Doc: A Memoir

by Dwight Gooden

  “Yeah,” I said, taking another sip of my beer. “I pitch for the Mets.”

  “Ooooh,” the other one said eagerly. “Come on over. We won’t tell anyone.”

  Pretty soon, the three of us were all doing vodka shots, as I joined them on the bed. Then the coke came back out. They certainly seemed to be having fun with it. When they asked me again, I was in.

  “I’ll try a little bit,” I said with a smile. I was nervous as hell. But I wasn’t there for the coke. At the time, it felt like nothing more than a way to connect with these two sexy women. I dragged my finger along the credit card, picking up some coke dust, then put it on my tongue. My face got numb. It felt weird but also good. They saw this and smiled.

  Then, I snorted some cocaine, and it was love at first sniff.

  The shy-and-laid-back Dwight was a different person that night. Confident, relaxed, actually social. Alcohol had been my release from stress and pressure. But compared to cocaine, drinking was nothing. Cocaine was a jet, and beer was a rickety trolley. Coke gave me a feeling I’d always wanted but didn’t know how to find. It convinced me immediately that nothing else mattered at all. No pressure. No worries. No need to stop. I had never heard that cocaine had calming properties. But that night it made me feel calm. The drug hit quickly, and I had no confusion. This is how I wanted to feel.

  I fooled around with the girls. It was a lot of fun. We drank and did more coke. They really seemed to like me. I know I liked them. Between the snorting, they took turns making me feel good. Then about an hour after he’d left, my cousin came back. He took one look in the bedroom—I was sweating and talking a mile a minute—and he knew what was up. He started yelling at the girls. Then he looked disgustedly at me.

  “I know you didn’t do what I think you did,” he said.

  “I only did a little,” I lied.

  “Here,” he said furiously, handing me the pot. “I got some weed for you. Take it and get the hell out of here. Get your act together.”

  “I don’t need that anymore,” I said to him, grinning now. “I want what they got.”

  He glanced at the girls and shook his head at them. “I can’t believe you got him messed up on that stuff,” my cousin said. “What the—?”

  “So can you give me what I want?” I interrupted. After the hour I’d just had, weed seemed pointless.

  “Can’t do that, cousin. You know better.”

  “If you don’t give it to me,” I said, “I’ll go find it myself.”

  After more arguing and pleading and a quick good-bye to the girls, I left my cousin’s house empty-handed and met up with one of my friends. Sure enough, he told me where I could score some cocaine.

  I don’t think it would be correct to say I got addicted to cocaine after just that one experience. That would come gradually, over time. All I know is I liked what it did for me that night, liked it more than I ever imagined I would. And I wanted more of it.

  The next day, I didn’t come down very hard at all. I just felt a little tired. When I saw my dad at home, I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want him knowing what I had done. I didn’t like that feeling. But I didn’t hate it as much as I liked the rush I got from cocaine.

  Within a couple of weeks, I was a seasoned user. I didn’t start using every minute or every day. Cocaine didn’t fill my days like a job or a hobby would have. But cocaine was never entirely out of my mind again. It got me through to the second week of February.

  When I reported for spring training, I took a look around, and I was pretty sure that a couple of my teammates were doing coke like I was. Maybe I was only wishing, but I don’t think so. When we were out at night, I’d see them disappear at unexpected times and come back just looking different. No one came out and said anything. Not at that point. I figured they didn’t want me to know they were doing it. I sure didn’t want them to know that I was.

  I couldn’t always hide it, not if anyone was paying close attention. There were days when I was visibly messed up. Pitcher Ed Lynch, who was eight years older than I was and had been around a little more, stopped by my locker one afternoon. He sized me up and down and just shook his head.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “You know what, man,” he said.

  I didn’t make eye contact with him for the rest of the day. I’d just signed a new contract for over a million dollars. I knew coke could be dangerous. I guess I still had my mother’s voice bouncing around in my head. When I was a kid, every time there was a story in the paper about drugs, she made me read it. “Don’t be messing around with drugs,” she would say. “If I ever catch you, sure as I’m sitting here, I’m gonna let them put you in reform school.”

