The Wax Pack

by Brad Balukjian

  “Don Carman considered it self-preservation. What is your take?” I ask.

  “Yeah, you know, when we get to a certain age, there are things we can’t do. But in my mind I think I can still do it. I think an athlete always has that competitive edge in him. Always. You never lose that,” he says with the same look that Tempy and Randy had when discussing their desire to get back in the game.

  My dad sips his glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, content to take a back seat and listen as Maz and I give and take. He occasionally asks a question or adds a comment but mostly just chuckles at Maz’s dry humor.

  “We’re staying in Sheepshead Bay,” I tell him.

  “No offense, but that’s not a very good area. I lived there,” he replies. “We had five of us living in a three-room apartment, my brother and sister and my mom and dad. We didn’t have much. But that’s all we knew. It was normal to us,” he says.

  “Were you surprised when you got drafted in the first round?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Absolutely. I just wanted to get drafted, I didn’t care when. I had no clue where I was going to go,” he says with a smile, flashing a set of bright white teeth.

  During his couple of seasons in the Minor Leagues, he got a taste of a world much bigger than Brooklyn. In 1974 he played for the Anderson Mets in western South Carolina.

  “When I went down there, you’re down south, and you’re talking the seventies, and it was chain gangs on the side of the road, KKK, all that stuff that I had not been privy to,” he says.

  “What was your manager there like, Owen Friend?” I ask.

  “Miserable bastard,” he says, cracking up my dad. “I’m gonna be very nice and say that.”

  Maz is quick-witted, direct, and honest. He sits with his back against the wall, relaxed and at ease. He tells me about the surreal nature of his relationships with Willie Mays, whom he idolized as a kid and who became his personal mentor during those early years when Maz was learning to play the outfield. We gloss over the highlight of his career, the Mets’ dramatic comeback win over the Red Sox in the 1986 World Series, because what new could possibly be said about one of the most chronicled series in baseball history?

  While many of his teammates were careless with their money, living in the moment a little too much, Maz was always smart and careful. He didn’t rush into anything, equally patient at the plate (he excelled at drawing walks) and in his personal life. Enduring yet another question about his love life in a 1980 interview, he said, “It’s tough being married when you play ball. You’re always moving around. I’m not getting married to get divorced. Once I get married, I’ll stay married.”4 A man of his word, Maz married Dani in 1984, and they’re still married today.

  I ask how his ride on the baseball carousel came to an end.

  “In 1990 there was the lockout. That spring I still wanted to play, but I couldn’t get to camp because of the lockout. And when they finally resolved it, there was a very short window for spring training, so there really wasn’t an opportunity to get invited to spring training to see what you’ve got. And that was it,” he says.

  “What did you do that first year you were out?” I ask.

  Like the rest of the Wax Packers, his memory of life immediately following retirement is a blur.

  “I don’t really know,” he says. “We wanted to start a family [their eldest child, Jenna, was born in 1989]. The stars weren’t lined up right to go back to playing.”

  Before long, he was busier than ever, trying on several new careers: he opened a restaurant, went to work with a friend at a mortgage bank, served as commissioner of an independent baseball league, and even starred in an off-Broadway play following a dare from buddy Dan Lauria (the father on The Wonder Years). But no matter what he did, none of it was baseball.

  After Maz wandered in the wilderness for six years, Dani brought him home by making him leave home. “My wife, she basically pushed me out the door,” he says, resting his elbow on the chair in front of him.

  “Nothing ever fills the void,” Dani said back in 2003, aware that her husband still had baseball left in his system.

  “She just knew this was something I needed to do. I needed a push, and she pushed me,” Maz says.

  The hardest part was going back on the road, away from his family. Nothing is more important to Maz than family. He eased himself back in, managing the Single-A Tampa Yankees. He and Dani made a pact to never go more than three weeks without getting the family together. By 1999 Maz had graduated to Double-A Norwich, and from 2000 to 2003 he was the first base coach for the New York Yankees, winning another World Series ring in 2000. But he almost didn’t get that far.

