Doc: A Memoir

by Dwight Gooden

  This was early November of 1994. A week earlier, I had filed for free agency, one of nineteen players that year to tell their teams “I’m outta here.” When I next pitched in the majors, I’d make them sorry they weren’t nicer to me. In fact, I had no plan for actually pitching any time soon, since it would mean I’d have to get off drugs. But now, as I held that gun to my head, even the far-fetched notion of playing ball again was being pushed back yet more.

  I’d gotten a registered letter in the mail that morning. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said he was very sorry, but I was being suspended for the entire 1995 season, 168 days on top of the 15 days I already had to make up for 1994. Even my coked-up brain could understand: this meant I would have no job, no salary, and nothing to do all day. I would be failing my father’s most basic test of manhood: Do what you want to. But make sure your family is taken care of.

  Here’s how sick I was: The letter didn’t make me want to kill myself. It made we want to put on a show of self-destruction so dramatic that my family would sympathize with me instead of being angry I’d messed up my life again. I would trump their anger with depression. I would show them I was more upset than they were disappointed. It was a shitty, shitty thing to do. But initially at least, it got the response I was looking for.

  “I’m sick,” I told my mother. “I have to change my ways.”

  She’d heard that before. “How?” she said.

  “Mom,” I said, “I’m not really sure.”

  The announcement of my yearlong suspension wasn’t released to the media until Friday, November 4. With it came a statement from Joe McIlvaine. I had never imagined, as he and my father played that game of chicken over my rookie signing bonus almost thirteen years earlier, that my professional baseball career would come to this.

  “Dwight Gooden needs to get his life in order,” Joe’s message read. “He has been offered the best assistance baseball and the New York Mets have to give for his problem and has not taken advantage of this guidance and help. All of us who love this man urge him to get the help he needs, put God into his life, and exhibit the same tenacity he showed on the mound, especially in the early years of his career, when a lead in the seventh inning meant a victory in the ninth. Dwight needs to demonstrate that same degree of competitiveness to defeat a far more insidious enemy that is sucking the life out of him both personally and professionally.”

  Wow. If that didn’t shake me, nothing would.

  The announcement of the suspension had one good effect. It staggered me enough to keep me home for the final days of Monica’s pregnancy. I was there at four a.m. on November 10 when she let me know it was time. I put her in the car and raced—not over the W. Howard Frankland Bridge to the clubs and the dealers of Tampa but to All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, where she gave birth to our son, Devin.

  That kept me home and sober for one more week.

  Then I decided I had to share the news with friends in Tampa. A drink or two turned into a day or two and a long coke bender. Another hotel room. Another line. Another lie.

  Joe McIlvaine’s lecture wasn’t enough. Neither was fresh fatherhood. I was starting to think I should just let the cocaine kill me. Not an empty-gun threat but a sad, easy way to end everything. I could retire from baseball, let Monica and the kids live off what I’d earned already, then go ahead and overdose. Why keep embarrassing myself and my family with failed drug tests?

  I told Jim, my agent, to get the retirement wheels rolling. I asked the league to start the paperwork. One night as we barbecued in the neighborhood, I told Gary my plan to quit playing.

  “I know you’re not going out like that,” he said, not even taking me seriously.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ve accomplished everything I set out to do in baseball.”

  He didn’t want to hear it. “Somethin’ ain’t right with you, Doc,” he said, shaking his head. “Somethin’ ain’t been right with you for a long time.”

  “So,” I answered, “it’s time to fix that.” Then I took another sip of my beer.

  Gary knew whatever I said, it was just another excuse to keep using cocaine. Retirement was code for more time to get high without anyone checking up on me. Killing myself might not have been my real intention. But it could certainly be my real result.

  It was no more than a few days later that I got a call from Bob Klapisch, a baseball writer in New York. “You’re looking at a year away from the game,” Bob said. “What are you planning to do?”

  “Get into shape,” I lied. There was no sense pouring gasoline on the fire and filling the papers with stories of my retirement at age thirty.

  “I know a guy down there,” he explained. “Ray Negron. Worked for the Yankees for a long time.”

