Doc: A Memoir

by Dwight Gooden

  The fact that I could deliver that is something I have never stopped feeling grateful for.

  The Mets hadn’t won anything since 1969. Hadn’t been to the postseason since 1973. The dugout was full of Mets executives and their families. Cops with helmets were waiting off to the side of both dugouts and stationed all the way around the field. The last out was Chico Walker, a lefty. I got him to a 1–2 count. Keith Hernandez came over to the mound and shouted “fastball” emphatically. I ended up throwing Chico a curve, one of the few times I didn’t take Keith’s advice. Chico hit a ground ball to Wally Backman at second base. Wally fell to his knees to secure the ball, making absolutely sure he didn’t bobble or lose it. Then he threw to first, easily getting Chico out. As Keith caught Wally’s throw, one of the first fans on the field was already running past him. Even before Chico was officially called out, two dozen people jumped the wall and were out on the field. There were so many people out there, Keith joked to me later, he figured if Wally hadn’t stopped the ball, one of the cheering fans would have.

  In my excitement, I raised my arms and looked at Gary Carter, who was running toward me. By then, fans had already stolen his mask and helmet. But instead of waiting for Gary, I turned and tried to run off the field. Thousands of fans were rushing toward us. Darryl lost his glove. Many of the players instinctively grabbed the caps off their heads, hoping to save them. But that was mostly futile. The caps were snatched and gone. I was hugged, then tackled and nearly buried alive. I looked up and realized I was at the bottom of a growing human pile. I was happy. Then, all of a sudden I was on the ground and scared. I couldn’t get up for what seemed like forever but was probably forty-five seconds at most. I didn’t know who was on top of me. At one point, Keith jumped onto the pile. Davey sent police to the mound to rescue me. But it was Greg Pavlich, our bullpen coach, who managed to swat some of the fans away. He pulled me up from the pile, and we made a mad dash to the dugout, where anyone who dared to enter was assaulted with ice, water, talcum powder, beer, shaving cream, and green dye. “I don’t think they know how to celebrate,” Davey said, some mystery liquid dripping down his face. “It might be more dangerous in here than out there.”

  We went to Houston to face the Astros and their star pitcher Mike Scott in the playoffs. If they were going to beat us, it’d be on his shoulders. He had over three hundred strikeouts that year, pitched in the All-Star Game, and would go on to win the Cy Young Award—not to mention the MVP of this playoff series. He had a ninety-one-mile-an-hour fastball, but that wasn’t as intimidating as the rumors that he scuffed the ball. All season long, people tried to catch him. But they never did. All I know is that whatever he was doing, the ball danced like a Wiffle ball. We had a lot of hard-charging characters on our team, but the idea that he scuffed the ball turned them into butter.

  I pitched against Mike in game one and gave up a homer to Glen Davis in the second inning. I lasted eight innings without giving up another run. But we couldn’t hit Mike and lost 1–0. Guys were frustrated, inspecting the balls, complaining to the ump, you name it. I used the same balls Mike did. I could see that some of them were scuffed. But Mike looked clear, and no one could prove otherwise.

  We won the next two, then lost one—to Mike Scott again. The series was tied 2–2 when I went against Nolan Ryan in game five. For me, it was a dream come true. Nolan was a pitcher I’d watched on Saturday afternoons in complete awe with my dad ten years earlier. He was such a dominant pitcher that coming to the plate to face him made my knees turn to jelly. He wasn’t even that big of a guy. He had big legs and a high kick, and that’s where most of his power came from. It was a long game. Neither one of us, Nolan or I, was willing to go to the showers. I went ten innings, gave up two runs, and didn’t get the decision. Gary Carter saved us in the bottom of the twelfth with an RBI single, scoring Wally Backman and getting the win. Up 3–2.

  We flew back to Houston to play game six the very next day. This was really our game seven. If we lost, we’d be going back up against Mike Scott, and he was deep inside our heads by then. We all had the same feeling. We weren’t going to hit the guy. Talk about losing the game even before you get out there! Our only chance was to avoid playing the game. The Astros jumped out to an early 3–0 lead on us in one of the most nerve-racking playoff games of all time, and I wasn’t even pitching. It took us sixteen innings to finally put the Astros away, 7–6. Jesse Orosco came in and somehow picked up his third win. We were going to the World Series at last.

