One guy looked at me and smiled. “You’re a real dude,” he said. A real dude? I was a real mess. That’s all.
When I first walked in with Bobby, everyone was saying, “There’s a hero.” What were they thinking now? It was more like, “Look at that fuckin’ guy.”
As sunshine filled the small apartment, my high was evaporating fast. You can’t say I was sober. After all I’d put into my body, that made no sense at all. I was just feeling numb and disgusted.
I still had some coke left. But without saying good-bye to anyone, I put the drugs in my pocket and quietly skulked out of there. I was praying no one would see me in the project parking lot.
I looked like crap. I smelled like crap. I can’t vouch for my driving. As I drove toward home with the sun streaming in the passenger window, I was still sweating out of control.
And then I totally lost it.
I started crying, sobbing loudly, literally blubbering in the car.
This was pathetic.
I couldn’t go to the parade this way. I knew that. But how could I not go? Everyone would know what I’d been doing all night. Or at least they would suspect.
My mind was racing nowhere. Everything was pouring down at once.
I walked into my empty apartment and started taking off my clothes. I was thinking I could get a quick shower and maybe still make the parade.
I had messages on my answering machine. The first three were from the Mets’ PR man, Jay Horwitz.
“Hey, Doc, just calling to make sure you’re up for the parade.”
“Doc, you up?”
“Doc, let me know if you need a ride. No problem. We can send a car.”
Just then, I heard a knock on the door. A loud bang, really. I didn’t look outside, but I was pretty sure it was Darryl Strawberry. Darryl lived in the next complex over. A lot of times, we’d ride to the park together. Either he would drive or I would drive. I couldn’t remember what plans we’d made the night before.
But I didn’t answer. I was too dejected and too scared. After a few more bangs, the knocking stopped.
I finally got the courage to get into the shower. When I came out, I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw. I looked horrible.
In my insanity, I thought if I did one more line, maybe I would get the boost I needed. So I did another line.
The phone kept ringing. I heard my mother’s voice on the machine. “Honey, are you on your way to the parade?” The Mets must have called her in Florida. My girlfriend, Carlene, called too. And Jay called again. “Hey, Doc. We’re worried. Wherever you are, we’ll send a car.”
I started putting my clothes on. I wasn’t sure what I should do. But who was I kidding? I was in no condition to go anywhere, much less to ride in front of two million people at the victory parade.
“Oh my God,” I thought. “What am I going to do?”
If I did one more line, I thought, maybe my heart would explode and I would die. Or maybe I could buy an airplane ticket and go somewhere far and hide. I could stay away long enough that people would forget I wasn’t there.
No answer seemed any good. What could I say when people started asking? Major League Baseball had called me in during the season. There were already rumors about me and drugs. This would prove everything. Who would believe me now?
I took off the clothes I’d just put on. I pulled on some shorts and a T-shirt. I climbed into bed and turned on the news, thinking, “I’d better watch this. I know they’re gonna say something about me.”
But as soon as my head hit the pillow, it seemed like the live parade coverage began. It couldn’t have started that quickly, but that’s how it seemed to me.
I stared at the TV through narrow, squinting eyes. And that’s how I watched my own victory parade.
I saw Mookie and Darryl, Keith and Ray, and all the Mets I had played with.
I heard Davey talk and politicians get booed. I saw a kid with a hand-lettered sign.
PART I
Dreaming
1
Whose Dream
FROM FATHER TO SON AND father to son, that’s how baseball dreams have always been handed down. In one of my very earliest memories—maybe I am four years old—my mom is out in the kitchen of our little house in Tampa. My much-older sisters, Mercedes and Betty, are off somewhere. My dad is sitting in the den in his special chair, a huge black La-Z-Boy recliner, like he’s commanding the whole room. The Cincinnati Reds are on the new color television, and my father has a beige wire poking out of his ear. He’s following a second game on his transistor radio—the Atlanta Braves or the Chicago Cubs or the St. Louis Cardinals. Really, it could be anyone. He isn’t yelling at the TV the way some sports fans like to. He is reaching into a bag of Doritos, sipping from a can of Budweiser with salt around the rim—I still don’t know where that came from—and coolly analyzing everything that’s happening on the field.
