Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball

by Wayne Coffey

  I hold it together.

  Thank you, Sam.

  The Bartholomews have a Thanksgiving tradition in which each person at the table speaks for a few minutes about what they are thankful for. Sam asks Anne to start and then they go clockwise around, meaning that I will go last. Sam knows just what he’s doing. Sam and Vicki give their thanks and so does my mom. Next are Anne’s brothers, Bo, Will, and Ben. As they go around I take the engagement ring out of my pocket and put it in my right hand and slightly inch my chair back from the table. My hands are sweating so much I’m afraid the ring might slip out; I keep my grip on it tight. Finally it is my turn. Everybody in the room but Anne knows what is about to happen.

  I begin by thanking God for the bountiful provisions and for the chance to be together and then thank Sam and Vicki for having my mom and me to their home. I turn and look at Anne, gazing intensely into her green eyes.

  Anne, I am so thankful for you and for our relationship, I begin. I met you one afternoon in this very house ten years ago, and I loved you from the moment I laid eyes on you.

  I inch my chair back a little more. My eyes remain locked onhers.

  I cannot imagine my life without you, I say, and then I am off the chair and on my knee, with the ring between my thumb and index finger, more slippery than ever, Anne’s eyes already glistening.

  Will you marry me, Anne?

  She brings her hands up to her face, and now she is crying and nodding, not even able to speak. I slip the ring on her finger; with all the moisture, it slides on as if I’d coated it in WD-40. Anne pulls me closer to her and holds me, my head near her waist.

  I love you so much, she says. All around the table there are hugs and handshakes and an abundance of gratitude. Nobody has more of it than me. I am engaged to Anne Bartholomew.

  MY FIRST full year as a professional ballplayer doesn’t follow my script. It ends after eight appearances, six starts, and thirty-five innings in the Florida State League, cut short by bone chips in my right elbow. They’re painful but not particularly serious, and after I get an arthroscopic cleanup—totally unrelated to the absence of a UCL—I am ready to rock.

  ANNE AND I GET MARRIED on December 13, 1997, in Nashville before an intimate gathering of five hundred people, including Winfield Dunn, the former governor of Tennessee, and Lamar Alexander, another former governor and a 1996 Republican presidential candidate—the type of men who my new father-in-law, a prominent Nashville lawyer, moves with. Two months later we’re off to Port Charlotte for our first spring training. Late in camp, a Rangers player-development executive pulls me aside and tells me the organization has an experiment in mind.

  We want to give you a look as a closer, he says.

  This is just a couple of days before the season starts. I say nothing and report to the bullpen, same as I did at Tennessee. If that’s where they think I can help, that’s where I’ll pitch.

  I take to it well and save thirty-eight games and make the all-star team, moving up to Double-A ball in Tulsa in 1999. I learn a valuable lesson along the way:

  If you want to get by on a minor-league salary, you need to watch every penny and look for any way you can to supplement your income. Anne and I get by with one car and start our married life by sharing an apartment with another couple so we can split the $650 rent. Anne gets a job at The Limited and is teaching aerobics too. Sam and Vicki help us from time to time, but we want to make it on our own. I aim to further boost our cash flow with a business venture that I start with my friend Jonathan Johnson, another Rangers pitcher and the best man at our wedding.

  Our apartment in Port Charlotte is a short distance from three golf courses, all of which have ponds and lagoons all over the place. Jonathan and I play the courses whenever we get a chance, and after I lose my third ball of the day in a lagoon on a par-five hole on one of the courses, I say to Jonathan, Can you imagine how many golf balls there must be at the bottom of this thing?

  Hundreds, maybe thousands, Jonathan says.

  Don’t you think that if we could somehow fish the balls out of there, we could sell them and get a pretty good business going?

  You may be onto something, Jonathan says.