  The game had run so long, from 3:05 to 8:30, we had to rush from our lockers to William P. Hobby Airport. The only time we had to celebrate was on our chartered plane back to New York. Which we did. With gusto. Beers came out. Then little bottles of the hard stuff. Then people started throwing slices of cake. Then one of the players’ wives threw up in a seat back, and Darryl thought it might be fun to see how far back an airline seat could really recline. The answer? All the way back to flat, if you pushed it hard enough and broke the back off. By the time we got off, the whole cabin was smeared with food and alcohol and worse. Two rows of seats were destroyed. It looked like someone had tipped over a dumpster in there on Mardi Gras Day.

  United Airlines sent Frank Cashen a bill for $7,500, which under the circumstances was fairly moderate, I thought. Frank marched the bill down to the clubhouse. He presented the bill to Davey in front of everyone.

  “This is disgraceful,” Cashen said. “And I’m not paying for it. You guys are.”

  Davey allowed him to finish and let a moment of silence pass. “Is that all, Frank?” he said.

  It was, and Frank left the room. Then Davey spoke to the team.

  “Do you have any idea how much damage we caused on that plane?” he asked. “Any idea? Would anyone like to explain? Does anybody have anything to say?”

  No one said anything.

  I looked at Darryl. He looked stone-faced. I noticed Wally staring at his feet.

  “What are we going to do about this?” Davey asked, sounding like a very angry fourth-grade teacher after the class had just pulled some totally boneheaded prank. “What should we tell Frank? What do you think?”

  Still no one said anything.

  “In that case,” Davey continued, “you know what I think? I think in the next four games, you guys are gonna put a shitload of money in this team’s pocket, more than enough to cover this bill. So fuck this bullshit.”

  He tore up the bill, and then he tossed it away. And the Mets front office didn’t bring up the issue again. We had a World Series to play.

  I wish I could say I had something left by the time we played the Red Sox. But the truth is I was done. Tired. Sore. At my limit. Totally out of gas.

  That season, I had thrown over 250 innings. Against the Astros, I’d given up three runs across eighteen innings of ball with no room for error at all. By the time I got to the World Series, my arm and my body had hit a wall. I had never experienced anything like it before.

  The Red Sox had the kind of lineup I usually liked to face. With the exception of lefties like Wade Boggs and Rich Gedman, they were heavy with right-handed power-hitters like Jim Rice, Don Baylor, Dwight Evans, and Dave Henderson. Guys like that normally feed into my high fastballs and breaking balls out of the zone.

  But not now.

  Had I been at the top of my game, I could have gone to town on them. Instead, I had nothing to show. Even when I got ahead in the count, I couldn’t put them away.

  We lost game one at Shea, 1–0, a real pitching duel between Bruce Hurst and Ron Darling. I opened game two against Roger Clemens. But my fastball wasn’t the same. I had no bite on my curve. I started going for location, just trying to get outs. Nothing I tried was working. I wanted to pull my hair out. I was shelled for six runs on eight hits in five innings. This was the World Series, the biggest stage of all. Dr. K couldn’t K that Sunday afternoon. The Red Sox were up on us, 2–0.

  After we lost the first two games at home to the Red Sox, the whole Wo
rld Series could have easily slipped away. We had to travel to Fenway Park in Boston for the next three straight. We were mentally and physically flat. People kept telling us—we kept telling ourselves—“It’s the World Series. You should be up for it.” But those six games against the Astros took a lot out of all of us, not just me.

  After blowing those first two games, the second with me on the mound, we had a day off before game three. Davey looked at us sulking in the clubhouse before we left Shea. He could always read us.

  “I don’t want anyone coming in here tomorrow,” he said sternly. “Just get the hell out of here. Forget about baseball.”

  His words took some of the pressure off. Then Lenny Dykstra opened game three with a home run, the first of four runs in the first inning, and got us going again. Bobby Ojeda outpitched Oil Can Boyd for a great 7–1 Mets turnaround. Then, in game four, Gary Carter’s two home runs and Ron Darling’s seven shut-out innings evened the series at two.