  “The Yankees?” For the first time since the birth of Devin, something made me smile. If by some miracle I didn’t retire and I ever played again, I loved the idea of finishing my career in New York.

  “Yeah,” Bob continued. Then he quickly reeled me back in. “But with the players on strike and you being suspended, nothing’s happening there. You gotta just talk to Ray. He wants to meet with you. He’s got a lot of connections sending American ballplayers to Japan.”

  The conversation continued, but after “Japan” I heard nothing else. I called Ray Negron and set up a meeting.

  When he was seventeen, Ray was caught writing graffiti on a wall at Yankee Stadium. George Steinbrenner screeched up in a car and busted Ray, spray-paint can in hand. But instead of turning him over to the cops and forgetting about him, George offered Ray a job as a Yankees batboy and a chance to turn his life around. Growing up in the Bronx, Ray had been around some tough people. He definitely had that street-smart way of carrying himself. But he’d gone from vandal to sports executive to well-connected middleman, and now he lived in St. Pete.

  “So you think I can get a deal in Japan?” I asked him.

  “Sure,” Ray said. “But come on, man.” He looked into my droopy eyes. “You’ve got to pull yourself together first. You can’t just rely on your name.”

  “I’m willing to do the work,” I said.

  I wasn’t, of course.

  I wasted a couple of weeks of Ray’s time, showing up at his house after night-long binges, promising I was cleaning up, constantly bugging him about the Japan deal. “I can’t help you if you’re gonna continue using,” he told me one morning after we finished eating breakfast with his kids. “There’s no way right now that we could get a deal. If you want to put in the effort, we can do something. If not, leave. You’re stressing me out.”

  His anger, I admitted, was justified.

  “When you feel like doing drugs, Doc, call me before it happens,” he said. “When you’ve already done them, I can’t do shit.”

  “I should have gone back to treatment,” I told him. “I need something bigger than I am.”

  He told me about a buddy of his named Vincent, who used to work on Wall Street. “He put his future in a crack pipe and smoked it,” Ray said. Ray always talked dramatic like that. “Then he came down here. Got in a shitload of trouble trading other people’s cars for drugs.”

  “And he’s your friend?” I asked. I wondered what sorts of people Ray associated with.

  “Yeah,” he said. “And so are you. But you’ve gotta put in the effort. We’re gonna go to an NA meeting with Vincent. We’ll go today.”

  The Narcotics Anonymous meeting at Freedom House on Tenth Avenue North in St. Petersburg was a long way from Betty Ford. There were no supermodels or Hollywood actors in the room when Ray and I got there. The only ballplayer was me.

  We met Ray’s friend Vincent and listened to a man named Ron Dock. Like Ray, Ron was from the Bronx. He was a Marine in Vietnam who learned to calm the stresses of war with opium and then heroin. He sunk into addiction, PTSD, jail, and the streets. “When you’re eating out of trash cans, and you’re okay with that, you have a problem,” Ron was saying to the group. “I know. I was cool with that for a l
ong time.”

  Our backgrounds couldn’t have been much more different. But listening to Ron, I could tell we had a lot in common. We had both left home at an early age and got a taste for high-pressure adrenaline—his M16, my fastball. Then we both moved quickly to drugs. When Ron got done speaking and the meeting broke up, Ray introduced us.

  “That was some speech,” I said, holding out my hand.

  “Who are you?” Ron said gruffly.

  “I’m Dwight Gooden, sir.”

  “He plays baseball,” Ray said with a smile. “He was a pitcher for the Mets, in your old stomping grounds.”

  Ron shrugged. “I don’t know shit about baseball.”

  “That’s cool,” I said.

  “And I don’t give a shit about baseball.” He furrowed his brow and looked at me. “What are you doing here?”

  “I gotta get clean,” I said.

  “Gotta? Or wanna? Two different things.”

  I looked at Ray nervously. Who was this guy? Wasn’t he supposed to be supportive? Ray nodded back at me.

  “I want to get clean, Mr. Dock,” I said.