  I briefly ponder if this is how Apple or Starbucks got started, with an innocuous, spur-of-the-moment brainstorm. I don’t take the argument too far, turning my energy instead to the challenge of getting the golf balls up from the bottom—and doing it discreetly, as there are houses lining every inch of the course. We invest in fifty feet of rope and two golf ball rakes with little baskets at the end that allow us to scoop up about sixteen balls at a time. We buy waders, buckets, a couple of gallons of bleach, and a scrub brush for the cleaning operation, and lift a few dozen bundles of sanitary socks from the clubhouse.

  Our overhead is low, our start-up costs only about sixty dollars, key factors in any new venture.

  We are almost ready to plunge the rakes in the water when we realize we haven’t accounted for one factor:

  Alligators.

  They are all over the place on this golf course. Look on the banks of the lagoons and you see them sunning themselves in the reeds. Look in the water and you see them skimming along the surface, possibly trolling for Titleists.

  The gator factor, I decide, is not going to foil our plan.

  We’ll be fine, I say. We’ll just be on the lookout for them. It’s not like we’re going swimming.

  At 10:45 on a moonlit night, we set out with our rope and rakes and buckets, wade into the shallows, and extend our rakes and haul them back in, dragging them along the bottom, hoping for dimpled white pay dirt. We attach ropes to the rakes, then throw them out there as far as we can and drag them back in toward the shore. After the first half hour, business is booming. We already must have a hundred balls. No stopping us now. We keep flinging the ropes and raking the balls in, but on one throw my rake gets snagged on the bottom, on a stump or rock, I don’t know what. But it’s really stuck. I pull on the rope every way I can think of but can’t shake the rake loose. I put more muscle into it. I start to feel a burn in my shoulders and don’t want to overdo it, thanks to a horrible headline premonition:

  RANGERS PROSPECT WRECKS ROTATOR CUFF FISHING FOR GOLF BALLS IN LAGOON

  This would be right up there with the most ridiculous baseball injuries of all time, alongside Cardinals outfielder Vince Coleman getting his leg mashed by a mechanical tarp and Braves reliever Cecil Upshaw suffering a career-ending finger injury supposedly while practicing imaginary dunks on an awning. No, this is not a club I want to join, so I ease up a bit.

  What are we going to do? I say to Jonathan.

  I don’t know, but if we don’t get the rake unsnagged, our business may be closing its doors after one hour.

  Well, I think we may just have to dive in there and free it up by hand. What do you think?

  I think you’re right, Jonathan says. Neither of us even mentions the wildlife factor.

  It’s dark, it’s late, and we’re in alligator-infested waters, but what can I tell you? Jonathan and I are bent on freeing up our rake so we can keep collecting golf balls and become moguls. I wade in up to my waist and then follow the rope, which Jonathan is holding taut, into the middle of the lagoon. When I get there, I take a big breath and dive down, into about eight feet of water. I yank and yank at the rake, but it’s really stuck. I come back up for air.

  I go back down. Yank some more. No luck.

  I come back up, make another descent, and—with hands on either side of the rake basket—rock it back and forth and finally get it free, then swim back up to the surface.

  I hold it up like a trophy and get back to shore.

  We return to the lagoon the next night, and for many nights thereafter we make the rounds of the three golf courses, searching for water hazards and doing our dragging thing.

  The rakes work well, but they do get stuck now and again. Which means we swim now and again. Jonathan makes me look cautious. He’s all over the diving and rake-freeing p
art of the enterprise. I put the alligators out of my mind, but I don’t think they are even on his radar.

  Back at the apartment, we scrub the balls with bleach and get them as white as we can, then put a dozen of them in a sock, separated by brand. We have Titleists and Maxflis and Nikes—a sock for every budget. On a good night we will collect three or four hundred golf balls. Over the spring we collect thousands. Our best customer is probably Kenny Rogers, the pitcher and a Titleist man, who gets a dozen for ten dollars. Will Clark is a regular customer too. Other guys buy lesser balls for six or eight dollars per dozen. I keep track of all of the transactions in a little notebook, with entries such as this:

  3/1 Will Clark 2 socks of Pinnacles $18 paid

  By the time the spring is over, we have $3,000 or so that we didn’t have before. Jonathan, who got a $1.1 million signing bonus, insists that I keep everything, even though he worked as hard or harder than me, diving to the bottoms of all those lagoons.