  By this point, there was far too much at stake for me. I’d been doing too well to risk blowing it. Everyone was certainly expecting a lot. The general sentiment around the organization seemed to be: “If Gooden wins twenty-plus games again, and Ron Darling and Sid Fernandez and our other starters can win twelve or thirteen games each, we should be okay.”

  Only twenty-plus? That was a lot of wins, I thought—and a lot of pressure. Could I really do that again?

  I felt dominant. My arm felt strong. There was no reason I couldn’t match last year and then some. But going into the season with those expectations did take some of the fun out of baseball in my mind. It certainly added to the pressure. It played to my old insecurities and made the game feel more like work. How come I didn’t feel like that in ’84 and ’85? Maybe I hadn’t set the bar so high yet. The sportswriters sure hadn’t. But now they had.

  On opening day of the 1986 season, we played the Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. I pitched a complete game, struck out six batters, and we won 4–2. When the game was over, the first question from reporters was: “What happened today? You only had six strikeouts.”

  Damn, I thought! Didn’t they notice I won the game?

  All I could think of as I left the ballpark that afternoon was: “Man, I could use some cocaine.

  8

  Series Season

  NINETEEN EIGHTY-SIX WAS THE year it all came together for the New York Mets and it all started to unravel for me. Nothing dramatic at first. Just some troubling hints.

  The year got off to an awkward start. Frank Cashen, the Mets’ general manager, blew up at me in January when he heard I was walking on crutches in Florida. I’d been tossing a ball with my nephew Gary, and I’d sprained my ankle. I didn’t think anything of it. I iced the ankle and used the crutches as a precaution. But Frank’s comment to the Mets beat reporters—“right away, you start to wonder about the severity”—raised some early questions about what I might be trying to hide.

  Nothing. I sprained my ankle throwing with Gary.

  In the first week of April, I missed a preseason game. A friend was driving me to the training facility in St. Petersburg when another car ran us off the road. We didn’t crash. We didn’t even make contact. I wasn’t hurt. The police weren’t called. But especially after the crutches questions, Davey thought I hadn’t given him a proper heads-up. “Doc, you gotta tell me everything,” Davey had said, before hitting me with a $500 fine.

  Five games into the season, with the team 2–3, the Mets’ front office woke up to my picture on the cover of the New York Daily News. “I AM NOT A VIOLENT PERSON,” the headline said. The story described a loud disagreement at a Hertz rental car counter at John F. Kennedy International Airport, where I’d been returning a car with my sister Betty and my girlfriend, Carlene. I don’t know why I got so angry at the Hertz clerk. But I did call her a stupid bitch when I thought she was giving Betty and Carlene an unnecessarily hard time. That was stupid of me. I lost my cool. Like it or not, I just had to realize I’d be under a whole new level of scrutiny now. At the level I was playing, my private life would never be private again.

  The next day in the locker room, the reporters didn’t have any baseball questions for me. I still hadn’t come to grips with the new reality. “Everyone se
ems like they’re waiting for the first thing you do,” I complained. “Anything—and then, boom! It’s a big issue.” You can imagine how well that went over.

  I didn’t slide into a deep, dark hole and stay there. And the difficulties I had that year were more than matched by the triumphs my team and I had on the field, successes I still feel proud of. If you look at the statistics from that Series-bound season, you’d have to say that, overall, I pitched quite well, best on the team, among the best in baseball. In 1986, I won seventeen games and lost six. My two hundred strikeouts were fifth in the National League. At various points that season, I had an ERA lower than any other pitcher’s. That summer, I became the youngest pitcher ever to start in an All-Star Game. I was twenty-one years, seven months, and thirty days old. All through the regular season, I was the Mets’ ace, even if I was sometimes an unsteady one.

  If it weren’t for 1985, I’m convinced 1986 would have been nothing but bows and backslaps for me. It’s just that, given where I’d set the bar—and where the fans and sportswriters were now setting it for me—my good that year never felt quite good enough. Not to me. Not to the celebrating Mets fans.