  “Why?” Ron said. That was the only time I saw him smile that day. He was pressing me.

  “I’m pretty sure I will die if I don’t,” I said.

  “Keep coming back for meetings, and we can talk,” Ron told me, his voice sounding compassionate for the first time. “Show me you’re invested in this.”

  I started going to the NA meetings. And unlike at Smithers and Betty Ford, I wanted to be there. I gave the Narcotics Anonymous meetings the same focus I had given my drug runs. In early 1995, Ron became my NA sponsor.

  Five days a week, Ray started picking me up in the morning and driving over to the baseball fields at Eckerd College, where I would throw. Then, I’d hit the weight room with trainer Larry Mayol. After a quick shower, we’d stop for an NA meeting. Sometimes Vincent or Ron would meet us for lunch. I spent afternoons with my family, trying to repair some of the damage I’d done. And I’d go to bed early. Even though I knew I was suspended for the entire season, when the teams finally started playing in ’95, I asked Major League Baseball to begin testing me again.

  I could feel myself getting stronger. But I also hit a speed bump on my road to recovery. Actually, it was more like I was pulled over by the cops. In March, I was stopped for driving my Mercedes at 117 miles an hour on Interstate 275 with an open beer in the car at four a.m. I’d been out with friends late and shouldn’t have driven home. That was a dangerous thing for me to be doing, dangerous to other drivers and dangerous to my recovery. The cop gave me a breathalyzer. I wasn’t anywhere near drunk. We argued over whether his machine was broken. I got off with only a speeding ticket.

  “You’re not out of the woods yet, Doc,” Ron said when I told him what happened. Just telling my sponsor was a good sign, I thought. Hiding had always been part of my problem. “You’re never out of the woods. Be vigilant. Pick yourself up. Don’t listen to the negative people. Keep working.”

  I stayed straight. At nine months, I felt ready to move ahead. One day when my arm was feeling great, I started pressing Ray about Japan again.

  “Nah,” Ray said. “Let’s not worry about that. You don’t want to go over there. I was mainly dangling that out there so you’d clean up and get into shape. Let’s focus on getting you back in the majors.”

  I felt duped at first. But it wasn’t long before Ray was bringing agents to watch me pitch. The White Sox seemed really interested.

  That summer, I started going to church on Sundays with my mother. I turned to her after one service and asked, “Was I ever baptized?”

  “No, son, you weren’t,” she said.

  When I was growing up, I guess you’d call our family religious. But my parents weren’t too strict about the formalities. Mom went to church while Dad got his spiritual sustenance from NBC’s Game of the Week. Now getting baptized suddenly seemed important to me. I wanted to feel like I belonged to a church. Up to then, I’d only belonged on teams.

  A few Sundays later at the end of the service, the pastor said, “If anyone would like to turn their life over to God…” When I left the pew and walked toward the altar, the whole congregation stood and cheered. I’d been cheered in ballparks for various achievements. I’d been cheered at baseball card shows and sports award dinners. I’d never been cheered simply because I was human and recognized my connection to God.

  The scouts kept coming. The Pirates, the Blue Jays, more White Sox, some Independent League scouts. I even called the Mets to see if they’d be interested. I had never wanted to leave our relationship the way we’d left off. I had never wanted to leave New York. I hated the circumstances I’d left under. I considered New York my second home. The fans there had just been great to me. The Mets declined.

  By this time, Ray was unofficially representing me. He got in touch with Commissioner Selig to see if he’d reduce my suspension and reinstate me. “If Dwight passes all the tests he’s taking,” he told the commissioner, “and is doing everything right, you should take him back.” Ray assured him that I’d been “doing all the right things” and regularly attending sobriety meetings.

  Gary got me a tryout with his team, the Marlins, at the end of the ’95 season. Ray, my dad, and I drove to Miami. I threw on the sidelines for their pitching coach, Larry Rothschild, and then we watched the game in a luxury suite with owner Wayne Huizenga and Dave Dombrowski, the general manager. Playing on the same team as Gary would be a dream come true. “Let’s work something out soon, Doc,” Dombrowski said. “Looks like you’re back.” My dad looked so proud of me.