  His twins, Lacey and LJ, were only seven when he decided to return to the game. LJ in particular was attached to his dad.

  “I said to him, ‘Remember in September, Dad’s gonna be home, and I’m gonna take you to soccer and basketball, and I’ll be with you every day,’” he tells me, his dark eyebrows slightly furrowed. I feel my dad shift next to me.

  “One day I had an off day and flew home from Florida to surprise my wife,” he begins. “I came home and said, ‘Where’s the big guy?’ She said, ‘He’s in bed.’ I went and surprised him, woke him up. The first thing he said was, ‘Dad, is it September already?’ And that just broke my heart. I went downstairs and told my wife, ‘I can’t do it.’ It killed me,” he says.

  We all sit in silence for a moment, staring at our drinks.

  “What’s your tattoo about?” I finally ask, breaking the silence.

  “That’s me and my brother,” he says, his eyes welling.

  He pats his bicep.

  “Me and my brother.”

  “How would you describe your relationship with your siblings?” I ask. I had read that Maz was the youngest, with Freddy seven and Joann three years older, but I know little else about them.

  “I lost my brother,” he says softly. “We were together for fifty-some years, and there wasn’t one time where he and I ever had a fight. Not one time that he and I ever cursed at each other. Never. He was such a big part of my life, losing him—I had a tough time with that,” he says, closing his eyes and reaching his hand to his forehead.

  “I lost my best friend,” he adds.

  Maz and his wife, Dani, and sister, Joann, helped put together a small charity, the Fred L. Mazzilli Foundation, in his memory to raise money for lung cancer funding.

  “It’s just us licking the envelopes and putting the mailings out,” Maz says.

  We chat a bit more over coffee, but it’s getting late, and Maz has to get back to Greenwich.

  “Thank you for dinner,” he says, gripping my hand tightly and looking me warmly in the eyes. “It’s good to see you’re going out and spending time with your dad. Enjoy your time together—it’s precious.”

  My dad and I ride back to Sheepshead Bay together, saying everything by saying nothing at all.

  * * *

  *

  The next morning, before parting ways, my dad and I sit at a Starbucks for our other favorite activity: Trivial Pursuit. He’s strong in every category but entertainment, while my weakness is art. For years, although I came close, I could never quite beat him, but the torch has now been passed, as I win handily. He’s got to head back to Chicago, and I’ve got an appointment in Doc Gooden’s living room tomorrow, but I’m not ready to go. I feel that anxious pit in my stomach, that hollow feeling I experienced as my parents drove away after dropping me off for my freshman year of college, effectively ending my childhood.

  “Dad,” I begin. He turns his hazel eyes on me, bright but with slight circles underneath. They are the same eyes I have been looking into for thirty-four years. He raises his eyebrows.

  “Dad, I want to tell you some things,” I begin. “And I just want you to listen. You can respond if you want to, but mostly I just want you to listen. I don’t need your approval or your opinion, I just want you to know certain things about me.”

  “Sure,” he says, cross
ing his legs, folding his hands, leaning back the same way Maz did last night at the restaurant.

  Once I start talking, I don’t even pause to breathe. “I know you want me to find someone special and get married and have kids. I know you think I would be unhappy if I never did that, that my life would somehow be incomplete. You don’t say that out loud, but I know you, I know how you feel. And maybe you’re right, maybe I would be miserable if I was always alone. But I like my life. I’m happy being alone. I like my freedom. I’m not like you, I don’t see the world through the same lens that you do. And I love you so much, you know that, and I am always so grateful for all the opportunities you and Mom gave me. But I’m different from you. I’m not a Christian. I don’t believe in the same God that you do. I like to sit still and meditate and just observe my thoughts. My god is just trying to be as present as I can, which I think is what love really is, and being compassionate to other people, treating them well. I’m telling you all this because I want you to know that me having these beliefs and feeling this way is not out of some defiance of you, it’s not some rejection born out of bitterness about what happened between you and Mom, because I accept all of that. I respect you and love you for who you are, but it’s different from who I am. I need you to know that.”

