The truth is that I’m single because I don’t want to end up getting divorced like my parents did. I’m scared that I will mess up again like I did with Kay. And I’m scared of making a commitment I’m not sure I can keep.
I don’t say any of this. Instead, I talk about being independent and liking my space and being picky, things that are also true but don’t tell the whole story.
I say good night and watch Sophia walk up the driveway. I watch in the rearview mirror as she shuts the door behind her.
I turn the ignition, feeling content. Don’s words float back to me: We don’t get to write the script in life. Whatever it is, we just get to respond.
* * *
*
The next morning, Don leads me into his study, his private sanctum, where he remotely massages some of the biggest and most fragile egos in all of baseball. I wanted to see him in his home environment so I can fulfill a twenty-six-year wish: to play catch with my hero.
At the center of the room is a brown leather chair in front of a desk with a small lamp and a MacBook, its lid closed. I spy a yellow legal pad on the desk with the handwritten names of several clients—Addison Russell, Mike Moustakas—with little notes in the margins and a hand-drawn check box next to each name. But they’re not actually check boxes, they’re check cubes, drawn in three dimensions.
On a second yellow legal pad is his daily to-do list, with such entries as “set up phone e-mail,” “expense report,” and “homework.” I’m there too, noted simply as “Brad” with my own check cube. He’s taking classes toward a doctorate in psychology after having recently completed his master’s.
The study is full of mementos from his career, baseballs piled high on a shelf, framed newspaper clippings, plaques and awards. There’s the ball from his near-perfect game against the Giants in 1986 and an autographed, inscribed ball from teammate Mike Schmidt, one of the greatest players of all time. If I ask about any of them, he provides an explanation, but all of the items he points out have little to do with him.
He points to an oil painting on the wall of a wolf staring directly ahead with a whimsical expression on its lips. It’s good.
“Jackson painted that,” he says, referring to his youngest son, who’s now a junior in high school. “There something different about Jackson in an unbelievably wonderful way.”
He tells me a story about when Jackson was in the sixth grade and forgot a paper at home. Don drove to the school to drop it off, and as he turned to go, a teacher stopped him and said, “Are you Jackson’s father?”
“Yes,” Don said.
“I have to meet the father of Jackson Carman. I’ve been teaching for eighteen years, and I’ve never met a child like him,” she said.
For every conversation Don never had with his father, he has ten with Jackson and his other two sons, Jared and Aaron.
“I was a stay-at-home-dad. We played catch a lot, worked the yard, went to the beach, rode bikes. My oldest [Jared] loves to talk about philosophical things, about my work. And Aaron was really shy, a lot like me. Watching him grow up, I could see what it would have been like [for me] without the other pain. It was fun to watch.”
On one of the bookshelves, in front of Socrates to Sartre, Cultural Literacy, and Philip Roth’s Everyman, stands a row of four bobbleheads: Don Carman and three characters from Napoleon Dynamite, Kip, Pedro, and Napoleon.
“I’ve seen it at least fifteen times. I can quote the whole movie pretty much.”
He leads me back into the kitchen, where I take a seat on a stool at the island in the middle. He stands up at the counter, cradling a mug of coffee. The house is big and comfortable but not ostentatious. There’s a screened-in swimming pool in the backyard and Trivial Pursuit laid out on the coffee table in the living room.
I want to know what happened at the end of his career, how he transformed from a head-hunting pitcher for the Phillies into a psychologist working on his doctorate. I knew from my research that the end of his career had been much different from that of players like Rance Mulliniks, who rode off into the sunset with a World Series title.
His last full season in the Majors was 1990 with the Phillies. For the next five years, he was a baseball gypsy, fighting for a job every spring training, bouncing from the Astros to the Reds to the Tigers to the Royals to the Rangers to the Mariners back to the Phillies to the Twins organizations, with a stop in the Mexican League mixed in. He finished his professional career in 1995, seventeen years after it began, pitching for the Gaston King Cougars, an independent team based in Gaston, North Carolina. Finally, a year older than I am now, he was done.
“For two years after I stopped playing, I went right into depression. I couldn’t even breathe,” he says.
I mention the other players I’ve met and how they also struggled with the transition—Steve Yeager too depressed to watch his beloved Dodgers on TV, Carlton Fisk’s self-induced exile—and how surprised I am that none of them seem particularly nostalgic about their careers.