  I came back in for game five, and I stunk just as much as I had in game two. I hated the way my arm felt. I tried pushing through on World Series stamina and adrenaline. None of it worked. I gave up four runs on nine hits in just four innings. Even Sid Fernandez’s strong relief wasn’t enough. That was the end of me in the series. A 4–2 loss sent us back to Shea trailing the series 3–2.

  Luckily, my teammates did what they had to without me. They looked inside themselves. They pulled back from defeat again. They remembered what the Mets were made of. The moment everyone remembers is Mookie Wilson’s grounder through Bill Buckner’s legs in the bottom of the tenth in game six, forcing game seven. Everything that happened during that at bat, from Bob Stanley’s wild pitch that scored Kevin Mitchell to Mookie’s staying alive to hit that bouncing roller up the first base line, was magical. Shea Stadium erupted and shook so much, I bet they felt the rumble in Manhattan. Game seven was a heart-pounding, come-from-behind 8–5 win, but compared to that ball through Bill Buckner’s legs, the play was almost anticlimactic.

  Now it was time to celebrate.

  The champagne came out in the locker room.

  The party began.

  A parade was set for the morning.

  I wanted a sniff of cocaine.

  9

  Off-Season

  WHEN I WENT HOME TO TAMPA after the World Series win, I didn’t go home home like I had the past four years. I went wild celebrating. For two weeks, I hung out with friends, stayed late in clubs, bought drugs, and rented hotel rooms to do those drugs in with people I’d met at those clubs. Actually, it was more than two weeks. The whole off-season was one big blur—an aimless, messy, sometimes violent blur. Not all of it was my fault. Not everyone around me behaved well. But I was the one who put myself in that position, and I was a walking target for trouble.

  In past off-seasons, I’d spent hours watching sports with my dad, going to my nephews’ games, even catching the occasional wrestling match. Not this year. I barely took the time to drop my bags off at home before heading out on a weeklong bender. And then another. And another. I was dying to prove something to my friends back home: even though I’d won the World Series, even though I was earning big money and living in New York, I was still just a regular guy. I tried to prove that by being stupid and never going home.

  Zero father-son time. A desire to prove myself to people still hanging around from high school. It was a bad combination. Dad didn’t complain. That wasn’t his way. But as November rolled on without much sign of me settling back in, Mom grew concerned. On one of the rare occasions that our paths crossed at home, she shot me a puzzled look. “Why don’t you hang out more with your dad?” she asked.

  I felt guilty hearing her say that. I told her we’d be spending more time together real soon, just as soon as I caught up with my friends and went to see Monica Harris, a girl in Tampa I’d just started dating after Carlene and I decided to break up at the end of the World Series. Or Debra. Debra Hamilton was a local girl I’d gotten involved with, briefly, in 1985. She was one of several. But Debra got pregnant, and Dwight Gooden Junior was born on March 8.

  Even Harold, my sister Betty’s husband, lobbied me. “Your mom mentioned to me that she and your dad are concerned about you,” he whispered one day when I went to their house to catch an NFL game—or half of one, anyway. Harold was careful not to embarrass me or make a big deal in front Betty and Gary.

  “I’m doing fine,” I lied.

  “Dwight, they never see you,” he pleaded. He looked me up and down. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, Harold,” I said, smiling at him. “I’m twenty-two.” I had him there.

  “Slow down, Doc,” he told me, glancing over my shoulder to make sure my sister wasn’t listening in. “Spend more time with them. Do ya some good.”

  “I hear you,” I told him. Then I looked at the clock on the stove. “Gotta go, Harold.”

  I got into my Mercedes. I picked up some friends. We stopped for a couple of six-packs, and we drove. We talked, laughed, looked for trouble. That was our daily routine. If we had a big group, we’d borrow my dad’s conversion van, drive it to the park, and party there. At night, we’d drive somewhere, go to a club, look for women—I wasn’t serious yet with Monica—find a drug dealer and snort cocaine.