  I won five of my first six starts, including a complete-game two-hitter against Houston on May 6. Then something happened I definitely wasn’t used to. I slid into a slump. Not a deep one—but for me, it qualified. I wasn’t used to having any. My next eight games, I went 3–3 with two no-decisions. After the shutout against the Astros, my ERA was 1.04. It crept up quickly to 2.58.

  The loss I really hated was June 18 in Montreal, 7–4. I walked six batters in six innings, the most I’d walked since my rookie season in 1984. That night in Montreal, Tim Wallach became the first batter ever to hit two home runs in one game against me. To make the sting even worse, my childhood pal Floyd Youmans was pitching for the Expos. When Floyd and I met for dinner after the game, he shrugged and said: “So you’re not Superman.”

  I didn’t like to hear it. But he had a point. I was learning that I might not be. Two days later, the Associated Press asked, “What’s wrong with Dwight Gooden?”

  A pattern began to develop. No matter how well I was pitching, I was putting more pressure on myself. Was I as good as last year? I wondered. Was my Cy Young year a fluke, or was something really inside me, something repeatable? The K Korner was restless. The fans wanted strikeouts—more strikeouts. I found myself worrying more about strikeouts than who I was facing at the plate. I hated seeing sports page headlines that read: “METS WIN, BUT GOODEN ONLY FANS FIVE.”

  Even though my mom knew nothing about fastballs, I needed someone to talk to. I called her one day when I was feeling low. “Maybe I can’t do it again,” I said.

  She knew me better than anyone. She’d seen me doubt myself many times before. She knew I needed a shot of confidence. “If you did it,” she told me, “that means it can be done. And if it can be done, you can do it.”

  No one could do that for me like my mom.

  To this day, I have tried to pinpoint how much my off-time drug use affected my on-field performance—and exactly when the damage began. And how much was I hurt by overusing my arm or other causes? I am haunted by those questions even now.

  But give the coke credit: it helped me shove some of that pressure and anxiety aside. I didn’t use every day or even every other day. But as the season rolled on, my use slowly began to escalate. A friend of mine from Tampa hooked me up with a connection in New York on Long Island. Whatever I needed, he could supply. I knew enough not to get high the day or two before a pitching start. But once in a while after I pitched, I’d go out that night and party, drinking and using cocaine. I was sliding predictably out of control.

  In between starts, instead of calling home and catching up with my family, I began hanging out and going to parties and nightclubs with my new druggie friends. If Carlene wasn’t around, I’d run around with women I had met in clubs on Long Island. These weren’t the kinds of women I would date and bring home to meet my mom in Tampa. But they were happy to go out with me, get high, and fool around. Once in a while, I’d go into Manhattan to a club called Bentley’s, where the women and the drugs were even looser. My life off the field was becoming booty calls and blow.

  Tim Raines, the great base-stealing outfielder for the Expos, has said that his drug problem grew so severe in Montreal that he kept coke in his pocket and sometimes did lines during a game. That could be true. I don’t know. I know there’s been similar speculation about me, that I played while I was high on cocaine. But me? High on the field in ’86 or ever? No way.

  I would have been far too hyper and jittery out there. My precision would have been shot. All those people watching me. The paranoia setting in. I’d have made that second wild inning against Pittsburgh look like a model of ball control.

  And then there would have been the issue of stopping. When I did coke, I could never do just a line or two and say, “Enough.” I’d have been sneaking into the dugout, snorting lines every inning or two. I’d have been wrecked by the sixth, for sure.

  People look back on the 1986 Mets and say, “Now that was one wild group of guys!” We were young. We were loaded with talent. We had a city that loved us and fans who were desperate to win. We were an in-your-face team for an in-your-face city, perfectly matched with the times. Brawling with opposing players. Tearing up the nighttime across the National League. Stomping around New York with attitude and bravado. Rioting inside our own team plane. Someone even told some crazy story about slicing off the head of a cat. That one never happened.