“I like that rookie catcher,” my dad is saying. “Good field vision.”
I’m on the floor, cross-legged with cookies and a plastic bottle of juice. There is no one in the den but Dad and me. So he’s delivering his running commentary to a four-year-old who clearly has no idea what field vision is. But kids that age have minds like sponges. And somehow I am able to grasp that Johnny Bench, the Reds’ cocky new catcher, is out on the mound with veteran pitcher Jim Maloney, and the two men are arguing about what Maloney ought to throw next.
“They clocked his fastball at ninety-nine miles an hour,” my dad marvels. “What do you think he’ll throw now?”
On the TV, I can see the catcher shaking his head like he isn’t too happy. Then I stare blankly up at my dad.
“That’s right,” my father says. “Another fastball.”
And that’s exactly what Maloney throws—smack into Bench’s waiting glove.
Thump!
“Told you,” my dad says with a sharp nod and the tiniest hint of a smile.
When it came to the skills and strategies of baseball, Dan Gooden was seldom wrong.
Long before baseball became my dream, it was the dream of my father. He got it from the same place I did—from his dad. The Gooden baseball dream wasn’t hatched on the thriving Gulf Coast of Florida. It was born three hundred miles away in the fading cotton fields of southwest Georgia, where my father’s family had lived for generations. That part of the South was known as the Black Belt. It got its name from the rich, dark soil that spread out for miles from there—not the thousands of men and women, slave and free, who had tilled that land. When the slaves won their freedom after the Civil War, some of them set off for Chicago or Detroit or other points north. But many stuck around, living in the same wooden shacks and working the same plots of land they always had. Only now, many were sharecroppers or hourly employees. Segregated southwest Georgia wasn’t a place of much opportunity. But it was the only home they had ever known. They worked hard to provide for their families and found what enjoyment they could.
“Your grandfather wasn’t just a good baseball pitcher,” my father told me one Saturday morning as we sat in the den. “He might have been the best ever.”
Dad wasn’t joking.
My father’s father was born just after the turn of the century. His name was Uclesee Gooden. I never met him. He died when my dad was eight. From what people said, he was six-foot-four or -five, nearly a giant for his day, with tree-trunk legs and gangly arms. He played for the Albany Red Sox, a local Negro sandlot team.
“He used to carry me in his arms to the park where he played,” my father recalled. “People came from miles. His fastball was smokin’. He was the most powerful pitcher anyone had ever seen.”
Years later, when I would meet my father’s older relatives, they would look at me and say, “You’re good, but you should have seen your grandfather pitch.”
I wish I’d had the chance.
When Dad came along in 1927, it was only natural that he would find his way onto a baseball field. He wasn’t the physical specimen
that his father was. But he was lean and quick, and he was constantly practicing. My dad dropped out of school in the third grade and went to work in the fields and processing plants, as many of his relatives did. But Saturday and Sunday afternoons, he was always playing baseball, doggedly developing his own talent at his father’s beloved game.
There was no organized Little League for colored boys in rural Georgia. Dad went from pitch-and-catch in the yard to pickup games in Albany and nearby Americus, showing raw, early promise. “I played all the positions at the beginning, but first base was the one I took to,” he told me. “I hit right-handed, and you had to be quick to play first base.”
As he grew older, the pickup games gave way to a traveling team that played around the area and sometimes out of town, the entry level of what today we might call semipro ball. And my dad began to wonder: would his bat and glove be his ticket out of Georgia? For a poor kid like my father, becoming a professional baseball player was a bold dream. But it wasn’t a crazy one. There were the Negro Leagues, where competition was famously fierce. And in 1947, when my dad was nineteen, he got some even bigger inspiration. Jackie Robinson, who was born to a family of sharecroppers in Cairo, Georgia, debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field, breaking the modern color barrier in major-league baseball. Jackie helped to usher in the whole civil rights era—and not just in sports. But he was playing in New York City—not Albany, Georgia. When Jackie was one, the Robinsons had moved to Pasadena, California. Progress was still a little slower in the South.