  The money in the glove compartment went to fund the parties. I never knew much about measuring coke. So I’d just ask a dealer for $300 worth or, if it was a big party, $3,000 worth. I took whatever the dealer gave me and accepted his honesty. I’m sure I got taken many, many times. Some of the money came from my salary and endorsements. But I earned a lot of it at autograph signings and appearances. In those days, I could earn $10,000 at a baseball card show, and we usually got paid in cash. A guy once paid me $2,000 to eat lunch with his son on Long Island, while another paid me $3,000 to have dinner with his clients for one hour. I could earn about the same giving a pitching lesson to a Little League kid, a Little League kid with a successful dad.

  Rumors about me and drugs were all over Tampa. No one seemed to have proof of anything. But I didn’t understand how the talk could have spread so fast. Some of the rumors were crazy. Someone said I’d been pitching on cocaine ever since high school. Some of the rumors were close to true. A friend of mine told me, “I heard you missed the parade because you were in a crack house.” Well, it was powder cocaine, not rock, I thought. But I was only quibbling there.

  I didn’t know what to do. But I thought I had to do something. And that something wasn’t to quit. It was to talk to the media and lie.

  On November 11, I gave an interview from my parents’ house, insisting I had no problem with drugs or alcohol. I was emphatic. I said I only drank beer and not that much of it. “Drugs? No. I never use them, and I never will.” And I didn’t stop there. I laid it on thick. I said that in my next contract, I would insist on a drug-testing clause. “It can be for a test every week, every two days, as often as they want, and it can be forever,” I said.

  This was a bold gamble—maybe a reckless one—for someone slipping into drug addiction. Taunting a suspicious media is usually not a great idea. I hoped my offer would end the rumors. It didn’t, of course, but I still felt eager to show everyone that I was okay. A week later, I got the perfect opportunity—with President Ronald Reagan at the White House. It’s a World Series tradition, the winning team being invited for a presidential handshake. Still feeling embarrassed that I’d missed the victory parade in New York, I wasn’t about to pull a no-show in Washington. Not all the players seemed to feel that way. Of the twenty-four guys on the roster, only ten showed up for the Rose Garden ceremony. Gary Carter was there. So were Jesse Orosco, Bob Ojeda, Lee Mazzilli, and owner Jeff Wilpon. Keith, Darryl, and Mookie were not.

  Even though he was a lifelong Chicago Cubs fans, President Reagan gave a very friendly speech, saying the Mets had shown America that “the other team from New York could win.” Gary presented the president with a blue and orange warm-up jacket that said REAGAN across the bac
k. He gave Vice President George Bush a Mets cap. Fred Wilpon made everyone laugh when he promised to come back next year with the rest of the uniform. Then the president walked down the line of players, stopping and shaking everyone’s hand.

  “Hi, I’m Ronald Reagan,” said the leader of the free world, one of the most recognizable men on earth. “Hi, I’m Ronald Reagan.”

  When he got to me, I told him: “Mr. President, you don’t have to do that. I know who you are.”

  He smiled and nodded and kept introducing himself. I don’t know what he was thinking, but he seemed like a nice man.

  If the off-season had been an exercise in irresponsibility and addiction, at least it had been playing out quietly. Mostly so. On December 13, that all changed. That day, I went to Town and Country Field in Tampa and played in two charity softball games for the local Kidney Foundation. My dad was on dialysis, and I had done a few events for them over the years. I was joined by my nephew Gary, Vance Lovelace, my childhood friend Troy, and some other local athletes and celebrities. After the games, a bunch of us took some teenagers who were waiting for kidney transplants to a University of South Florida basketball game at the Sun Dome. We dropped the kids off, then Gary, Troy, Vance, a couple of other guys, and I drove our own cars to Chili’s Bar and Grill for some burgers, wings, and beers.

  We had some drinks. We were laughing, telling jokes, reenacting our favorite plays from the day, and taunting each other about our softball prowess. I didn’t think we were bothering anyone. But then I noticed that a couple of tables away, a sunburned, fortysomething Tampa police officer kept looking up from his hamburger. He was in his uniform. His radio was on the table.