God and Starbucks

by Vin Baker

  The Celtics told Jay there were indications that I had been drinking before practice, and that they were worried I had a serious problem. Jay calmly told them that this sort of accusation and alarmist response was probably not the best way to start a relationship with their newly acquired superstar power forward. Give it some time, Jay said. Everything will be fine.

  However, as part of my deal, the Celtics assigned a new member of the organization to live with me. His name was Mike Procopio, but he went by the nickname “Sweetchuck,” supposedly because he bore a resemblance to the character with that name from the Police Academy films (he’d had the nickname since high school). Physically, Sweetchuck looked like the last person you’d expect to see in the employ of a professional basketball team. He was maybe five foot seven, and weighed about two hundred pounds. But the guy loved basketball and was completely devoted to the sport, having coached at the high school and club level before he joined the Celtics the same year that I came to Boston. Sweetchuck has since become something of a legend in NBA circles, working in player development for a number of teams (he’s currently the director of player development for the Dallas Mavericks). Sweetchuck specializes in helping players improve their shooting form, body mechanics, and footwork, among other things. In 2002, when he came to work for the Celtics, Sweetchuck was basically a gofer brought in to do whatever was asked of him. One of his first assignments was to take care of me.

  A Boston native, Sweetchuck was assigned the ostensible role of helping me become acclimated to a new team and a new city. In reality, his job was to keep an eye on me and to report back to the Celtics if he saw any behavior that seemed suspicious—like drinking in the middle of the afternoon.

  When my agent found out about the Celtics assigning Sweetchuck to live with me, he was furious. But I really wasn’t that worried about it. I had a big place, so it wasn’t like Sweetchuck would be sleeping in my bedroom or following me into the bathroom. I had become quite adept at drinking sneakily, and Sweetchuck was basically a kid in his first NBA job; I figured it wouldn’t be hard to pull the wool over his eyes. In fact, I kind of liked the idea. By consenting to this degree of oversight, I conveyed a positive message: Do whatever you want. I have nothing to hide.

  Every morning I’d get up and drink. I’d be on one side of the door throwing back Bacardi in the afternoon, and Sweetchuck would be on the other side of the door. If I went out after games—and I did go out—Sweetchuck would be right there, keeping a running tally. But here’s the thing: my public drinking was not excessive. If you followed me to a club or a restaurant, I’d be no more inebriated than the next guy. It was the drinking I did in private that did the most damage. And Sweetchuck never got even a glimpse of that. He had nothing to report.

  Unfortunately, my performance on the basketball court was a dead giveaway that something was wrong. In the first twenty games of the season I scored in double figures only three times—each time, just barely (exactly 10 points)—and never had more than eight rebounds. I was playing less than twenty minutes per game—sometimes a lot less—and frequently I looked and felt lost on the floor. Part of this was due to the fact that I was not suited to the Celtics’ style of play, and quickly became an afterthought in their offense. In Seattle, despite my drinking, the ball always seemed to find its way to me, and I had numerous opportunities to keep up the pretense of being a productive player. In Boston, I never had a chance. Coach O’Brien saw through me from the beginning and almost immediately lost faith in my ability to stay sober or to be a functional NBA basketball player.

  There is no better sports town than Boston. Its fans are passionate, knowledgeable, loyal. Play hard and win championships and you will be treated like royalty. Play badly and lose, and you will feel the sting of disappointment and anger, both in the arena and in the media. This applies to all teams: the Red Sox, Bruins, Patriots, and Celtics. Anything less than excellence is unacceptable. Losing is treated like an illness that must be eradicated. And if you have the misfortune to be a player who is not living up to the standards of his contract, you are considered a primary pathogen. I was making more than $12 million a year, which made me not only the highest-paid player on the Celtics’ payroll, but also among the top ten most well compensated players in the entire league. An extraordinary salary provokes extraordinary expectations; I was not coming close to meeting those expectations, so naturally I began to hear the boos in Boston Garden. I was one of the least productive players in the entire league, a point driven home in a feature story done by ESPN in the first half of the season. That sort of exposure did nothing to ingratiate me with Boston fans, or with the increasingly frustrated coaching staff.

  There was no way to stop the loss of skill, or to hide the fog that enveloped my life because of excessive drinking. The Boston offense was not designed for a low-post player like me. The team’s big guys were more mobile players, so everything ran through the high post. One of the reasons I’d been able to conceal my lack of conditioning in Seattle was that my role on the court was so narrowly defined: dump the ball inside, turn, and score. Here, in Boston, everything was much faster and more complicated and demanding: flash to the high post, call for the ball, turn and square up, look for the back door cut, set a screen. Move, move, move. Mentally and physically, I just couldn’t keep up.

  One day Coach O’Brien called me in. Like Coach Phelan at Hartford, O’Brien was a no-bullshit guy, only he had the added quality of being from Philadelphia, the no-bullshit capital of the world.

  “Look, Vin,” he began. “I’m not even going to ask. I’m just going to say it. I can smell liquor all over you. You need to do something about this.”