  I don’t think that’s fair. You were in the water with those gators more than I was, I tell him.

  Nobody’s keeping score, he says.

  AFTER SPLITTING 1999 between Double-A Tulsa and Triple-A Oklahoma City, I am in Oklahoma City from the start in 2000. The major leagues are just one step away. I begin the year in the bullpen and get knocked around a little, then move into the rotation at the end of April and proceed to lose my first four starts. I finally start getting guys out with some consistency in late May and June, but by then I have other issues crowding my plate.

  It never makes the papers, or the evening news, or Deadspin, but I test positive for a banned substance in 2000. It is the only positive drug test of my life. And it is not just any positive drug test.

  It is a positive drug test for opiates, the class of narcotics that derives from opium—the substance used to produce heroin. I may only be a Triple-A ballplayer, but I am now in the crosshairs of a major-league drug problem.

  I find out about the mess when the Texas Rangers’ employee-assistance program (EAP) sends me a letter. They leave it on the stool in front of my locker. No envelope. No manila folder. Just a letter in plain view for the entire world to see that R. A. Dickey is apparently not the straight arrow he pretends to be. It informs me about the positive test and says I will be hearing from John Lombardo, one of the executives in the Rangers’ minor-league department.

  It is so ridiculous that I laugh out loud and take the letter into the trainer’s room to show Greg Harrell, our trainer and a friend of mine.

  Look at this, Greg. I’ve tested positive for an opiate. I bet you didn’t know that about me, did you?

  Greg laughs too.

  How on earth did this happen? he asks. You doing heroin on your off days?

  I don’t know how it happened, but I do know I’ve never had any heroin products in my life.

  Lombardo calls and asks me a few questions, seeking information about the situation and telling me that an employee-assistance counselor would be calling me to follow up.

  John, all I can tell you is that there must be some mistake. I don’t know whose mistake it is, but I promise you I am not on opiates.

  The EAP guy calls and wants to know the whole story. Let me put this as simply as I can, I say. I have never had as much as a sip of alcohol. I take Advil occasionally and that is a big deal to me. I have never had any narcotic or mood-altering, mind-altering drug, ever.

  You can test me and retest me. You can come to my house and I will meet with you and talk to whoever you want, but I do not have any sort of drug problem and I am not going somewhere for treatment or to talk to an expert in the field to help me with my supposed problem.

  The guy probably thinks I’m just another drug addict who is either in complete denial or lying because he can’t live without his fix.

  Nothing I can do is going to change his mind.

  The whole thing began two weeks before, when I attended our regular Thursday afternoon lunch and Bible study at the home of Dan Brown, our team chaplain. I go straight to the ballpark from there, and when I arrive in the clubhouse, Greg comes up to me.

  It’s your turn to pee in the cup, he says. Baseball has random testing, and every so often when you get to the park the trainer will tell you you’ve been selected.

  I go get my driver’s license and give it to the drug tester, then head off to the bathroom to fill the cup. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to pee on demand, dating back to my days at Tennessee and in the Olympics. I don’t need to run water or drink a gallon of liquid or use any other bladder-enhancing techniques. I’m on top of my game again this time. I fill ’er up and go back to my locker, and don’t think about it again until the letter comes.

  The mystery finally gets unraveled well after I speak to the EAP officer, and the culprit is outed. It is the chaplain’s wife who did it, who is to blame for everything. I would hold it against her, but in good conscience I can’t. She fixed us a sumptuous lunch for our Bible study, and I freely admit that I pigged out on it. I had seconds and then thirds, then took a doggie bag to the clubhouse so I could have fourths later. It was the best poppy-seed chicken casserole I ever tasted. Poppy seeds are from the poppy flower, and the poppy flower is where opiates come from. I have no idea how many poppy seeds I devoured, but it was a very large number. I happen to mention my predicament to an Oklahoma City cop who works at the ballpark, and he tells me that he has heard that poppy seeds, taken in copious amounts, can indeed trigger a positive test for opiates.

