Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (6 page)

Reckless years in the fast lane, fueled by alcohol and cocaine,
cost former New York Mets phenoms Darryl Strawberry
and Dwight Gooden the prime years of their careers

T
HE HOOD OF THE SILVER-BLUE MERCEDES RESTING IN
the circular driveway of the new $1.2 million house in Rancho Mirage, Calif., is still warm. On this Wednesday afternoon in mid-January, Darryl Strawberry has just returned from providing a urine sample at a local hospital as part of his drug-testing agreement with Major League Baseball.

“There’s a lot of sobriety out here,” Strawberry says of the Coachella Valley as he offers up bottled water and stretches out on a leather sofa. The valley also has perfect desert weather, streets named after movie stars and more than 80 golf courses, 600 tennis courts and 10,000 swimming pools, one of which is on the other side of the patio doors just over Strawberry’s left shoulder. Strawberry chose this resort community as his home last May after seeking treatment for cocaine abuse. “And I don’t even play golf,” he says. He is living in self-imposed exile, talking about his former home cities, New York and Los Angeles, as his versions of Sodom and Gomorrah.

“It became a lifestyle for me,” Strawberry says. “Drink, do coke, get women, do something freaky … all that stuff. I did it for so long. I played games when I was drunk, or just getting off a drunk or all-night partying or coming down off amphetamines.

“With alcohol and drugs it was the excitement. That’s how I got addicted. It was an exciting way to escape from everything else. Coming to the major leagues at such a young age and coming to New York … maybe someplace else it would be a little different, but New York is a party place, an upbeat place.

“Man, I put up some good numbers. But I look back and wish I could’ve done it like I’m doing it now: clean. I just got tired of [the lifestyle] after eight, nine, 10 years. They would have never caught me because I’d done it [drugs] for so long. I grew up in a fast place, L.A.”

Strawberry had provided a urine sample the previous day as well. The day before that, on Monday, Strawberry had spoken at a Martin Luther King Day rally at the El Cerrito Community Center, a few miles north of Oakland. He had talked about the importance of keeping children off drugs and alcohol, referring to them several times as “the young youth today.”

“I’ve been through drugs and alcohol myself,” he had said into the microphone. “I overcame that through the grace of God.” The cocaine he had scored less than 48 hours earlier, on Saturday night, lingered in his system as he spoke at the rally. More fatefully, it was in the urine samples he provided on Tuesday and Wednesday. He didn’t realize, as he sprawled across his couch, telling a reporter he was clean, that he’d been caught.

IT BEGINS with one beer, the way a massive freeway pileup begins with one car or the way an inferno starts with a spark. Dwight Gooden’s pattern of self-destruction continues when he orders another beer and then another. On this night, in June 1994, the lights and the music and mostly the alcohol at the Manhattan nightclub are soothing him.

He has been a hard drinker since 1986, when he was 21 and in his third year in the majors—abstaining from alcohol only on the two nights before a starting assignment and, flushed with youth, money and stardom, indulging on all the others. At 22 he landed in a drug rehab center after testing positive for cocaine. Now, nearing his 30th birthday and into his third straight losing season, he is drinking out of self-pity. The alcohol hits him like Novocain; it numbs the pain but cannot remove it.

The beers are not enough, so, as he often has, he switches to something harder. Vodka has always been a favorite. It makes him forget about his combined 22–28 record for the Mets in 1992 and ’93, about how terrible his team has become and about the injured toe on his right foot, which has kept him on the disabled list for the past five weeks. The drinks keep coming.

Man, I’m hammered, he thinks. He presses on deep into the night, so deep that he still is drinking when he notices the place is closed, the doors are locked and everybody else except the people who work in the club have gone home. That’s when one of the employees pulls out the bag of cocaine. You want some?

I know I shouldn’t, he thinks. But that notion passes quicker than one of his old fastballs, dissolving completely into the fuzziness of his alcohol-polluted mind. What the hell, he thinks. I’m on minor league rehab for my toe. They won’t test me. Within 48 hours a representative of the testing agency used by Major League Baseball arrives in Binghamton, N.Y., home of the Mets’ Double A affiliate, to collect a urine sample from Gooden.

