Matthew Perry, the actor best known for playing the role of Chandler Bing in the sitcom ‘Friends’ died at the age of 54 in Los Angeles on October 28. He was found unconscious in a hot tub and the first responders were unable to revive him. As per reports, the actor was playing pickleball shortly before his demise. Mr Perry’s pickleball coach has now revealed that the actor was “doing really well” before his death. He also used the sport as a means to help others who were staying at the rehabilitation centre he had established.

Matt Manasse spoke to People Magazine and said, “He was doing an awesome job. He loved it. He came out five times a week, would always talk about it. (He) got so much better, always made everyone laugh. He was competitive, just a genuine, good guy – caring for everybody. Pickleball was his outlet. He really looked forward to it. He was a competitive guy, not in a bad way at all…When he hit an unbelievable shot, he would tell you about it for days.”

“He thought it was something that could help with his recovery,” the coach said, talking about the actor’s struggles with drug abuse. Mr Perry battled for years with addiction to painkillers and alcohol and attended rehabilitation clinics on multiple occasions. The actor detailed his addiction to Vicodin following a jet ski accident in 1997, admitting that he was taking up to 55 pills a day at one point.

“He had so much that he was doing with his rehab facility and trying to get people clean. He would bring them to teach them pickleball. He was just always trying to help people,” Mr Manasse added.

Mr Manasse highlighted that he was always there to support him and would often say, “Whatever you need. Anything you need, I’m there for you.” The 35-year-old coach told the outlet, “That was just the kind of guy he was. We went to dinner together. I was over at his place for the Super Bowl. He cared about other people. He was a really good person.”

The coach, who last spoke to his buddy “Matty” a week before his death, says he wants people to know that the actor was “a guy who wanted to help people and was selfless.” “He cared about everyone – your day was better when you saw him or when he called. He never missed an opportunity for a funny joke to make you laugh. Just a genuinely amazing person. Everyone should know he had a heart of gold,” he concluded. 

“I should be dead,” Matthew Perry wrote in the prologue of his memoir ‘Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing’, published last year. In the book, which he dedicated to “all of the sufferers out there”, the ‘Friends’ star talked about drug abuse and alcoholism and described going through detox dozens of times and spending millions of dollars in repeated attempts to get sober.

The prologue talks about his time living in a sober living house in Southern California. “This was no surprise – I have lived half my life in one form or another in a treatment centre or sober living house. Which is fine when you are twenty-four years old, less fine when you are forty-two years old. Now I was forty-nine, still struggling to get this monkey off my back,” he wrote.

The title of the book sums up his incredible highs and shattering lows and the “big terrible thing” in his life: “My addiction being my best friend and my punisher and my lover, all in one. My big terrible thing”.

“Alcoholism, addiction – you call it what you want, I have chosen to call it a Big Terrible Thing”.

In his heartbreakingly beautiful memoir, he also recalled his time during the filming of ‘Friends’ – both sober and otherwise – among other things.

Perry wrote his addiction trajectory could be tracked by his weight on the smash hit TV sitcom: “When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.”

Season 9 was the only season he was fully sober which was also the time that he was nominated for an Emmy.

He wrote in his book that at one point, he was taking 55 Vicodin a day, and had to try various ploys in order to get them. He would “fake migraines or other pain, and sit through MRIs with different doctors”. On Sundays, he’d go to open houses and search the medicine cabinets of different homes for any pills he could find, he wrote.

For his addiction to Vicodin, methadone, and amphetamines, the actor attended 6,000 AA meetings, gone to rehab 15 times, was in detox 65 times, has been on life support and has spent between $7-$9 million trying to get sober, Perry detailed in his book. 

His ‘Friends’ cast – Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow and David Schwimmer – was supportive of him during this period, he wrote. First Aniston, and later, others approached him and told them they knew what was going on with him, he said.

“If I did die, it would shock people, but it wouldn’t surprise anybody. And that’s a very scary thing to be living with,” he wrote in his book. Matthew Perry was found dead at his home in Los Angeles on Saturday. He was 54.