  Who knew?

  I never hear from the EAP counselor again. The Rangers never bring up the matter again. I have no idea if my sample was run a second time or if they just believe my story, as far-fetched as it sounds: that the entire thing is set off by me pounding on chicken casserole. The next time we go to Chaplain Brown’s home for lunch, I ask his wife for grilled cheese.

  LIFE IN THE MINORS for Anne and me is all about saving money and hoping I pitch well enough to get a shot at the big leagues. In 2000 we move into a Tudor-style apartment complex in Oklahoma City called Warwick West, where we have a small, one-bedroom place next to a Dumpster with a rented bed and couch and a coffee table that consists of a cardboard box with a bedsheet thrown over it. Lifestyles of the broke and anonymous.

  In our second year in Warwick West, I begin the season with a strong start against Salt Lake City, but the much bigger news is that Anne is feeling funny in the morning and thinks she might be pregnant. We do the home pregnancy test and when the little stick changes color, she immediately books an appointment with an obstetrician. I have to go the ballpark, so Anne goes to the doctor alone and calls me when she is finished.

  How do you feel about being a father? I hope you give the right answer because I am eight weeks pregnant, she says.

  Oh, Anne, that is the greatest news. God is blessing us in so many ways, I say.

  We get a copy of the baby bible—What to Expect When You’re Expecting—which becomes the second most important book we own, after the Bible. We share the news with family and friends, and even though there are thirty-one weeks to go, it feels as though we need to start getting ready now.

  Shortly after we get the news, Anne comes to the ballpark with friends for my first start as a father-to-be. It’s a surreal, and joyful, feeling to see Anne in the family section. Midway through the game, she has to go to the bathroom. She doesn’t feel quite right and is a little concerned. She passes a trace of something, and her instincts tell her that she should be home. She drives back to Warwick West and I meet her there later. By the time I get home, she is that much more alarmed. I see a look on her face that I have never seen before, and that raises my own alarm. Her maternal instincts have already fired up and they are telling her that our unborn child is in distress.

  I do my best to reassure her. We put a call into the doctor. We pray together.

  God has a plan for us, Anne. We have to remember that, I tell her. I don’t know what is happening or why, but I do know that God love
s you, loves us, and He will never, ever forsake us.

  Anne goes to the bathroom again and hopes and prays that everything will be okay. She feels helpless, because more than anything in her life she wants to save her baby. In a few minutes she calls for me, her voice trembling and halting. I hear her crying. She opens the door and the moment I see her all I want to do is hold her and protect her. Anne is sobbing in my arms, and she can barely speak. She doesn’t need to. She really doesn’t need to.

  Our baby is gone, she says finally. The baby is gone. Anne doesn’t need confirmation from a doctor or nurse or anybody else. She knows.

  You want to ask God why in a moment such as this. As much as you keep faith as the centerpiece of your life, you still want answers to unanswerable questions. You want to know how and why this is His plan for you, what the possible good could be in this. You want to rage and feel victimized and scream to the heavens, How could You let this happen, Father? What did this unborn child do to deserve this? What did we do to deserve this?

  The questions don’t take you anywhere, of course. Pain and tragedy exist in our world, side by side with God’s boundless love and grace. It is impossible to reconcile in so many ways, but ultimately Anne and I are able to surrender to our belief that God has a perfect plan for us. That comes later, though. For now we are in grief.

  I take Anne’s hand and we go to the sofa, and we weep.

  THURSDAY, APRIL 28, 2011

  Nationals Park, Washington, D.C.

  With two outs in the top of the first, David Wright crushes a ball off of Livan Hernandez to the deepest part of the park. The Nationals’ center fielder turns and races back for it, his graceful strides making it seem as though he’s not even exerting himself. Rick Ankiel chases it down and makes the catch, and I marvel at how natural he looks out there, and at the career he’s made for himself.

  Still, for me, Rick Ankiel will always be a pitcher—probably the greatest pitching prodigy I have ever seen.