Doc: A Memoir

by Dwight Gooden

  “Hey, Doc,” they’d say. “We’re counting on you. We going to the playoffs this year?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I told them.

  The K Korner was becoming huge. Red Ks, black Ks, multicolored Ks—they were popping up all over the stadium, even some at away games. At Candlestick Park, it was black Ks on orange paper, Mets fans taunting the Giants in their own color scheme. The groupies weren’t just lingering in hotel lobbies anymore. They were waiting for me outside the ballpark at Shea and away. One day, my sister Betty was walking out to the parking lot with me after a home game when a group of female fans rushed up. I think they were surprised I wasn’t alone. “You’re too old for him,” one of them yelled disgustedly at Betty. “All you want’s his money.”

  “I don’t think they like me,” she laughed as we got into the car and shut the doors.

  The game crowds kept growing larger. The team noticed an attendance bump on the days that I pitched. Thirty, forty, sometimes fifty thousand people were coming to watch me work. It was all pretty head-turning for an awkward twenty-year-old.

  Nineteen eighty-five was the year I learned I couldn’t hide. The media knew me. The other teams knew me. The fans certainly did. Almost everyone was being swept up in the story of the great young pitcher who brought it, the shy boy dominating the big leagues, the savior not just of a struggling baseball team but of the struggling city it symbolized.

  I was tossed into a whirlwind of attention, endorsements, and fame. I signed a lot of contracts with big companies. Jim made deals for me with Polaroid, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Sports Illustrated, Spalding, even Toys “R” Us. Major brands with major marketing budgets.

  I shot a Diet Pepsi commercial with Catfish Hunter, the older pitcher showing the younger one how to throw an illegal pitch using moisture from the ice-cold can. Bruce Springsteen featured me in the video for “Glory Days.” Playboy published my diary. I recorded a novelty rap song with the same guys who had written “The Super Bowl Shuffle” with the Chicago Bears. I told David Letterman no, even though I was a major Late Night fan. I was just too nervous to sit on Dave’s couch. NBC asked me to host the season opener of Saturday Night Live, but I begged off on that, as well. They went with their fallback choice, Madonna. A gigantic photo of me went up at Pennsylvania Station. Underneath was my strikeout total, constantly kept up to date. This was getting ridiculous.

  For sheer impact, nothing quite matched the mammoth Nike billboard that covered the whole side of a building just west of Times Square. To anyone standing on the Manhattan sidewalk, the ad looked shockingly huge. The question it asked was just as shocking:

  “How does it feel to look down the barrel of a loaded gun?”

  The first time my mom saw the billboard, she said the picture didn’t look at all like me. I told her it came from my photo. But she held her ground. “I don’t know,” she said. “You look scary up there.” The man on the side of the building, she explained, looked too fierce to be the nice boy she had raised.

  I laughed and told her only my fastball was scary.

  Everyone seemed to want a piece of me. My fame kept spreading, and not just to places that sports stars normally went. Playgirl magazine named me—me!—one of the “ten sexiest men” of 1985 along with Miami Vice star Don Johnson, ballet star Alexander Godunov, and actor Aiden Quinn. That made me feel pretty good—until I noticed who else was on the “sexiest” list: New York governor Mario Cuomo, Nightline anchor Ted Koppel, and fat-boy comedian John Candy.

  Candy? Really?

  I did my best to handle it all. That didn’t come naturally to me. It was fun sometimes, having people telling me how great I was. But every time I heard that, I thought, “I know I have talent. But I don’t think I’m as great as you think I am.” Sometimes, I even said it out loud.

  The praise kept pouring in. Jesse Orosco, my sometimes late-inning reliever, said I reminded him of Fernando Valenzuela. No, Gary Carter said. Think Bob Gibson. Mel Stottlemyre, the veteran pitching coach who’d worked with lots of major talent, said even Bob Feller wasn’t this good at my age. Sandy Koufax said he’d trade his past for my future. Mickey Mantle said he wanted to be me. Davey Johnson pushed all the comparisons aside. My talent, he said, just was. “He has command of pitches and of himself,” Davey told reporters one day. “He’s a prodigy—that’s all. Why try to define it? How can you define a prodigy?”

