God and Starbucks

by Vin Baker

  In hindsight, I can see that Coach Dunleavy was 100 percent right. He knew I wasn’t ready for the NBA when I first got to Milwaukee. I had to develop that energy, that motivation. I had to get hungry. Everyone gets knocked around in life; the trick is figuring out how to bounce back from the beating.

  4

  “How Bad Can It Be?”

  It’s interesting. People who abuse alcohol are known as alcoholics. People who abuse all manner of pharmaceutical products and other illicit substances are generally lumped under the pejorative heading of “drug addict.” But marijuana users mostly get a pass. The names for the person who smokes weed all day, every day—“stoner,” “pothead,” whatever—are fairly benign. They lack the sting of accusation and weakness—of recklessness and damage—associated with labeling someone an alcoholic or a drug addict. And, yeah, maybe it’s not quite as bad, but I’m telling you right now—weed is at the very least psychologically addictive, and it can and will screw up your life. It also happens to be a serious problem within professional sports in general, and the NBA in particular. How bad? I’d say, on average, five or six players on every team are smoking weed on a regular basis—and by “regular,” I mean, every day. Including game days.

  I didn’t smoke at all—not once—until I got to the pros. In my rookie year I was a young man with a growing degree of fame, a substantial amount of discretionary income, and sudden access to a variety of mood-altering substances. I was a young man who discovered almost by accident that the sometimes crippling anxiety and shyness he faced as a teenager were greatly mitigated by a few drinks or a couple of hits of weed, and whose young body—the body of a highly trained professional athlete—seemed more than capable of withstanding the occasional late night on the town. That’s the insidious nature of addiction: you don’t see it coming until it’s too late, until all the fun is drained of the experience and you’re left with nothing but anguish and loneliness and regret.

  It doesn’t happen overnight.

  For all intents and purposes I was a grown man when I arrived in Milwaukee for my rookie season with the Bucks. Chronologically, legally, physically, I was an adult, supposedly capable of caring for myself and making decisions that would enhance my career, rather than detract from it. Practically speaking, though, I was still an adolescent (and keep in mind, I was twenty-two years old; I can’t imagine what it must be like today, when so many of the top draft picks are coming out after only one year of college, many still in their teens—what a nightmare for both the player and his new employer). Like a lot of rookies, I enlisted the services of a couple of friends on this journey. Got a nice place to live, one with more space than I’d ever need, and invited them to join me. Here was the agreement: I would pick up their living expenses, and they would pick up . . . well, nothing. Basically, I was paying for companionship and support. I didn’t look at it that way at the time, and I know it sounds crass and cold, but essentially that’s the way it worked. I was afraid of being alone in a new town. I wanted to see familiar faces when I came home from practice or games. I wanted that same feeling I had in college, when you walk down the hallway of your dorm and just about every door is open, and you can count on a friendly conversation at any time of the day or night, when you never have to worry about finding someone with whom to have lunch or dinner.

  Merely filling the day proved to be something of a challenge. I know some people scoff at the very concept of the “student-athlete” in big-time college sports, but for those who play at the mid-major level, and who spend four years on campus, honestly and diligently working toward a degree (I put myself in that category), it’s an appropriate term. At Hartford I had very little downtime. Between classes, study hall, homework, practice, meals, games, meetings, travel, and film sessions, I sometimes felt as if there weren’t enough hours in the day. I very quickly discovered that the NBA is a job, and a serious and demanding one at that, but it isn’t a 24/7 experience, the way it is when you are a college athlete. You find yourself coming home at noon after a morning shootaround or practice, and suddenly you’re looking at four or five hours with nothing to do. I understand now how it’s supposed to work—how the great ones take care of themselves and fill that empty time with endeavors that can further their careers—or with healthy interaction with friends and family. Me? I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t sad and homesick.

  Because I was somewhat shy and reserved, I made new friends slowly and tentatively, but eventually I connected with a few guys on the Bucks—Eric Murdock, Todd Day, and Frank Brickowski—and through them I was introduced to the time-honored practice of burning the candle at both ends. I want to make one thing clear: when I was with the Bucks, the great majority of my partying occurred on the road. This is partly attributable to the fact that Milwaukee is kind of a sleepy town (by major metro standards); there aren’t a ton of late-night options, and if you screw up and behave inappropriately, news of that behavior is likely to find its way back to your coach or GM or the local media and fans. And let’s be honest: Married guys stay home when they’re home. On the road, many of them go out and act like they aren’t married (or otherwise attached). Just the way it is.

