On the face of it, John Hanrahan was the man all the other boys wanted to be.

As an exceptionally good-looking and talented wrestler, he became the first in Penn State’s history to achieve over 100 victories, setting him on the path for a gold medal at the 1984 Olympics.

He was also a model, making more money than he’d ever imagined appearing on billboards all over the world in glamorous fashion campaigns.

And, of course, he was dating the most beautiful women.

Then, in the midst of qualifiers for the ’84 Olympics, he simply disappeared.

“I vanished into the streets of New York without informing anyone,” Hanrahan shares in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail. “Neither my coaches nor my teammates knew. I missed the US Open four weeks afterwards. I had reached my breaking point.”

In his newly released memoir, Wrestling with Angels, Hanrahan uncovers the extent of his struggles, the moment he nearly died from an overdose, and how—according to him—a life-changing encounter with two powerful angels helped turn his life around.

He then re-built his life, eventually becoming a personal trainer to the stars, including actress Julia Roberts, Hollywood producer David Geffen and even JFK Jr.

‘In truth, I spiraled,’ he says. ‘I disappeared into a devastating drug binge while my coach searched for me. I had crossed a line I couldn’t uncross. That’s when wrestling gave way to modeling full time… and to something darker.’

Hanrahan’s introduction to drugs was at college, trying pot in an attempt to get along with the ‘cool kids.’

That soon led to harder substances and, once his wrestling career was in the gutter, his cocaine use spun out of control as he chased the high that sport had once given him.

Meanwhile, his successful modelling career gave him the illusion that he was still the one in control.

‘Life became a… debauched series of events,’ he writes. ‘I hung with Playboy centerfolds. I had dinner with Andy Warhol, soft spoken and seemingly shy, and Grace Jones, elegant in the sheer hooded top that framed her chiseled face.

‘I yachted to the Bahamas to spend time at a countryside castle with a beautiful Italian divorcee. Took private planes to Key West getaways. I got flown out to LA and sent on a cruise ship for a one-week shoot for an Italian designer, and we partied at every port all the way to Acapulco.’

He adds: ‘When one of the female models climbed into my bunk the first evening, it became the Love Boat. I had no interest in love.’

But something told him he was on borrowed time and, as his drug use grew ever more toxic – ‘going for three days straight with a supply of enough [cocaine] to kill a horse’ – he started scrawling goodbye notes on scraps of paper, to be read when his body was found.

The messages were to his family and loved ones, saying things like: ‘If I die don’t blame yourself for somehow failing to save me – you didn’t do anything wrong.’

When he didn’t die at the end of his latest binge, he would be disgusted with himself.

‘I’d gather up the notes and all the drug paraphernalia, clean off the tabletop, and throw the pile down the incinerator chute in the hallway. Then it would start over again. The urge. New bags, new straws, new notes.’

There were no notes on the night he ‘died.’ Just his neighbor Joel – a psychiatrist and fellow addict – a bag of pure Columbian cocaine, and a box of little orange-tipped syringes.

‘I recoiled a little,’ writes Hanrahan. ‘Despite the kilos of cocaine I had ingested, I’d still only injected cocaine one time as a teenager. I was so freaked out by it, I never tried it again.

‘But I sold myself on the fact that Joel was a doctor, and from the marks on his arms, he’d clearly done this many times.’

Joel injected both of them and, as the high rushed through their bodies, the neighbor grinned, looked at Hanrahan, and said: ‘Let’s do one more.’

Feeling under pressure, he says, he caved. It was the worst decision of his life.

‘It wasn’t anything like the drug I knew, or anything like the shot I had 15 minutes earlier,’ he writes. ‘As soon as the needle plunged into me, I felt the exact opposite of high. I could feel my body shutting down.

‘The power was beyond anything I had ever felt before. My body had hit its limit. This is the end – this is death, what the last moments of life feels like. An anguish and a pain beyond anything I had ever known filled me.’

But as he fell to the carpet, he says he didn’t simply submit to death. He fought it as if he was in a wrestling match for his life.

‘Angels – physical angels – ripped me out of my body,’ he tells the Daily Mail. ‘It was the most horrific feeling that anyone could ever imagine.

‘There was this force pulling at me – two of them – and I couldn’t sustain it. My fingers just ripped and I lost control, and I got pulled upward, whisked away and taken to three different dimensions.’