  Some of this stuff got downright intellectual. George Will, the conservative essayist and brainy baseball fan, compared me with both the posse at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (“Who are those guys—they’re really good!”)—and the fellow Washington brainiac Dr. Charles Krauthammer.

  Will wrote, “We knew how baseball’s lesser pitchers—which means all other pitchers—felt when they first glimpsed Dwight Gooden. They thought, He is unreasonably good, and it is unreasonable to doubt that he will get even better.… Like Gooden, Washington’s Dr. K plays a game of inches—or precision.”

  Maybe someone who reads Will—or Krauthammer—can explain to me exactly what that means.

  Even Richard Nixon weighed in.

  “What’s he going to be like when he’s thirty?” asked the former political slugger who became a major Mets fan after leaving the White House and moving to New Jersey.

  Was I the best pitcher in baseball—or the best pitcher who had ever touched his foot on the rubber and picked up a rosin bag? Was the Hall of Fame a lock already? Was there any stopping me? I didn’t want to think about any of that. Couldn’t I just play baseball?

  Writer Peter Richmond managed to get it all into a single paragraph: “At the age of 20,” he wrote, “Dwight Gooden is simply the best pitcher in baseball, and getting better. If all goes well for the next fifteen or twenty years, he’ll be the best in the history of the game.”

  That was a big if. And frankly, I didn’t know how to answer comments like that. I didn’t want to seem unfriendly or unappreciative. I didn’t want to brag either. Plenty of times, I just didn’t know what to say, so I said as little as possible. “I hear comparisons with the great pitchers all the time,” I told Richmond when he and I spoke in Cincinnati. “But I don’t like to think about it. I just like to do the things I’m capable of doing. All I want to do is play baseball.”

  Often, when writers didn’t get what they were looking for from me, they would go see my family, trooping one after another into my parents’ living room. My dad would tell stories about me playing with the grown-ups when he managed the sandlot Tampa Dodgers. “Even as a boy,” my father said, “he never lost his cool.”

  They’d ask Mom how she felt seeing me pitch now. “I’ll be watching him and my stomach is turning,” she told one writer. “But he’s so calm. He’s always been like that.”

  “You know,” my sister Betty said in one interview. “He’s so quiet, he’ll say there’s nothing wrong no matter what. The only way we know how good he’s doing, if he’s homesick or worried or whatever, is watching his face and how he pitches.”

  Despite it all, I was still just a twenty-year-old kid. I was old enough to be the best pitcher in baseball. But I still wasn’t old enough to order a drink or even organize much of a social life.

  That year, when we were on the road, Keith Hernandez would often find me and ask, “Doc, you pitching tomorrow?”

  If the answer was no, that was all he needed to hear.

  “Okay, you’re coming out with us,” he’d say.

  We’d go out for dinner, then hit a couple of bars. At that time I was still basically just drinking beer. One night in Chicago, we were in a bar off of Rush Street and my Pepsi commercial came on the TV. The bartender looked at me, looked at the TV, then looked at me again.

  “Hey, you’re Doc Gooden!” he said.

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You know, you’re not old enough to be in here,” he said, turning suddenly serious.

  I looked at him. Then I looked at Keith. Just as Keith was about to make a case for me
, the bartender started laughing and said, “Go ahead. The drinks are on me. Get wasted. I hope the Cubs pound you.”

  They didn’t of course. Not many teams did. I was aiming to win twenty-five games that season. By August 25, I was the youngest player ever to win twenty. That’s what I cared about most.

  By the time the season was over, I threw sixteen complete games, won twenty-four and lost four. It was the best pitching record in either the National or American Leagues. Attendance at Shea jumped by nearly one million from the previous year. It would keep on growing throughout the rest of the ’80s, until we were the number one draw in the National League.