  It began casually enough: most nights on the road, after a game, we’d hit a club (and by club, I mean strip club—most of the time, anyway), where we’d drink hard and fast, drop hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and then go back to the hotel and sleep it off—sometimes with female companionship, sometimes not. Either way, it was fun. I need to be perfectly blunt about that: in the beginning, at least, the late nights were a blast. I liked going out after games; I liked walking into a club wearing an expensive suit, looking like a ballplayer out on the town, a guy prepared to make it rain. I wanted everyone to know that I wasn’t some chump—I was young and successful, so why not enjoy the fruits of my labor? Of course, that’s shallow and stupid, but it’s also part of growing up. Most young guys go through some version of this and come out on the other side no worse for wear. I figured I had it all under control. And I did, in the early days, anyway. I had no idea of the demons lurking within me, of the propensity for alcoholism and addiction. I just knew that drinking made me feel good—that warm rush that came with the first shot, and the subsequent eroding of inhibitions. Whenever I drank—and it wasn’t all that often in my rookie year—I became funnier. All my life I had been the kind of guy who would stand pinned to a wall in a crowded room, afraid to talk with people, afraid to be seen or heard or judged. Now I’d go out after a game, have a few drinks, and suddenly I’d be dancing like a fool! An inebriated, completely uninhibited, fun-loving fool.

  Everything changed when I drank. Typically tongue-tied around women, I would morph into a smooth-talking pickup artist. Not just friendly, but almost aggressive. I was a star athlete in college, but if a woman wanted to meet me, she had to make the first move. I wasn’t going to risk getting rejected. But I’d watch some of the guys on the Bucks and the way they acted when we were out, totally in control, drawing in women like a magnet, and I’d think: Yeah, that’s the way I want to be. I want to talk like a pro athlete, not like some kid who’s harboring his Baptist ministry in his stomach. I don’t want to be the preacher’s son anymore.

  Slowly but surely, I lost my faith; I turned my back on the core values I’d been taught. I became a different person—and alcohol fueled that transformation.

  I’d never been to a strip club before I got to college, and maybe only a couple of times before I got to the NBA. But I became indoctrinated pretty quickly. Professional athletes like strip clubs—high-end strip clubs—not merely because they are filled with attractive, naked women, but because they offer a degree of privacy and discretion you won’t find in a regular club. If you’re a rich and famous athlete interested in having a few drinks and hooking up with a young lady, the last place you want to go is a regular club or bar. First of all—and this is especially true today, in an era of omnipresent social media, when every cell phone is a camera and every patron a
link to TMZ—your every move is likely to be documented. You don’t want to be at a club, working the whole “What’s your name? What’s your sign?” thing in front of an audience. Very few guys are looking for a new wife or girlfriend when they venture out on the road after a game. They are looking for a good time, with no strings attached. Simple as that. When you go to a strip club, everyone understands the parameters of the evening. The club owner tries to provide a degree of privacy to his high-rolling customers. The customer agrees to throw around a lot of cash and to behave in a manner that won’t cause trouble. And the dancer agrees to show the customer considerable attention—attention that might carry over to a point well beyond the end of the show. It’s not exactly prostitution. It’s more of an understanding:

  I’ve got all the money you possibly could want, and you’ve got exactly what I need.

  There were some strip clubs that crossed certain lines of protocol and decorum—not to mention legality—by offering private rooms in which sexual activity would occasionally take place. For the most part, though, the club was merely a place for the athlete to meet a potential partner for the night. To drink and party with his buddies while showering the dancers with far more money and tips than they would ever make during a normal shift.

  In return . . . well, that was left up to the patron and the dancer. If they struck up a conversation, and decided at some point that they wanted to leave together and return to the athlete’s hotel room, so be it. Two consenting adults are allowed to have sex, right? Is this prostitution, or something more subtle? I know that I never thought of the strippers in this manner, and I don’t think they viewed themselves as such. It was more like, “I’ll keep the money flowing, and maybe later on you can say thank you.”

  And when you leave the hotel that night, or very early the next morning, we part ways without anyone feeling hurt or used. It’s a professional arrangement based on money and sex and the fulfilling of mutual needs. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody gets pregnant. Nobody tries to trick the other into doing something they don’t want to do.

  “We just had sex and now I’m leaving. You’re okay with that, right?”

  “Couldn’t be more okay with it. Thank you for the lovely evening.”

  I know how that sounds—crass and cynical and immoral. It’s hard to convey just how normal seemingly deviant behavior can become when you’re in the middle of that world. It’s a lifestyle, and I got drawn into it. With virtually no experience in these matters, I was at once terrified and fascinated by the strip club culture that seemed to permeate NBA life on the road. I was intimidated by the dancers, worried about spending too much money, fearful that my girlfriend back home would get word of my illicit activities, or that I’d contract a sexually transmitted disease. If you’re basically a shy kid who was raised under the hammer of a Baptist minister, even the tamest of strip clubs is going to feel like Caligula’s rec room.

  That was me. For a while, anyway.

  Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how you look at it), I had an eager and gifted mentor in Frank Brickowski. A decade older than me, with more than a dozen years of professional experience under his belt, Frank was already a basketball lifer by the time I got to Milwaukee. He was six foot ten and 240 well-muscled pounds, so he looked great in a uniform, but he was not the smoothest or the most skilled of players. Frank had been drafted by the Knicks in the third round after graduating from Penn State, and then spent three years kicking around the European leagues before finally catching on with the Seattle SuperSonics. We both came to Milwaukee during the 1993–94 season and he instantly took me under his wing. Although a bit wooden and unglamorous on the basketball court, Frank was impressively smooth around women in virtually any setting. He was the strip club Don of our team, who knew exactly how to make everyone feel comfortable, and how to negotiate the whole deal without a hint of awkwardness or embarrassment.