“I think it’s self-preservation,” he says. “Because it’s your dream, and then it’s gone. It’s like, okay, I woke up, and I don’t get to go back to sleep and dream again.”
Don, as always, was different. Never a fan, he didn’t mind letting go of the game itself, but leaving behind the lifestyle was harder.
“What was missing from my life was structure. I had spent my whole life under structure. I knew where I was supposed to be, when to go to camp, when to show up, when to get up, everything was structured,” he says. “I started drinking. I drank quite a bit, and I didn’t even think about it. But then I realized I was doing it five days a week. It became my activity.”
His second wife, Kathy, whom he married in 1995, was the one to get him up off the floor. Literally.
“We had chatted about me going back to school, and I kept going ‘yeah, yeah.’ I was scared. It seemed like such a daunting thing,” he says. “One day I was sitting on the floor, leaning against the door of the garage. I just sat there. And Kathy came over and said, ‘What’s going on?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ She said, ‘I know it’s scary out there, I know it’s scary to go back to school, but you’ve got to get off the floor. Just take one class and go from there.’”
He got up.
Toward the end of his playing career, when he was struggling with the end of his first marriage, his then agent and now boss Scott Boras recommended he talk to Harvey Dorfman, a pioneer in baseball psychology and the author of the landmark textbook The Mental Game of Baseball. Don flew out to Dorfman’s Arizona compound for a weekend and met the man who would become his second dad, neither of whom was his father. In Don, Dorfman saw the same untapped potential that Bob Ward had seen in his backyard in Camargo, except this time it was the talent Don possessed above the shoulder rather than the skill of the arm attached to it.
Dorfman became Don’s mentor. He was the one who encouraged Don to continue his education after Kathy picked him up off the floor. He got his bachelor’s in psychology, then his master’s in sports psychology, and now he is working on his doctorate, although Dorfman won’t be there to see him receive it. He died four years ago at the age of seventy-five.
“I miss him every day,” Don tells me.
Don walks over to the microwave to heat up his coffee.
“What impact has your marriage to Kathy had on you?” I ask.
And here, for the first time since our conversation began at the zoo yesterday, Don’s tongue gets tied. Not because he’s got nothing to say, but because he has so much to say that he constantly edits to get it just right.
“I’d say the broadest, the biggest—besides know that—a couple things that I would say, without thinking too much—one is that people can be what they present themselves as.”
He pauses, resets, then starts again.
“It took years for me to realize that she is everything that she appears to be. And I don’t know anyone else like that, not one person, who is truly a great frien
d, who is truly truthful, I don’t know anybody, not one person.”
His voice trails off, his eyes well up. He sniffles, says “mmm-hmmm” with a slight nod. For the second time in two days, I’m watching my childhood hero cry.
I never get to meet Kathy, but I feel like I already have.
“Do you want to throw a bit?” Don asks me, suddenly aware of the time and leading me into the garage. I remember reading that he found an old shoebox full of fan mail in this same garage, letters he never replied to. He turned writing responses into a project with his son Jackson. I ask if he remembered getting a birthday card with a sailboat on it, but he doesn’t.
He plucks a couple of gloves and a ball out of a box, leading me out to the driveway. The hot sun, already high in the sky, beats down on us as we stand fifteen yards apart and start tossing. He demonstrates the same windup he used for all those years for the Phillies, the same series of movements that I watched from the nosebleed seats on that August day in 1989. The high leg kick, his hands held just below his bent right knee, and then the arc of his left arm as it comes whipping over the top, releasing the ball, which snaps into my glove an instant later with a loud pop, stinging my palm inside. Even in a simple catch, decades removed from his playing days, Don’s arm is still free like it was in Bob Ward’s backyard forty years ago.
The ball feels smooth and cool in my sweaty palm, a five-ounce core of rubber wrapped in yarn and covered by cowhide. I grip it tightly, moving my fingers over the relief of the red stitching, feeling its coarse surface. I toss it back.
We start out chatting about how to grip different pitches, about his fielding position after completing a pitch.
Then we just stop talking and throw in silence, the ball’s white parabola soaring against a bright summer sky.
11
Vincent van Gone
When I get on, nobody’s going to throw me out.