THE CAREER paths of Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden began as parallel lines—unbending inclines headed straight to Cooperstown. How could it be that instead we are left with this ugly tangle of trouble? They both were National League Rookies of the Year, the 21-year-old Strawberry in 1983 and Gooden, at 19, the following season. When Gooden started his first major league game, in ’84, Strawberry ripped a home run to centerfield for the game-winning RBI. Before either one of them had turned 25, they were stars, millionaires and, in ’86, world champions as members of one of only four National League teams in this century to win as many as 108 regular-season games. How did those parallel lines wind up as twisted as those on a New York City subway map, the two of them intersecting over and over again?

Intersections: In the off-season following the Mets’ World Series victory, Gooden was arrested for brawling with Tampa police and Strawberry was ordered by a Los Angeles court to stay away from his wife, Lisa, whose nose he had broken with a punch to the face. So when Strawberry reported to spring training in 1987 and discovered he had been assigned a locker next to Gooden’s, he cracked in his typical dark humor, “Look, it’s Assault and Battery together.”

Six weeks later Gooden spent Opening Day in Smithers Alcoholism and Treatment Center in New York City, being treated for cocaine use, while Strawberry, wearing Gooden’s uniform pants, drove in the winning runs with a three-run home run. Three years after Gooden checked into Smithers seeking treatment for drug abuse, Strawberry checked into Smithers for alcohol abuse. Both of them now admit they sought treatment halfheartedly. Little wonder then that last year Strawberry and Gooden both checked into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage for cocaine abuse. One going and the other coming, they missed each other by only 79 days.

Last Aug. 14, Strawberry picked up Gooden upon his release from the Betty Ford Center and drove him the one mile down Bob Hope Drive to Strawberry’s new home. He escorted Gooden through the grand marbled foyer and into the living room.

“Doc, you’ve got to get out of Florida,” Strawberry said. “You’ve got to change your environment to keep from using. The most important thing they told me at Betty Ford was to change the whole atmosphere and get away from the people who use.”

Gooden has maintained his home in St. Petersburg since moving there in 1987 from his birthplace, Tampa. Within a week after leaving the Betty Ford Center last summer—and three days after attending a counseling session in New York with Robert Millman, a psychiatrist who represents Major League Baseball, and Joel Solomon, a psychiatrist who represents the players’ union—Gooden was drinking and using cocaine again with friends in Tampa. And five months after that, Strawberry tested positive for cocaine.

“It just goes to show you,” Gooden says now, “it doesn’t matter where you are. Drugs, alcohol … it’s everywhere. What’s more important is that you can never let your guard down.”

Another intersection: Today neither Strawberry nor Gooden has a team to call his own. They are suspended from baseball. They are the eighty-sixed Mets.

And yet they are so different. Strawberry is a complex puzzle. None of the Mets was better around children at charity events. Even now he is pouring a healthy portion of what’s left of his money—he’s estimated to have earned about $25 million as a baseball player—into the Strawberry Patch Youth Project, a San Francisco Bay Area drug and alcohol prevention program that he founded with Ron Jones, one of his closest friends and a former drug dealer. Strawberry is, even as he approaches his 33rd birthday, as naively eager for love and acceptance as a puppy in a pet-shop window. He has a natural capacity to charm people. He can turn any room into a happy place merely by strolling in with that cool, smooth, long-legged glide, and he can energize any ballpark, hit or miss, with that beautiful, looping swing.

Sadly, he can just as easily transform himself into something rotten. His transgressions contradict—even obliterate, for many people—that core of goodness. Alcoholic, drug abuser, batterer and now convicted tax cheat. His career has been a long screech of tires during which all you could do was wait for the crash. The chronic tardiness, the enormous mood swings and the erratic behavior offered a cacophonous prelude to disaster for all to hear. “A walking stick of TNT,” says Strawberry’s former Mets teammate Ron Darling.

Contrasted against Strawberry’s dark streak was the apparent benevolent light of Gooden: accommodating, consistent, industrious, quiet. Indeed, after 1985 the tight friendship between the two ballplayers loosened to a comfortable acquaintance. They were not as close as the public thought. As Strawberry says, “I never partied with Doc.”