  I won the Cy Young Award, declaring me the number one pitcher in the National League. I earned baseball’s pitching Triple Crown, which is only given if a single player has the most wins and strikeouts and the lowest ERA. Maybe someone wins it every decade, if that.

  I would never perform quite so well again.

  But who was Dwight Gooden?

  My mom and my sister put their fingers on something true, I believe. While my heat was terrorizing batters and making them jump back from the plate, I was still very much the shy boy from Tampa, awkward, lanky, sheltered, still unsure of myself. It just so happened I was burning up the National League. That didn’t change who I was, who I had always been. It was almost like I was two people in one. That both those people could inhabit the same body was a conflict that wouldn’t end quickly or well.

  7

  Party Time

  WANNA PARTY?” THE WOMAN in the black negligee asked me, the taller of the two.

  She and her friend—I never learned either of their names—were lounging in my older cousin’s bedroom on his mammoth king-size bed. The bedroom door was halfway open. I was sitting on a couch in the living room, peeking through the door. Bo, my cousin, had gone out to fetch me some pot.

  My mother had always warned me about the “occasion of sin.” My dad had a more colorful way of making the same point. “Lie down with dogs,” he liked to say, “you might get fleas.”

  This was January 1986, between my second and third seasons with the Mets. I had plenty to feel good about. I was making excellent money. My $475,000 baseball package was about to jump to $1.3 million. The endorsement deals were still pouring in. After I won the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Awards, and all the TV ads, people seemed to know me everywhere—not just in Tampa and New York, and not just sports fans. Mets fans were still talking about the dominant season I’d had. Even I felt like I’d pitched well. And the team was only getting stronger. In November, we’d traded with the Red Sox for lefty pitcher Bob Ojeda, a veteran starter who could bring new leadership to our rotation. We were slowly assembling a truly lethal lineup. It wasn’t out of the question that we could go all the way.

  So why was I feeling so bored?

  My previous off-seasons, I’d been happy to sit around the house with my parents and have a few beers with my friends. Just waking up in the morning felt new and exciting to me. But now, for reasons I wasn’t exactly sure of, I was having trouble getting used to the off-season pace. Had I finally begun to think of myself as a real big-leaguer? Had I been enjoying the faster New York lifestyle a little more than I thought? One hundred and sixty-two games a year, even if you’re not an everyday player, is a frantic rhythm for anyone. During the season, I could work off my excess energy on the mound, then decompress on the off-days with my teammates. I had focus and purpose and regular demands on me. Now, not so much.

  Tampa in the winter felt like a floating void. My high-school buddies weren’t doing much of anything. Being around my parents’ house just felt like more of the same. I was a big star now, a bigger star than I’d ever imagined I’d be. But that wasn’t a job title with actual duties. It wasn’t enough to fill all my days. I didn’t have hobbies like a lot of ballplayers did. They’d play golf with business guys or fly around the world on hunting and fishing trips. None of that was part of my off-season routine. My dad would occasionally put together a team for a charity softball game. I played some neighborhood pickup ball. Other than that, my major form of distraction was drinking beers with my friends and driving around in cars, often with a six-pack in my lap.

  Idle hands, idle minds: I can see now I was ripe for trouble. I had just turned twenty-one.

  While I’d spent the spring, summer, and early fall playing and practicing baseball, my friends had been polishing their screwing-off skills. They could turn doing nothing into a full-time job. Me, I needed a schedule. I needed a focus. I still do today. When I was a kid I had my dad filling hours with drills and practice. Then, I had Mel Stottlemyre and Davey Johnson in my ear, reeling me in and pushing me along. If not them, Keith Hernandez and Gary Carter. But sitting down in Tampa, I was mostly on my own. I needed to be told I’d be pitching in two days in San Diego. All I had back home was time and my aimless friends. I hung out some with my dad. But mostly, I drove to the projects, picked up my friends, then cruised around. By January, even that was tiresome. I couldn’t wait for spring training to begin.