—Vince Coleman
Days 24–27
July 12–15, 2015
Miles driven: 5,546
Cups of coffee: 66
Naples FL to Jacksonville FL
Ever since he was a little boy, Vince Coleman has been running. Growing up an only child raised by his mother, Willie Pearl (he never knew his father), in a rough part of northwestern Jacksonville, he once told a reporter, “I had to survive as best I could and a lot of times, I got out of trouble with my feet.” His need to escape was so deep-seated that it seeped into his sleep. “Even now my dreams are just running, running, running. I think that just carried over to sports, so that stealing bases was a natural.”1
He’s so good at running, in fact, that I have no idea where he is. While I had strong leads on every other Wax Packer before I hit the road, the man once nicknamed Vincent van Go for his base-stealing prowess has gone completely AWOL. He is a base-running instructor with the Chicago White Sox, but the team’s PR rep said that Coleman had not been with the team in weeks, and the rep had no idea when or if Coleman would return.
9. Vince Coleman
I have my work cut out for me, but after the Carlton ordeal and the emotionally exhausting couple of days with Don, I’m spent.
I lie under the covers in my Jacksonville hotel room, splayed out on my stomach with my head turned sideways. The smell of the coffee I put on five minutes ago percolates through the air, but I have no will to get up and taste it. I peek out from under the covers and see the bright red light of the coffeemaker, the same shade of red as the uniforms of Van Go’s old team, the St. Louis Cardinals. On the floor next to the bed lies a stack of notebooks and newspaper articles where I dropped them last night, too tired to set them on the desk a few paces away.
I’m at the All-Star Break of the trip, halfway through. I’ve driven almost six thousand miles in less than a month through eight different states. Outside the womb of my air-conditioned room lies another Florida Groundhog Day, more unrelenting humidity and clear blue sky. But right now I want nothing more than to turn off my brain and lie completely still, to be swallowed whole by this soft mattress. For twenty-four days I have followed a strict writer’s regimen of late nights, early mornings, and too much coffee; I’ve blogged daily when the last thing I wanted to do was to be creative, let alone entertaining, when all I wanted to do was watch old reruns of Wings on my shitty hotel TV. I’ve eaten food whose grease soaked through the wrappers and watched the whites of my eyes turn more and more the color of rosé with each passing day. I haven’t done laundry or gone to the gym in a week and have reached the low point of recycling underwear.
Somewhere out there is the fifty-three-year-old Vincent van Go, even more intractable and difficult than Carlton, not wanting to be found. I should be in detective mode, working the phones, looking for leads as big as the ones Van Go used to take off first base with his eye on stealing second. Instead I want nothing more than to turn off the radio in my brain and disappear into the sheets.
* * *
*
Several hours later, a text message wakes me up. I squint at the screen, disoriented from a deep sleep, the coffeemaker light still burning red across the room.
The message is from Dwight Gooden Jr., better known as Little Doc, who is the youngest of Dwight “Doc” Gooden’s seven children and who serves as his dad’s agent. We have been negotiating back and forth about setting up a meeting when I’m in New York in a few days, and the answer at last arrives: “We will be here.”
I bolt up like a piece of toast, suddenly invigorated by landing the second most famous Wax Packer (and some might argue that his fame rivaled that of Carlton’s). I pour myself a cup of still-warm coffee and fire off a text reply. The only way the Goodens would agree to talk to me was for me to pay them, which I’m not thrilled about (the practice of paying sources is frowned upon in journalism) and which I would only do as a last resort and with full disclosure to readers. I consent to pay Little Doc $200 and Doc $500 for an interview.
“He is doing a documentary with [Darryl] Strawberry and maybe when they start shooting you can come follow and make it happen. I know they will be shooting some day in July. If not, there’s plenty of signings or public appearances coming up,” Little Doc texts.
This is big. So big that I jump right into the shower, washing away the road grime and weariness, turning my sights back on Vincent van Go. He is the reason why I’ve come to Jacksonville, the largest city (by land area) in the United States, consisting of a maze of bridges and buildings centered around the St. John’s River on Florida’s northeastern coast. The city’s numerous pockets and neighborhoods include a major naval station and university, but despite its immense size, it lacks any defining character. When I ask the bartender downstairs what Jacksonville is known for, he simply shrugs and offers, almost apologetically, “The Jaguars?” (the football team, not the animal). Still, Jacksonville has more character than San Diego.