  Just a year earlier, I’d been contemplating retirement, even dying. But now playing again seemed like a real possibility. Ray said he’d been in touch with George Steinbrenner. Before anything was final, he said, George wanted to speak with me. When the Yankees got knocked out of the playoffs, George flew down to Tampa, where he lived in the off-season. Ray arranged a dinner with the Boss at Iavarone’s.

  Before we could get down to the business of my comeback, though, one small problem had to be resolved. This was more than just a career issue. This was personal. Just as my suspension was coming to an end on October 1, the players association told me they were decertifying Ray, who’d been acting as my agent. Gene Orza said the union had sent a memo out to teams not to negotiate with him. But no one ever told me. Here I was, on the verge of achieving my comeback, and I got that news. Ray had been with me ten hours of every day for the past year. I knew I wouldn’t be clean without him. I wouldn’t be talking to anyone in baseball, definitely not George Steinbrenner, without Ray Negron.

  I was mad. I even threatened a one-man “strike” until the matter was settled. Ray just told me to stay calm and focused. “It’ll work out,” he said. “We just need to keep talking to people.”

  Ray was right. Somehow or another, all the technicalities were resolved.

  For years, I’d heard stories about what a hard-ass the Yankees boss was. But when Ray and I got out of the car and walked into the restaurant in our nicest suits and ties, we saw George and pitching coach Billy Connors sitting there in sweat suits. We had a friendly three-hour conversation and a very tasty meal. George asked about my wife, my children, my recovery, my community work. I told him how much fun I’d been having coaching Dwight Junior’s Little League team. We even talked about Darryl Strawberry, who’d signed with the Yankees the year before. The subject of Dwight Senior in a Yankee uniform never came up.

  In the car ride back to St. Petersburg, I let Ray have it. “What the hell were we doing there?” I asked him.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ray said.

  “He has no interest in signing me,” I scoffed. “You just wanted to meet with him, right?”

  “No, that’s BS,” Ray countered. “Give it time. He just wanted to feel you out. I have no doubt they’ll call back.”

  Sure enough, the next day Ray got a call from George, asking us to meet at his hotel in Ta
mpa, the Bay Harbor Inn. This time, my dad came along too, almost an echo of our very first contract talks with the New York Mets. Two hours later, George offered me a deal: one year guaranteed with options for a second and a third year. He wanted me to play winter ball before the 1996 season.

  Right there at the table, I agreed.

  George looked at me and said, “I know you’ve had a great career so far. I think you’ll also have a great career with us.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “Yes, sir.”

  14

  No-Hitter

  I WENT TO NEW YORK WITH my head on straight. I moved back into my place in Roslyn, which was a long commute to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. But I felt comfortable on Long Island. I had a purpose again. I was playing major-league baseball and lucky to have the chance. I was staying out of nightclubs. I wasn’t using cocaine. I was happy being drug tested two or three times a week. I wanted no gray area when it came to people’s opinions or curiosity about me. My attitude was, “Don’t take my word for it. Just check the test.”

  As soon as school got out for the summer, Monica and the kids joined me in New York. If the Yankees had a day game, we’d all go out to dinner at Pizza Hut or Chuck E. Cheese’s. Being together like that without so much chaos was a huge relief for all of us. I felt like a dad as much as a ballplayer.

  Too bad I got off to such a lousy pitching start.

  By the time I won my first game for the Yankees, on May 8 against Detroit, I’d already lost three and collected two no-decisions. The reporters were wondering when I’d be bounced to AAA ball. Mel Stottlemyre, the old Mets pitching coach who’d come over to the Yankees, was working hard with me. Even George was feeling some pressure. After my third straight loss, he wouldn’t even stop when I tried to introduce him to Monica in the players’ parking lot. “When are you going to win a fucking game?” he grumbled as he breezed by. He did approach me the next day with a heartfelt apology. “Sorry, Doc,” he said. “I was just caught up in the game.” And he sent a huge bouquet of roses to Monica.