One, he says, was a vast, colorful space. Then he was escorted by the ‘angels’ through a corridor, where he encountered what he describes as ‘a power, like a physical force of the universe.’

‘There was no doubt in my mind it was the source of truth and love, because that was all that was streaming through me. It was just the most warming, loving embrace that I could ever imagine.

‘I felt like I was in a place where I was meant to be.’

He describes the presence as pure light, ‘because it was just so totally illuminating and just kind of flowed through me and understood me.’

And as he saw his entire life in that one instant, he also saw the despair of his loved ones.

‘I could see all their prayers – they were shown to me as objects, almost like stones that were stacked up in a pillar.’

At first he was unable to speak, he says. But eventually he could verbalize what was going through his head, and begged: ‘Please don’t let my family suffer, my mother and father, brothers and sisters.’

Then, as quickly as he’d felt what he says was his soul leaving his body, he was back in Joel’s apartment – with a freaked out Joel standing over him. He thinks he’d been ‘dead’ for around 10 minutes.

‘I told him what I had experienced and where I had been… A psychiatrist, he brushed it all off as a psychological phenomenon,’ writes Hanrahan.

‘I tried one more time to explain, but none of my words did the light justice.’

Frustrated, he turned to leave, and claims in that moment his body felt clean – there were no effects from the three days of toxic-level drugs that had nearly claimed his life.

‘My mind was clear and sober. In place of the high, I felt the light. I had brought the light I had lost and then found again back with me to this realm.’

In another bizarre twist, the day after that eventful night, the psychiatrist Joel was arrested and charged with second-degree murder of a male companion he’d strangled with a cable cord.

He was sentenced to 10 years for the crime. 

Having been given what he felt was a second chance, Hanrahan vowed to ‘share and reflect this source of love with the world and help them recognize what I’d seen… This was my purpose – I just knew it. It was awe-inspiring.’

However, he didn’t get the reception he expected. Mostly, people made fun of him. Or said he’d probably had a drug-induced psychotic episode.

It had been a gift, he realized, but also a curse. Few people took him seriously.

As his modelling career morphed into the personal training industry, he had all but shut down his experience.

He married a fellow model, Kirsten, had two sons, Connor and Liam, and built up a celebrity clientele including Rod Stewart, Julia Roberts, Natasha Richardson, Tim Burton, Howard Stern, Melanie Griffith, JFK Jr, and David Geffen.

Julia, he says, liked to be treated like one of the guys.

‘One morning she came in after a night out… during which she got drunk and danced on the bar in her bra at Coyote Ugly. She was all over the front pages of the tabloids. Yet she fought through the embarrassment and the hangover to finish her workout.

‘She even asked me to teach her wrestling.’

Of John Kennedy Jr, he says: ‘He loved to vary his training and took whatever I threw at him. Walking lunges while carrying a weighted Olympic bar with plates across his neck? A mix of heavy-duty circuit modalities? He loved it all. 

‘Sure, he sometimes felt like an accident waiting to happen – once as he was leaving on roller blades, I reminded him about his bike. I’ll never forget him pedaling off to Central Park on his bike with his roller blades still on his feet, but that’s just who he was, fun-loving and fearless.’

But, for all that he bonded closely with his clients, Hanrahan’s near death experience remained a closely guarded secret.

In the book, he writes: ‘Every day I heard a voice inside me say, “God forbid they should ever know who I really am.” I absolutely didn’t want anybody to know.

‘Nobody really wants to be told, “I’ve met God and you haven’t,” and I wasn’t willing to open myself up to even my most receptive clients.’

He adds: ‘Every time I got ready to tell the story… and imagined answering the question, “How did you die?” by admitting I injected cocaine, my will to share unraveled.’

It was only when his son, Connor, faced his own life-threatening battle with drugs that Hanrahan realized his story might help other people in a similar situation.

‘I became the complete messenger I was meant to be when I met Connor in the light of truth and love,’ he writes.

‘I remembered how the loneliness overwhelmed me, drowned out my prayers, made me feel helpless – made me feel hopeless – and pushed me deeper into darkness, until I came as close as humanly possible to the point of no return.

‘I shared my story with Connor because I knew his loneliness had done what it did for me: left him with nothing but despair.’

The message he was sent back to convey, he believes, is that we are all connected to each other on a deep spiritual level.

Wrestling with Angels: A True Story of Addiction, Resurrection, Hope, Fashion, Training Celebrities, and Man’s Oldest Sport by John Hanrahan is published by Rare Bird