Van Go grew up in the blue-collar Moncrief Park neighborhood in the northwestern part of the city, spending as much time as he could in Scott Park playing sports with his older cousin Greg and other local athletes. Without a father in his life, he found male role models in Greg and his uncle Carter, a deacon at Abyssinia Baptist Church who made the best sweet potato pies around. Van Go followed in Greg’s footsteps to Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, where he excelled as a punter and kicker on the football team and as a center fielder in baseball, once stealing seven bases in a single game. He dreamed of following Greg to the NFL, refusing to sign with the Phillies when they drafted him after his junior year. The following spring, in 1982, he got a tryout with the Washington Redskins but was put at wide receiver, a position where he had no experience and faltered.
“He could have made it. But you see so few blacks kicking in the NFL. . . . I think there’s really a bias there that kept Vince from getting a fair opportunity,” his college coach Rudy Hubbard told Sports Illustrated in 1985.2
When the baseball draft rolled around again a month later, he was quick to sign with the St. Louis C
ardinals in the tenth round for $5,000. Possessed of otherworldly speed, he shot through the Minor Leagues, swiping 145 bases in only 113 games for the 1983 Macon Redbirds, a pro baseball record that would stand for twenty-nine years. By 1985 he was the St. Louis Cardinals’ starting left fielder and the National League Rookie of the Year, and by the time the playoffs started that fall against the Los Angeles Dodgers, he was a bona fide celebrity, hanging out at the Playboy mansion. Young, single, and on top of the world, Van Go was the personification of the American Dream.
But he never grew into his fame, never matured enough to know how to handle the success. He was cocky by his own admission, frequently referring to his “egotistical” attitude like it was a good thing. On the rare times he got caught stealing, he attributed it to something he had messed up, refusing to honor the opposition. “If I get thrown out, I always think I did something wrong. I don’t give credit to the catcher,” he said.3 The sportswriters who covered Van Go said he dripped with entitlement, outraged when umpires would call strikes on him and overly sensitive to any negative press even when it was justified. “Some of the time, if the play is close, shouldn’t it go in my favor?” he said when asked about his frustration with umpires.4 It didn’t help that he was woefully ignorant of history; when he was asked about Jackie Robinson during the 1985 World Series (after Robinson’s widow threw out the first pitch), he infamously replied, “I don’t know nuthin about him. Why are you asking me about Jackie Robinson?”5
Pride goeth before the fall. The man known best for stealing bases took his larceny a bit too far at Florida A&M, the first of a series of run-ins with the law. In 1981 he and his roommate were arrested for stealing one hundred dollars’ worth of wood from a lumberyard in the middle of the night. They said they were going to use the wood for bookshelves, and after they pleaded no contest, the judge dropped the charges and put them on probation with community service. During his six seasons with the Cardinals, Van Go stayed clear of legal trouble, but as soon as he chased the money to New York, signing a four-year, $11.95 million contract with the Mets after the 1990 season, his problems resumed. The small-town kid from the Florida backwaters who had been nurtured by midwestern kindness was now eaten alive by the Big Apple. Overrated to begin with, injuries and age slowed him down, turning Mets fans against him. (Other than stealing bases, he was a pretty mediocre player, subpar defensively and striking out way too much for a leadoff hitter—his career WAR was only 12.5.)6 He didn’t do himself any favors with an increasingly cantankerous attitude and immaturity in the clubhouse. “Coleman had also long since alienated reporters with his surliness, and he had a piercing laugh that seemed to echo throughout the clubhouse, sometimes even during the quiet brought on by a tough loss,” wrote beat reporters Bob Klapisch and John Harper in their book on the 1992 Mets. His round, cherubic face and pencil-thin mustache became stuck in a permanent frown. Through it all, Van Go became more and more delusional; rather than listening and learning, he doubled down on his own greatness and victimhood. “What this field is doing is keeping me out of the Hall of Fame,” he said, claiming that the playing surface of Shea Stadium was the only thing keeping him from immortality (a truly preposterous remark; even in his prime, Van Go was nowhere near Hall of Fame status).7
The Wax Pack Page 17