  At first I said nothing, just sat there stone faced and silent. I was stunned. Through all my years of drinking and deception, no one had ever confronted me directly. This wasn’t even an accusation; this was a coach taking matters into his own hands, trying to put an end to all the lying and the self-destructive behavior in one sweeping, parental gesture. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to hear any excuses.

  This ends right now, he seemed to be saying.

  Silence hung between us, thick as the stale air in a locker room. I stared at the floor, then slowly raised my head, and as our eyes locked, I burst into tears. Not because I was ashamed at having been busted, or because I was worried about losing a ton of money, but just because I was so tired. I couldn’t live the lie any longer; I was almost relieved that they knew, and that I didn’t have to hide it. I was crying because I needed help, and I didn’t know how to ask for it.

  But here’s the awful thing: even in that setting, in that most intimate and trusting and personal of moments, I lied. I admitted to drinking heavily, but I soft-pedaled the details.

  Just going through a rough patch right now, Coach. I’m trying to get a handle on it. I’ll be okay, really. Please, trust me.

  I left the office that day without receiving any sort of ultimatum. I had escaped the hangman’s noose once again. Or so I thought. In reality, Coach O’Brien was merely exercising another step in the process of due diligence. There had been a meeting before the season, followed by the assigning of Sweetchuck as my personal watchdog, and now this. I wasn’t aware of it, but the wheels of separation had been set in motion. The NBA has an enormously strong and vigilant players’ union, which makes it very difficult to fire a player without paying his contract. Extraordinary cause must be demonstrated and fully documented.

  There were appointments with doctors and counselors. At one point an X-ray showed something suspicious on my liver; the doctor, on the team payroll, told me it was something typically associated with heavy drinking. I figured, okay, this is it: four or five years of alcoholism, and now it’s catching up to me. I’m going to die. Instead, he gestured toward my chart and said, with a smile, “Of course, if you play better, this all goes away.”

  To me, that meant I needed more 151. Apparently I’m not drinking enough.

  Inevitably, people
started to catch on. Teammates would occasionally make comments about the way I smelled, or the amount of time I spent in the bathroom. Sometimes I’d keep Bacardi 151 in my locker, hidden in plain sight, in a Coke bottle. I didn’t drink during games—that had become too risky—but I’d sip from the bottle before practice or games. On the road, after games, I’d keep a bottle in my bag, and as soon as I got on the team bus I’d go straight to the bathroom and take a couple of hits. I was so consumed by my addiction that it didn’t even occur to me that others might find this behavior strange. Paul Pierce was just a young kid with the Celtics back then, and more than once he shook his head in disbelief when he saw me emerge from the bathroom.

  “That’s crazy, V,” he’d say with a laugh. “Just crazy.”

  On Christmas Day the Celtics played an afternoon game against the Nets in New Jersey. There aren’t a lot of matinees on the typical NBA schedule, but the few we had posed a problem for me. First of all, the day started early, which meant I was hungover. Second, I had to make sure I was properly fueled before going to the arena, so I started drinking the hard stuff earlier in the day than I normally did. On this particular day, I woke up feeling badly hungover, and immediately threw back about a half pint of 151. By the time I got to the arena I was not only drunk, but still hungover from the previous day of drinking. Simply put, I felt like crap. I plodded through warm-ups in a heavy haze. What I did not realize was just how unprepared I was for even a modest effort. I played a few minutes in the first half, and with each lumbering trip down the court I could feel my body protesting.

  Eventually I came out of the game, took a seat on the bench, and almost immediately became overwhelmed by a rising tide of nausea. I tried lowering my head between my knees. No good. I tried sipping from a cup of water. Even worse. My body turned cold and clammy. My heart began to race. I suddenly realized that I had reached the point where sickness was inevitable. Horrified and embarrassed, and utterly incapacitated by nausea, I jumped out of my seat and wobbled away from the bench toward the locker room. A couple of guys on the team asked if I was okay, but for the most part my departure went unnoticed. Once clear of the bench I sprinted beneath the stands and down a hallway; the added effort triggered a reflex, and left me vomiting into my hands as I searched unsuccessfully for the nearest garbage can. I finished the job by dry heaving into a toilet in the quiet of an empty locker room, as the game went on outside.

  “Sorry, must have the flu,” I said when I got back to the bench. I’m not sure anyone believed me. I played eleven minutes. Had six points and no rebounds, in a 36-point loss to the Nets. Statistically, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, it was the worst game of my professional career.

  A few weeks later I was confronted again, this time by Chris Wallace. He contacted my agent and my father, just to make sure that everyone was on the same page.

  “You need to check into a facility and dry out,” Chris said. “And you need to do it now.”

  A quiet, almost surreptitious mandatory stint in a rehab facility over the All-Star Break accomplished almost nothing. I was supposed to stay for at least three days but walked out—against medical advice—after only a few hours. When I checked in, I told my limo driver to just park around the corner and wait; I wouldn’t be long. True to my word, I was out the door after only a single meeting. I jumped in the limo and told the driver to take me home to Connecticut, to the mansion I had purchased in Durham. I cracked open a bottle of Bacardi and was drunk before we hit the interstate.