  I ramble. I don’t care. The whole time I look him right in the eye, feeling naked and vulnerable and exposed. When I finish talking, my whole body feels like an unclenched fist, tingling slightly. He looks at me with a look that only a parent can show to a child. After sitting and listening for several minutes, he opens his mouth to reply. “Brad, I know all that,” he says, astonishing me. “And I’m so proud of who you are.”

  The world does have good guys and bad guys after all. Heroes do exist. And although he never had his own baseball card, my dad will always be one of them.

  13

  Nobody Home

  When I was young, my neighbors had a VCR tape of my dad, and I used to watch that video. When the part with the drug problem would come on, I immediately would just start crying. Every time.

  —Dwight Gooden Jr.

  Days 33–35

  July 21–23, 2015

  Miles driven: 6,983

  Cups of coffee: 84

  New York NY to Westbury NY

  “I think he’s stoned,” says the promoter, fiftyish, wearing a canary-yellow polo shirt tucked into khakis. He swings his gut around the bar, clearly agitated, trying to get the attention of an attractive woman in her forties who’s standing nearby.

  “I gave him quite a fee for this too,” he says.

  The woman, apparently a colleague, grips her cell phone tightly and glares straight ahead.

  “Just tell me, Junior, be honest with me. What’s going on?” she says, pacing around the bar and sounding like she knows exactly what’s going on.

  I’ve just walked into the Olde Stone Mill restaurant outside Yonkers, a leafy suburb north of the Bronx.

  She pulls the phone away from her face and whispers to the promoter: “He says he has food poisoning.” She’s tall and attractive, with immaculate makeup.

  11. Dwight Gooden

  Dwight “Doc” Gooden, one of only three players to ever appear solo on the cover of Time, is nowhere to be found. One of the most dominant pitchers of the 1980s, Doc, now fifty, still earns on the fumes of that fame, appearing at venues like this to meet and greet fans and sign autographs. For $100 you get a speech from Doc and an autograph while you nosh on the “ballpark menu” of hot dogs and hamburgers.

  The “Junior” that the woman is talking to on the phone is Doc Gooden Jr., better known as “Little Doc” (he is a few inches shorter than his father), who also serves as his dad’s agent.

  I walk into the adjacent dining room, where the bulbs in the chandeliers splash bright light on the yellow walls. About thirty-five people, including a tableful of nuns and a kid in a wheelchair, are waiting and patiently eating their hot dogs.

  Waiting for Doc to show up.

  * * *

  *

  Doc Gooden, like Carlton Fisk, was the type of player I didn’t care for as a kid simply because he was so good (and because he played for the Mets, the archrivals of my beloved Phillies). He burst onto the scene in 1984, winning the Rookie of the Year Award at age nineteen, and a year later had one of the most dominant seasons in baseball history, winning twenty-four games with eight shutouts and posting an anemic 1.53 ERA. He won the National League Cy Young Award before he could even legally drink a beer.

  But the city of New York doesn’t just venerate its stars, it devours them. Doc (a nickname he earned at age nine for his surgical dissection of hitters) owned the city, and it owned him; a 105-foot-high Nike ad of him covered the side of a skyscraper on West Forty-Second Street. By 1986, the year the Mets won the World Series, Doc was already starting to burn out.

  Those who knew the real Doc, the Doc who had grown up in the working-class Belmont Heights neighborhood of East Tampa, Florida, were not entirely surprised. “Dwight shouldn’t have been in New York,” his high school baseball coach, Billy Reed, now eighty-three, told me last week when I was in Tampa. “He should have gone someplace like Minnesota. A low-key town.” Although Doc’s childhood seemed stable on the outside, beneath the surface lurked dysfunction that would haunt him his whole life.