  Believe me, this was an underrated skill, and one we all appreciated.

  There were six to eight of us in our drinking group, a mix of black guys and white guys with diverse tastes and interests. Todd Day, for example, liked going to clubs in the ’hood. Jon Barry preferred a more suburban experience. I was basically a follower and did what everyone else wanted to do. Whatever the consensus, Frank could provide the logical venue. Not only did it seem like he had been to every strip club in every NBA city, but he seemed to know most of the dancers by name. And shortly after arriving, he’d have the after-hours party all lined up for everyone who was interested.

  Frank got a huge kick out of my youthful exuberance and naïveté. We’d be hanging out in a club somewhere and I’d be talking a mile a minute, throwing back drinks so fast it was scary, my head swiveling as I looked at the girls. Meanwhile, there was Frank, calmly sipping a drink, politely engaging the dancers, behaving like a wily veteran even off the court.

  “Vin,” he’d say, throwing an arm around my shoulder and laughing. “Settle down. I need you to relax right now.”

  “Can’t do it, Frank. I’m hungry. Know what I mean?”

  Frank would nod and laugh reassuringly. “I get it, man. I get it. But you need to find your game here. It’s not the fourth quarter yet. Be patient.”

  He would talk to me that way all the time, even carrying it into the next day’s practice. For a guy whose career was built on seriousness and hard work, Frank could be hilarious. Sometimes, after a long night on the town, he’d walk up behind me at the edge of the court, in full view of everyone, and strike up a surreptitious conversation. Frank knew that as a rookie I was nervous about my reputation and how I was viewed by management and the coaching staff. I was the first-round draft pick, the future of the franchise, so even though I would go out once or twice a week, I tried to keep it relatively quiet. To Frank, my reticence was like a scab to pick.

  We’d be at practice and Frank would walk over and lean up against me. As I’d stand there listening to Coach Dunleavy, with a serious rookie look on my face, Frank would start whispering.

  “You were amazing last night, dude. The way you took that chick down. Seriously impressive.”

  I’d say nothing, just kind of nod, like we were talking strategy.

  “Whoo . . . the body on that girl. You ain’t a rookie anymore.”

  “Knock it off, Frank.”

  Then he’d laugh quietly, pat me on the back, and walk away.

  “You getting all this, Baker?” Coach Dunleavy would say.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I can’t deny that it was fun. But looking back on it now, after all I’ve been through, I realize that I was different. There’s nothing terribly unusual or scandalous about young men who have money in their pockets living somewhat decadently. Most people learn how to pump the brakes now and then, and eventually they find a slower, safer lane in which to travel. The things that should have served as warning signs, I misinterpreted as subtle gifts: not just the change in personality, but the ability to drink more than everyone else, and to get up the next morning and shake off the effects of a hangover with comparative ease. As an addict in recovery, I now recognize that all these traits were locked into my DNA, just waiting for someone to throw open the door and let them loose. Once enabled, they began the inexorable process of taking ownership of my entire life.

  The hangovers I viewed as little more than an annoyance. In the early days, they were rarely debilitating, no matter how late I stayed out or how much I drank. I always bounced back quickly. To be perfectly honest, I often felt weirdly energized by the hangovers. That first sliver of sunlight through the curtains, accompanied by a dull but persistent throbbing above the temple—a headache that announces with great clarity, “Time to pay the toll, my friend!”—would be engaged like an opponent. Later in life the hangovers—too benign a term for what they really are, which is a toxic reaction to alcohol or drugs—would grow worse, and my resolve to fight them would diminish (this is the general trajectory of addiction, incidentally). But in those early years? I was invi
ncible. The morning after always brings two clear choices: buckle down and get on with life, or surrender to the pain. I did not consider surrender to be a viable option, in part because I didn’t want anyone on the coaching staff or in the front office (or even some of my teammates) to know that I had been out late the previous night. So I’d always bring it hard the next day in practice. Indeed, as a rookie, I had some of my best practices, and played some of my best games, after drinking all night and getting just a few hours of sleep.

  I generally went out only once or twice a week in my first year, but when I did go out, I drank with purpose. We all did, and that purpose was to get drunk. I had just left college, so basketball—and all that it had given me—was still something I considered sacred. At first I worried that the late nights might have a negative effect, so I tried not to go out too often. But the more I saw of the NBA, the more I came to realize that drinking was the norm, and abstaining was unusual. It was a lifestyle: the freedom, the money, the women, the drugs, the alcohol. They were all part of the plan. You could say no, of course, but it didn’t seem like many people did that. And the decision to go out or to remain in the hotel after a game had absolutely nothing to do with how the team played that night. You could win or lose, you could score 30 points or never get off the bench. Didn’t matter. After the game you were going to shower, get something to eat, and hit a club. At first I was surprised at the way guys would shake off a loss or a bad performance. Soon, though, I got the message:

  This is the NBA, bro. This is what we do.

  You know what else “we” do in the NBA, bro? We smoke weed. Lots of it.