was stupid! I thought the world owed me something, but it owes me nothing. But I do owe this world a lot of respect. And I owe the game everything."

A couple of years ago, Warren wouldn't have given himself much of a chance of accomplishing anything close to his recent comeback, which has been nothing short of meteoric. "I was real lucky that I never got busted or had to do some hard time for my drug use," he says. "But I was probably more of an alcoholic than a drug addict. Even to this day, I really love to drink. But I know I can't. If I think I can have one drink, the next thing you know, it's a six-pack."

Warren seemed destined for stardom when he joined the tour in the early 1980s on the heels of successful outings by fellow Lone Star State standouts Norm Duke and Del Ballard Jr. He had a powerful strike ball that could dominate fields (he was the top-seeded player for the stepladder finals in four of his six tournament victories), a killer instinct on the lanes, and a friendly smile for any fans within eyesight.

Then all of the sudden, Warren was gone, earning nothing on the lanes from 1999 to 2001.

And almost as suddenly, Warren made his reappearance in PBA events a few months ago. After not having so much as picked up a bowling ball for three years, the Dallas native now living in the Seattle/Tacoma area took the Northwest Region by storm. At the urging of current road roommate Justin Clement, Warren rejoined the PBA and took a shot at the regional circuit. He found success immediately.

"In March 2002, Justin and I were supposed to bowl in a tournament in Grants Pass, Ore., and he gets sick and can't go," Warren says. "So I go to the tournament by myself, and fortunately, I won my first time back."

Warren says his physical game was in pretty good shape, but whatever instruction he did need was provided by pro shop operator Peter Sumoff, one of many friends in the Seattle/Tacoma area who made his comeback possible.

Warren won another regional later in 2002 and capped off the year by capturing the National Resident Pro Championship in Reno and battling his way back into the PBA Tournament of Champions. He finished the season as the Northwest Region's leading money winner ($13,100) and was fourth on the points list despite bowling only 10 of 14 events. Warren also won an "eagle" at the ABC National Tournament, teaming with Fred Mattson Jr. for a record-tying 1,534 in Billings, Mont. Mattson, a Billings native, rolled 268, 279, and 214 for a 761 series, while Warren added 227, 246, and 300 for 773.

But regaining his magic touch on the lanes merely has been a bonus. "I just want to start my life over and reconcile my differences with everyone," says Warren, who has gone through virtually all of the $700,000 he had earned on the PBA tour. "I want to start my life over and be the Chris Warren I know I am."

It wasn't long ago that life was good for the 39-year-old. The first time Warren tried the tour, everything was rosy, thanks in large part to his personal life, which featured his wife Maggie and daughter Dana.

But his four-year marriage ended in divorce in 1997. "We lived in Detroit for a little while, then relocated back to Dallas," Warren recalls. "[Maggie] wasn't real comfortable back in Dallas, and we probably should have stayed in Detroit. But the drugs and drinking were my downfall. I started several failed businesses and was getting deeper and deeper into a depression. When everything you do doesn't work out, the people you trust just don't work out, and you keep investing money, but the businesses keep losing, eventually you just snap. You get to a point so low that you drink, do drags, and everything becomes distorted.

"I finally hit the lowest point when I wasn't seeing my daughter or talking to my ex-wife. I wasn't communicating with my family. I don't blame the people around me, because it was my own undoing. It's been a long, hard road to recovery. Drugs are not that hard to stop, really. You just have to put your mind to it. The hardest thing to stop is drinking, because it's so readily available. It's legal, and there's a bar on every corner in America."

Things got so bad for Warren that he even considered taking his own life. "Did I think of suicide? Yes," he admits. "I was thinking that all things were bad and wondering how I was going to get things together. How can you have a career that was so good and then have nothing?"

After the divorce, Maggie and Dana, now eight, moved back to Detroit, and Warren decided it was time to clean up his act. In 1998, he did a 90-day rehab stint at a facility in Greenville, Texas, just outside of Dallas. That's when things started looking up--with a little help from his mother, Mary, and a few friends he had made in his previous tour life.

"When I was in a pro-am in Seattle in 1988, I bowled with a guy named Ken Baker," Warren recalls. "They had a little gambling pool going on behind us, and I asked if I could get in. They said, `Sure! We're not afraid of you!'"

The friendships that resulted from the chance encounter ended up changing his life.

After Warren finished his rehab, he was still living in Dallas but was going nowhere. So his mother brought up Baker's name. "I hadn't talked to him in about four years," Warren recalls. "I was clean and sober by then, but I still didn't think he wanted to hear from me. I would stay at his house when we bowled in Seattle, and he used to fly me, Pete Weber--at least 12 guys--to bowl in a regional up there every year."

Warren called his old friend, who runs the Amateur Bowlers tour in the Northwest, and his comeback shifted into high gear. "[Baker is] a promoter of bowling," Warren says. "Whenever the guys in the Northwest are looking for sponsors to go out on tour, the first one they'd go to is Ken. He'd get some people together and round up the money."

It was no different this time around. "I called Ken, and he says, `Come up and live with me. Your life is in shambles right now, so come to Seattle and get your life back together. You've got a place to live, we'll get you a job, and get you back on the right track. I don't care if it takes six months, a year, or two years. As long as your life is going in the right direction, all I ask is you don't drink or do drugs, and you've got a place for the rest of your life,'" Warren says. "Ken has never turned his back on anybody. I owe him everything."

So with the help of his family, who wholeheartedly supported the move, Warren scraped together the plane fare early in 2001 and headed for Puyallup, Wash., where he landed with just $200 in his pocket. Baker immediately noticed the obvious physical changes since he had last seen his friend: Warren showed up with his shoulder-length hair in a ponytail, weighing a little more than 100 pounds, and wearing a torn T-shirt and torn jeans.

"He said I looked like a drug lord. Then he wanted to know what happened to my front teeth," Warren says, who has had both of them knocked out in separate incidents but has never replaced either. "My daughter kicked me in the mouth to knock one of them out, and I lost the other in another accident for being drunk and stupid. A lot of people ask why I don't have them fixed. But it's a good reminder of what I've been through. A lot of people make jokes about it, but I don't care."

With Baker's help, within two weeks of arriving Warren had a job at Thunder Fireworks, acquired the use of a car from another former pro-am bowler, and was on the road to getting his life back together.