  Doc’s mom, Ella Mae, was the disciplinarian who emphasized education, but working two jobs limited her ability to keep watch over Doc; his father, Dan, was an ex-semipro ballplayer who worked at the local Cargill plant and always wanted to be the good guy. He was also a philanderer. When Doc was only five, Dan would take him out to get a snack before the Game of the Week came on NBC, and on the way he’d stop at his mistress’s house, leaving Doc in the car and saying he had to drop something off for a friend. One day when Ella Mae got wind of what was going on, she followed him to one of his trysts with a .38 and opened fire when he got to his lover’s door, hitting him in the left arm. He wasn’t critically injured, the police were kept out of it, and the whole thing was swept under the rug.

  A short time later, Doc’s half sister Mercedes was babysitting him when her husband, known for his violence, stormed into the house in a rage and shot her five times right in front of Doc and his eighteen-month-old nephew. Doc grabbed his nephew and bolted for the bathroom, locking them inside in sheer terror until he heard the police arrive. Mercedes survived but had permanent injuries.

  All of this happened before Doc was six.

  “For a long time, I buried most of these dark family memories,” he wrote in his third autobiography, Doc, in 2013.1

  Instead, Doc focused on baseball, and Dan was always happy to indulge. He spent hours and hours mentoring Doc, teaching him the fundamentals and strengthening his body to handle the punishment of pitching. He worked out Doc’s abs until it hurt to laugh, made him stand on a board laid atop bricks just to get his balance. Dan saw potential and dollar signs in his son’s blazing fastball, knowing he could go high in the draft. And while he spent time with Doc, he never disciplined him. When Ella Mae suggested Doc get a job, Dan would make the applications disappear. He’d give Doc money and tell him to go enjoy himself. Coach Reed observed all this from afar with a disapproving scowl but could only do so much. “I had to coach Dwight from the shoulders up,” he told me.

  Coach Reed wasn’t afraid to lay down the law, no matter how good his pupil was. When Doc was a few minutes late to homeroom on Opening Day, the star player earned a ticket to the bench. Although Doc was offered a full ride to the University of Miami along with free housing, Doc and Dan had their sights on pro ball. After being drafted in the first round (fifth overall) by the Mets in 1982 (eventually negotiating an $85,000 signing bonus), an excited but naive Ella Mae asked, “Will the Mets let you go to college first?” “No, Ella,” Dan said. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  Only four years later and on top of the world, Doc was holed up in his apartment on Long Island while his teammates were being toasted by two millio
n New Yorkers as they cruised down Lower Manhattan in the World Series victory parade. He had stayed up all night snorting cocaine and doing shots with friends and groupies, arriving back at his apartment in time for the rising sun to sting his bloodshot eyes. He was a world champion. He was in agony.

  From there, the tragedy of Doc Gooden unfolded over three decades, with so many twists and turns and rehab stints that I gave up counting when reading the stack of books and articles meticulously documenting his plight. The cocaine addiction, which had begun in January 1986, culminated with a suspension in early 1987, and although he would remain clean for several years, resisting the white medicine would become a lifelong struggle. He was suspended for all of 1994 for failing too many drug tests and hit rock bottom in March 2006 when he was sentenced to one year and a day in a Central Florida prison for violating his probation. There were some highlights amid the wreckage—in 1996, after not playing the previous season, he threw a no-hitter, and despite all the career interruptions, he finished with 194 wins when he retired in 2001. While the sports world largely considered him a disappointment, he may have overachieved, given all his demons. Following his playing days, he served for many years as a special assistant to Yankees GM George Steinbrenner, who always had a soft spot for him.

  Doc’s family life was just as tumultuous. He had seven children with three different women, none of whom he is still with today (he is twice divorced). The sweet and loving boy never fully matured. Stunted by addiction and those long-buried childhood traumas, he reluctantly entered Celebrity Rehab, a reality show with Dr. Drew Pinsky, in 2011. Although he had no expectations, something about Drew’s style clicked with Doc, and it actually worked in a way none of the previous programs had. In his 2013 book Doc wrote: “I am more than two years clean now . . . I don’t drink. I don’t use cocaine or any other recreational drugs.” Rather than taking an absolute, black-and-white approach, he emphasized self-compassion and persistence: “I hope I never stumble again. But if I do, I promise to pull myself back up again and try some more.”2 Doc may finally have found the cure.