“The few times Dwight was late for anything,” Darling says, “everyone would ask, ‘Is the cab stuck in traffic? Was he in an accident?’ When Darryl was late, you thought right away, Darryl screwed up again. Doc was Teflon and could do no wrong. Darryl was a ticking time bomb.”

THE WAY Strawberry remembers it, his first experience with cocaine was in 1983, soon after he was promoted to the major leagues. He liked to drink beer and he smoked pot sometimes, but now two of his veteran teammates were asking him to try something new. “There’s a couple of lines in the bathroom for you, kid,” he remembers them saying. “This is the big leagues. This is what you do in the big leagues. Go ahead. It’s good for you.”

Strawberry tried the cocaine. Damn, he thought, that’s
good
.

So began the volatility that became the trademark of his career. He did not create a new controversy every day; it only seemed that way. In a seven-day span in June 1987, Strawberry overslept twice, and was rousted from his hotel bed both times by a teammate’s phone call from the ballpark; was fined $250 and benched for two games for his tardiness; charged the mound after almost being hit by a pitch; and blasted a 450-foot home run. So often did he drop bombs that when asked about his weird week, he replied in all earnestness, “Weird? Why? Just because I was late twice, got benched, was fined and had a fight? It’s part of the game.”

Still, what happened within a four-day span this month was shocking even by his standards: Between Feb. 6 and 9 Strawberry received a 60-day suspension from baseball because of the positive drug tests, was released by the Giants and pleaded guilty to the charge of failing to report and pay tax on more than $350,000 in income from appearances at card shows from 1986 to ’90. As part of the plea arrangement Strawberry is expected to be sent to prison for three months and be under house arrest for another three months.

Last week, according to Jones, Strawberry entered his third rehabilitation center in the past five years.

“Every time I think he’s coming out of it, something else happens,” said Richie Bry, Strawberry’s agent from 1980 to ’88, even before learning about this month’s positive drug tests. “You don’t know what to believe from him anymore. I think Darryl is basically a good person but very immature and subject to being influenced heavily by other people, some good and some not. He’s easily misled and easily succumbs.”

The recent bout with cocaine cost Strawberry what appeared to be an opportunity with a team that seemed to be a perfect fit for him. During his 29 games with the Giants, who signed him after his release from the Dodgers last May, Strawberry enjoyed the benefits of playing for an understanding manager, Dusty Baker; having Barry Bonds and Matt Williams in the lineup, which allowed him to play a supporting role for the first time in his career; and having his older brother, Michael, on the team payroll as his personal chaperon. Strawberry lost all of that on Jan. 14, when he hooked up with some friends for a Saturday night out in San Diego.

“He had all of that riding and still went back to cocaine,” says Jones, who says he changed his ways after going to prison twice, once on a drug charge and once on a weapons charge. “That’s how powerful that s--- is. Darryl told me [he used again because] he felt a lot of pressure was on him.”

Until the recent relapse Strawberry said he had been clean since last April 2. That night began with a private lecture in the office of Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, before an exhibition game in Anaheim against the Angels. “Get yourself going,” Lasorda barked. “We need you to carry us.”

How many times have I heard that? Strawberry thought. Only my whole career. Why is it always on me? I’m tired of it. I don’t want to hear it anymore.

He hit a home run in his last at bat that night and then disappeared into his own black hole of despair, drinking and drugs. He got so high he never went home. His new wife, Charisse, called his mother, Ruby, late the next morning, which was a Sunday. Darryl had weekend custody of his two children from his first marriage, Darryl Jr. and Diamond, but after staying at his house they were to return that day to his ex-wife, Lisa. Did Ruby know where Darryl was? Ruby was rushing off to church, so she let her daughter Regina talk to Charisse and left without being clear as to what the call was about.

When Ruby arrived at the Blood Covenant Christian Faith Center in Pomona, Calif., where she also works as a secretary, the parishioners comforted her. They had heard news reports that Darryl was missing. “It’s going to be O.K.,” they said. Ruby had no idea what they were talking about.

Strawberry remembered that the Dodgers had an exhibition game in Anaheim that afternoon—the last before the regular season began on April 5—but he could not muster the energy to go. I’m tired, he thought, too tired. I am not going through another season like this. The partying, the drinking…. I’m just so tired.