Dad was a good baseball player for country Georgia. But he never got the chance to measure how good. Did race sidetrack my father’s baseball dream? Or did he just not quite have the ability? The truth is, he never knew. And that question hung over his life—and hung over our family—always.
Dad eventually got a job at the local Cargill plant, working as a belt operator on the production line. And though he still enjoyed playing, he began devoting more and more of his baseball time to coaching local teams. Pretty soon, he had three sons—James, Charles, and Danny. He moved to Chicago long enough to become a huge Cubs and Ernie Banks fan. Then he returned to Georgia, where he met a young woman from nearby Cordele, “the watermelon capital of the world,” named Ella Mae Jones.
She was tall and sturdy. She had a sister and three brothers, including one, Willie Lee, who went by the name Red Boy and had some baseball talent. By the time my dad showed up, my mom was married with a baby daughter, Mercedes, called Merc by almost everyone. Mom and Dad fell in love. My mom divorced her first husband and married my father. Then, my sister Betty came along.
Ella Mae Gooden had an air of calm self-confidence and a clear sense of right and wrong. She went to church on Sundays and kept a tidy home. She was definitely more talkative than my dad, and she wasn’t quick to get angry. But when she had cause to—Lord, you’d better watch out! She was known for keeping a .38 Special in her purse. Buried beneath a sweet and loving exterior was a woman who feared no one.
In 1956, when Cargill offered my dad a transfer to Tampa, my mom wasn’t too excited about moving. But she had some family in the area, and my dad would be getting a nice raise. And for him, the move had another attraction: baseball was everywhere in Florida. The Cincinnati Reds had a spring training facility in Tampa, Al Lopez Field, and an A-ball team too. The New York Mets trained in nearby St. Petersburg. The Detroit Tigers were in Lakeland. There were AAA and AA and A teams wherever you looked. Imagine the coaching he could do there. To him, the idea of leaving sleepy Georgia for the sunny Gulf Coast sounded ideal for him and his family.
They moved into a Tampa neighborhood called Belmont Heights, not a fancy section but solidly working-class. My mom got a job at a nursing home and, later, a night job at a pool hall. Most of the neighbors were like the Goodens, hard-working, growing black families with at least a couple of kids. Fifteen years after Mercedes was born, thirteen years after Betty, my parents got a little surprise.
Me.
I was born on November 16, 1964, a Monday, not quite a year after President John Kennedy was assassinated and less than two weeks after Lyndon Johnson was elected to a full term. With the big age difference between me and my sisters, I was the younger brother who almost seemed like an only child.
“I thought I was finished having babies, then up popped Poodney!” my mother liked to say, using the nickname I got long before “Doc” or “Dr. K.” Thank God baseball fans never picked up on that one.
My mom loved having a son, but my dad was like a shipwrecked sailor who’d finally been rescued. He wasn’t the only male in a house full of women anymore. From the minute I was big enough to hold a baseball, he was rolling one to me.
As my mother often said to me: “Once you came along, it was always him and you, him and you. And all we’d ever hear from the two of you was baseball, baseball, baseball.” I was still an “arm baby,” she said, when my dad started carrying me to the ballpark, like his own father had carried him. Soon enough, my father was letting me put my tiny fingers inside his giant glove.
If Dan Gooden had been a power forward instead of a power-hitting first baseman, I’m sure I would have spent my childhood dribbling a basketball right beside him. I never would have made it to the NBA. Physically, I wasn’t built for that. But I learned very young that baseball was the route to my father’s attention and his heart.