  I had tried smoking weed before. It only made me hungry and sleepy. But I thought I might give marijuana another chance. Maybe this time, it would ease the restlessness I was feeling, or at least mellow me out. So I drove to my cousin Bo’s house. I knew that he would have some.

  He was a cousin from my mom’s side of the family. He traded in pot, cocaine, and women. It was a little strange, my relative being a pimp and drug dealer. But that’s what Bo was. When I got to his house, he said he was totally out of weed—but, no problem, he’d be right back.

  “Yeah, great,” I told him half distractedly.

  Looking past Bo’s shoulder, I could see two of his ladies fooling around with each other on the bed.

  From what I could tell, they were probably ten years older than me, and they looked like they could be the backup dancers at a Prince concert. The taller one was dark-skinned, trim, and small-breasted. The other one was lighter and shorter, all tits and butt. Bo caught me staring into the bedroom.

  “Don’t pay any attention to them, Doc,” he cautioned me. “You don’t want to get tangled up in that. Sit down on the couch. Watch some TV. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  I grabbed a beer and sat. I left the TV off.

  In a minute, I could hear the ladies giggling in the bedroom. I looked up, and I could see them making out. The shorter one, I could see, had on purple-colored underpants, white boots, and nothing else. Through the door, I could see one of the women grab a handheld mirror and tap some white powder out of a little baggie. The tall girl used an ID card to push the powder into lines. I was mesmerized by their attention to detail—almost as much as I was mesmerized by them.

  I’d heard people mention cocaine in Tampa. It sounded like a scary drug to me. I had the sense, without really knowing, that people sold it in the projects. No one on the team had ever offered me any, and the topic only came up a few times. When outfielder Jerry Martin joined the team from Kansas City my rookie season, everyone knew he’d been arrested the previous October for buying cocaine. Along with Willie Wilson, Vida Blue, and Willie Aikens, he’d served ninety days in a minimum-security prison. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended Jerry for a year but then turned around and reduced his suspension. None of the other Mets seemed concerned about any of it.

  It wasn’t like drug use in sports was a shocking idea. In 1985, six Pittsburgh Pirates—Dave Parker, Lee Lacy, Dale Berra, Lee Mazzilli, John Milner, and Rod Scurry had been called before a Pittsburgh grand jury and questioned about drug use in professional baseball. Their testimony led to drug trials, which made headlines. UPI called baseball’s drug problem the “number one sports story of 1985.”

  The team owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association began negotiating a drug policy, but those talks went nowhere. “These guys must think they’re dealing with the sugar plum fairy,” complained Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who was pushing for mandatory drug tests. “We have p
layers that need help and the union is trying to pretend that no one is using drugs.” Union president Donald Fehr said the players felt insulted by the owners’ “guilty until proven innocent” approach.

  In December, while I was hanging around Tampa, the union did take one step: publishing a children’s coloring book called The Pros Say It’s O.K. to Say No to Drugs. It had messages from forty players—including me.

  Given where I was heading, is that ironic—or what? The Dwight Gooden page said: “If anyone tries to give you drugs, say NO! and tell your mom or dad.”

  If only I’d followed my own advice!

  But if I’d been scared of coke, all of a sudden the potent white powder seemed like something sexy women did. And these two seemed to have the mechanics down cold. Chopping up the powder. Lining it up just so. Taking long sniffs, first one nostril, then the other. Then they busted me.

  “Come on in,” Miss Negligee said with a laugh.

  She had just finished snorting a line of powder. She looked up from the mirror and pushed one of her nostrils closed and gave an extra sniff. She smiled and offered me her straw.

  She asked if I wanted to party.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  I was still nervous about messing with cocaine. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to use the drug. “I’m all right,” I said.

  There were two beautiful, half-naked women on a bed in front of me, and you couldn’t call them inhospitable. I was shy, but I was also a guy. I was just hoping they’d transition away from the drugs toward something I knew a little more about.

  “You’re in the major leagues, right?” the shorter, lighter-skinned woman asked, smiling at me.