  I hate to undermine our bad-boy image, but here’s the truth: most of what we did that season really wasn’t all that wild. Darryl, Lenny, Ron, and I—when we got together on an off-night or after a game, we weren’t doing much more than drinking or playing poker. We weren’t exactly known for being faithful to the women in our lives. Our wives and girlfriends had plenty of reason to be mad. When they were away, we did meet other women in bars. We did take some of them home with us, sometimes two and three at a time. We boasted about our conquests, the way idiot clueless guys have done as long as there have been idiot clueless guys. And sometimes, we got caught.

  One time in St. Louis, there were these two girls—they were sisters. Darryl and I had met them before and we’d messed around. Carlene didn’t make this particular trip but Darryl’s wife, Lisa, did, so he couldn’t hook up with the sisters. They were both mine. The next morning, I was in the hotel room with the girls. I heard a knock at the door. I was still half asleep. I thought it must be housekeeping. I didn’t even look through the peephole. I just opened the door.

  It was Carlene! In St. Louis! At my door!

  “Oh, shit!” I thought. But she was already marching past me and into the hotel room. She saw the girls in the bed. She broke down in tears. There was no way to explain. She shot back out of the room and got a flight back home. The sisters totally flipped out.

  “Should we leave?” one of them asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You probably should leave.”

  I knew Carlene and Darryl’s wife, Lisa, were close friends. I knew there was only one way Carlene would’ve flown halfway across the country without telling me first. I asked Darryl if he told Lisa about me and the sisters.

  “I didn’t tell her to tell Carlene,” he said. “I just told her, ‘Doc’s got these girls staying with him in his room.’” As tight as Lisa and Carlene were, he had to know that wouldn’t stay secret for long. But wasn’t Darryl my friend? As far as I was concerned, friends—let alone teammates—don’t do that to each other.

  All I could think was, “Thanks, Darryl.”

  We were aggressive young men with money in our pockets and testosterone to burn. But in a funny way, we were all still fairly young and innocent. I know I was. Drinking, carousing, staying out late—that was just our way of letting loose and having fun. That and a little drug use on the side.

  We were much more a team of drinkers than of druggies. Throughout the sea
son, I never saw cocaine on the team plane or shared in hotel rooms. People did drugs the way I did—alone or with friends from outside. We kept that stuff separate and quiet and to ourselves. I thought I was being discreet, the way most drug users do, I guess. But word was obviously trickling around the leagues: some players were doing more than getting drunk at night. And my name was one of the ones that kept coming up.

  During the second half of the season, Gene Orza and Donald Fehr from the Major League Baseball Players Association called me in for a meeting. I went to their office in Manhattan.

  “There are rumors out there that you’re hanging out in the wrong places, doing illegal stuff,” Gene said. At a charity dinner that summer, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth had told Ray Knight that he’d heard a black superstar on the Mets was doing illegal drugs. Ray had asked Darryl about it. Without hesitation, Darryl had said, “It’s Doc.”

  The reality is it could have been either one of us. It could have been players of a different race, as well. Darryl was just savvy at deflecting it, then later denying he’d said anything. Naturally, when confronted by the union heads, I denied it. I didn’t point a finger at Darryl or anyone else. I just said it wasn’t me.

  “Will you take a urine test?” Donald wanted to know.

  I stalled. “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  I asked Jim, my agent. He said I was under no obligation to do a urine test. Jim was a nice guy and had no power over how I conducted myself. He didn’t pry into what was going on.

  Afterward, the Mets never officially called me in for a talk or anything. Davey came up to me once before a game and asked if everything was okay, and I told him I was fine. Obviously, it wasn’t. But that was as far as it went. I had fairly open relationships with Davey and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre. I felt like I could tell them almost anything—except for the truth about this.

  Even with all that swirling around, I could still get out there and really pitch. We clinched the National League East on September 17, a night game, with a 4–2 win over the Cubs in front of 49,989 crazed Mets fans at Shea. I pitched all nine innings. I was smokin’, and I don’t mean pot. That was one of my very best moments in baseball, ever. From the sixth inning on, the fans were on their feet. We’d laid the foundation over the past three seasons. They could hardly wait to taste the rewards.