When I was three or four, we were tossing balls in the yard. When I was five or six, I was hanging out at the ballpark on Sunday afternoons with his semipro Tampa Dodgers. When the action on the field slowed down, some of the team members would play catch with me. Dad got a kick out of that and started working closely with me.
We quickly got in a pattern. On weekdays, he would come home from work, have something to eat, and say to me, “You ready to go?”
“Where are you guys going?” my mother would ask.
“To Robles Park to practice,” he’d say.
At the beginning, especially when it wasn’t baseball season, my mom thought all this baseball practicing might be a bit much. She told my father, “Let the boy be a kid.”
She had a right to be concerned, but I didn’t feel like Dad was pressuring me. He always asked, “Do you want to go to the park?” And I almost always did. Maybe once or twice I told him I wanted to ride bikes with my friends, and he acted like that was okay. But practicing usually seemed like more fun. Spending time with my father. Learning the game he loved. I didn’t even mind doing the drills he started dreaming up for me. And when we were finished for the day, my dad would ask me, “Tomorrow, you want to come back here and work out some more?” I almost always answered, “Yeah.”
Eventually, my mother came around. One day, I told her directly. “This is what I want to do. This is what I’m going to be. You’ll see, I’ll be playing on TV. And when I get big and famous, I’ll buy you a house.”
By that point, there was no stopping me. I was happy practicing on my own. On weekends and in summers, I was the neighborhood alarm clock. I’d be out in the driveway early, throwing a ball against the garage or swinging a bat at a crumpled aluminum can. I didn’t have to chase the can like I would a ball. I’m sure I drove the neighbors crazy.
Pretty soon, I was starting to show some actual talent on the field. When I was eight and nine, Dad’s players would put me in some of their softball games. I was competing against adults, even though it was only softball. Then when I’d play with kids my age, I wasn’t afraid of the biggest boy on the team or the home run hitter. Why should I be? I’d just competed against a field full of twenty-five-year-olds. I don’t know if my dad did that intentionally or if it just happened because I was always around. But the experience definitely improved my skills.
Around that time, my nephew Gary Sheffield moved in with us, along with his parents, my sister Betty and her husband, Harold. Gary was four years younger than I was. But now I had a twenty-four-hour teammate in the house, someone else to share the family dream with. Gary and I
slept in the same bedroom. Soon after the sun would come up, I’d pull him away from his favorite cartoon, Scooby-Doo, and drag him out to the yard. I hung a floor mat from the family car on the back fence, creating an uncontestable strike zone. Gary and I would play a game called Strike Out. I’d pitch a tennis ball and little Gary would strike out repeatedly. When it was my turn to bat, I’d hit home runs. But he was a quick study. And the same way I benefited from playing with older guys, he was benefiting from playing with me.
“How much do you like baseball?” my father asked me one day.
“I like it,” I told him. “I love it.”
“You ever think you might want to play professional?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “That would be my dream.” I told him what I had already told Mom, that one day I was planning to play on television and buy a house for her.
My father got very serious. “If you want to do that,” he said, “it’s a lot of work that goes into it. It ain’t about just goin’ up there and playin’.”
“I know,” I said. That was all Dad needed to hear.
All of a sudden, our training sessions at the park kicked up a notch. My father began working more and more on my pitching. I liked hitting and playing different positions. But Dad seemed to think that pitching was my strongest talent. And I was noticing real improvement there.
My father had some unusual training techniques for me. He was big on long tossing, having me throw the ball as far as I could. We did a lot of distance running and a lot of abdominal exercises. Then legs. “The legs and the abs, they’re a pitcher’s foundation,” he told me constantly. “They bring all the balance and power to the arm.”
I didn’t understand a lot of what we were doing, but I didn’t question him. Some days, we were out there for an hour or two without picking up a ball. Dad would put a board on top of a brick and have me balance there. He’d take me down to home plate and have me just stare back up at the mound. We talked about hitters who swing too early or swing too late. He laid it all out slowly. It wasn’t like he was filling me up with too much too fast. I absorbed a lot of it.
Doc: A Memoir Page 2