  By failing to complete the program, I gave the Celtics leverage to impose drug and alcohol testing for the remainder of the season, if not for the duration of my time in Boston. Not just random testing or monthly testing; the team was going to test me every day—at least until we got back from our next road trip, which was two weeks long.

  The outcome was entirely predictable. I didn’t stop drinking; I couldn’t stop drinking. I was physically addicted and needed alcohol to stay alive. Every test administered on that trip came up positive, despite my use of masking agents (diuretics and the like) to try to beat it. On February 28, 2003, I was suspended indefinitely. My season ended with an average of 5.2 points per game.

  Less than one week later, on March 4, I checked into Silver Hill Hospital, an addiction treatment center in New Canaan, Connecticut. I went in “voluntarily,” but really I went in reluctantly, forced by my employer to deal with an obvious problem or face the possibility of losing my career and my livelihood. I knew I had a problem; I knew I was an alcoholic. But I wasn’t ready to accept the help I needed, or to acknowledge the depth of my addiction. Mainly I was just pissed and embarrassed at the situation in which I found myself. This is not uncommon among addicts: the layers of resistance are peeled away over time, until finally there is nothing left but accountability. Or death. (Sometimes, of course, death is the ultimate statement of accountability, a final reckoning, if you will.) I was still several years away from that point.

  I stayed in my room for the first twenty-four hours, refusing to come out for meetings or meals. I accepted the meds to ease the pain of withdrawal, and after a while I grudgingly began taking part in my own treatment. I was there for three months, and the whole time I used the alias Mike Evans, a nod to the actor who was featured in several 1970s sitcoms. However, everyone at Silver Hill knew who I was, which weighed me down with pride and embarrassment. Every day, in a place, an environment, where you should be absolutely claiming your disease, I was “Mike Evans.” Just lying.

  In rehab, without the pressure of basketball, I felt no anxiety. Once relieved of the physical craving for alcohol that comes with addiction, I no longer wanted to drink. I had long since passed the point where it had any positive effect. Now that I had effectively been removed from circulation, and no longer had to worry about playing basketball, the anxiety melted away. For the first time, I began to see clearly that perhaps the thing I had always loved the most in life was also the thing that caused me the most pain.

  13

  A Career Unravels

  There is no such thing as a former alcoholic. Once you join the club, you are a member for life. At opposite ends of the room are the recovering alcoholic and the practicing alcoholic, and somewhere in the vast middle is the alcoholic who hasn’t quite made up his mind.

  That was me in the late summer of 2003.

  After Silver Hill, I was sober and physically fit for the first time in several years. I was eager to play basketball again, to resurrect my career, and to put a new coat of paint on the facade of my fading reputation.

  The story that appeared in the Boston Globe on September 11, 2003, began with these words:

  When Vin Baker opened the door to his brick mansion late Tuesday night, he looked different than he did six months ago. He was clear-eyed and harder edged. Most noticeably, the puffiness that followed his jawline was gone. He sounded different, too; stronger and surer.

  I had opened the door to my home—to readers and the reporter—for two reasons: to establish rapport and to make it clear that I held a certain station in life. Yes, I had a drinking problem; yes, I had failed to live up the standard of expectations that came with an $86 million contract. But look, everyone! I’m still a nice guy! And I still live in a house as big as a hotel. I’m doing just fine, thank you very much!

  So why did it bother me so much that the headline above the story read “Baker: I’m an Alcoholic”? I mean, this was the absolute truth, and I acknowledged as much in the interview. Why, then, was I so angry when the story appeared? Why did I find myself sitting there at the kitchen table, reading the Globe, cursing the reporter for not focusing on something more positive—as if an alcoholic publicly claiming ownership of his disease and vowing to do better wasn’t positive. Of course it was. But I felt betrayed and humiliated, and the reason was simple: I still hadn’t come to terms with my addiction. I neither understood nor respected its power. It was easy for me to use the words “I’m an alcoholic” when speaking with a re
porter, but I didn’t really believe it, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be perceived that way. I’m not sure what I expected out of that story, but I was completely unprepared for the response it provoked. An extraordinary degree of humility is required of the recovering alcoholic; I hadn’t yet reached that point.

  Working in concert with league officials, the Celtics had structured an arrangement designed not only to encourage my sobriety, but also to ensure that a relapse would provide an exit strategy for the club, which understandably did not want to be left holding the balance of an $86 million contract on a player who couldn’t stay sober. After reworking my contract to a more manageable one-year deal, the club still wanted me to meet with officials from the league’s drug counseling office at specific intervals. For a while there would be daily drug and alcohol testing. Later it would become more random but still frequent. My response was anger and indignation.

  You don’t trust me?

  Well, no, as a matter of fact we don’t.

  The maintenance alone was exhausting. The league had taken $1.4 million of my salary from the previous year and held it in an account pending completion of a year in which I met all the terms of my return. A single failed test or missed meeting would result in a declaration of noncompliance and forfeiture of the $1.4 million. It would also set the stage for my outright release. I began looking for enemies and excuses.