by Vin Baker
“All right, G,” I said. “Let’s party.”
Party we did, into the wee morning hours. I felt like crap the next day, and continued to play mediocre, uninspired basketball the remainder of the series. The Lakers took games 3 and 4, and then closed out the series by humbling us on our home floor by a score of 110–95. After winning game 1 we were swept four straight, losing by an average of nearly 17 points per game. Given that the Sonics had been one of the winningest teams in the league the previous two years, and we were the No. 2 seed this year, the exit was humbling, if not downright humiliating. I took it personally, as I was the new ingredient to this year’s team. In the playoffs I had averaged 15.8 points per game. Respectable by ordinary standards, but a noticeable drop from my regular-season output. By the time we got bounced from the playoffs, that slippage had become at least a minor story: What’s wrong with Vin Baker?
All the things that people had been saying about me my whole career—or at least that I felt they had been saying—resurfaced. He’s not a winner. He’s not tough enough. The sting of that criticism provoked a rise in anxiety, and that summer I began to self-medicate in earnest. It was an escape. As was the anonymous sex and the reckless spending. As long as I was drinking, I was a fun guy to be around. Everyone liked me. It was easy. And I was good at it. I was a generous drunk, buying for everyone, taking care of people whether they deserved it or not. I bought not just affection and friendship, but permission to behave inappropriately.
I spent most of that summer at home in Connecticut, where I split time between two girlfriends, each of whom wanted to believe I was faithful and monogamous, but was smart enough to suspect otherwise. One of these women I had known since my playing days at Hartford. The other, Shawnee Baker, I had met more recently. For years I would juggle these two relationships while being extremely promiscuous on the side as well. There were women in Seattle, women in Milwaukee, along with an endless parade of nameless, faceless women whose favor was curried at the end of long nights in strip clubs. How many partners? I couldn’t begin to guess. And the weird thing is, I didn’t even feel bad about it.
When I was young and rich and famous, and drinking myself blind three or four nights a week, I felt like I could do anything I wanted to do when it came to relationships; my narcissism knew no bounds. Shawnee would get at me, but we wouldn’t really fight. You see, the money makes everything weird. It causes people to tolerate that which they ordinarily would find intolerable. When you’re funneling ten thousand dollars a month to someone—more money than that person has ever seen before—accountability slips away. But the anger and resentment are there, simmering, waiting to erupt.
While squinting through an alcoholic haze, I managed to make everyone around me feel important: the women, the friends, the business associates, the teammates. Even at my worst, I was likable. On some level, I suppose, I knew that I was behaving badly—that I had drifted far from my Christian roots and the moral upbringing I had received from my parents—and the generosity was merely a way to compensate, a penance of sorts. But I was also a very good liar, capable of looking a woman in the eye and saying, “You are the most important person in the world to me,” with such conviction and warmth that she had to believe it.
And then I’d say it to someone else the next day.
And someone else the day after that.
That’s how I lived: not just from one drink to the next, but from one lie to the next. I believed my own bullshit, and the fact that others believed it kept me going. I honestly felt like I was a good guy. It’s true that I was doing god-awful things, but I didn’t feel like I was hurting anyone. Of course cheating and infidelity are hurtful, but I compensated by sharing everything that I had with the people around me: homes, vacations, cars, money. I enjoyed passing it around and seeing others smile.
Until the money dried up.
In the summer of 1998 I went to Cancún with Gary and a bunch of our friends to attend a jazz festival and hang out on the beach for a week or so. I did some drinking while we were there, but mainly I just picked up the tab for everyone else and hung out in my room, because I had begun to fall into a fairly deep depression. A couple of my buddies—guys who went way back with me and knew me to the core—understood the pain I was feeling, and I think they were legitimately concerned. But they also wanted to have fun; hell, we were in Cancún, right? Bottomless margaritas, sun and sand, crystal-blue water, and an endless parade of beautiful women. Mainly they just wanted me to keep paying for everything. Which I did, without complaint. It wasn’t their fault that I had shit the bed during the playoffs. It wasn’t their fault that I had become an alcoholic. That was on me. Every last bit of it.
One night Gary burst into my room and called me out. Like I said, Gary was a unique cat, unlike anyone else I have ever known. Not only could he drink all night and still play well the next day, he could put the game behind him five minutes after it had ended. Not that he didn’t care—he did care, deeply. Gary was as competitive as anyone I’ve ever known when he stepped between the lines. But when the final buzzer sounded, that was it. Game over, time to move on. No sense fretting about it all night. After we got bounced by the Lakers, Gary was the first person out of the locker room. Showered, dressed, on his way, while many of us sat there in stunned disbelief. So he wasn’t about to forgo a good time in Cancún just because the season hadn’t ended with a championship. And he expected me to adopt the same attitude.
“Yo, V!” he shouted. “Enough of this bullshit! Pick yourself up, dawg.”
I just looked at him and shook my head, which only made him dig in deeper. Trust me—when Gary wanted to hit you in the gut, he could do it, even to a friend. Maybe especially to a friend.
“Look at this nigga in here,” he said, giving me that patented GP scowl. “Acting like he’s Jordan or something.”
It was exactly the right thing to say. The Cancún Jazz Festival was a major event that annually attracted huge crowds, including many famous athletes and entertainers. GP and I were hardly the only professional ballplayers in town, and the vast majority seemed to be having no problem putting the travails and triumphs of the previous season behind them. I took it all very personally, and very hard. I didn’t want to leave my hotel room. I didn’t want to face people who might ask what happened in the playoffs. Truth is, I was ashamed.
But Gary knew exactly which buttons to push, and insinuating that I was too big for my britches was the right one.
If all these other guys can go out and have a good time, then so can you.
We went out to a club and did our thing. I threw back some vodka and Hennessy (not at the same time, mind you) and started to feel a little better. Didn’t get really hammered, just enough to soften the depressive fog that had enveloped me. On the way back to our suite, we passed the hotel pool. It was late and quiet, except for the presence of a single young woman. She was floating around, all by herself, minding her own business. She was also beautiful, which of course drew the drunken boys to her like flies to honey. They tried to talk with her, hit on her, compliment and otherwise charm her. But she would have none of it. Barely even acknowledged their existence.
After watching my boys trip over themselves for a while, I finally intervened.
“Sweetie,” I said. “Why are you being so rude? Can’t you just say hello?”
I had no right to say this, of course. Part of me felt bad for my friends, but mainly I was suffering from a case of inflated ego. I was an NBA all-star—who was this woman to diss me and my boys? I was accustomed to just flashing a smile and a thick roll of cash, and having gorgeous women fall all over me. But not this girl. Uh-uh. Instead, she gave me a sideways glance, like she recognized me, and was sizing me up.
“You’re Vin Baker, aren’t you?” she said.
I nodded subtly, began to move closer. Here was my opening.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
She smiled; there was something mischievous in her demeanor, something that s
hould have set me back on my heels. But I was too drunk and stupid to notice.
“You want an autograph or something?” I said. “Or maybe we can get to know each other better?”
She laughed. “Nah, that’s okay. You’re the one who came up tiny in the playoffs, right?”
The words caused me to stand and stiffen, and momentarily lose my breath. It was like she had hit me with a hammer. I mean, I know she was just sparring, and I know I had it coming, but it caught me totally off guard. Not only did she know who I was, but she knew exactly what kind of season I had, and how badly it had ended. And she knew that reminding me of this fact would quickly put me in my place.
“Damn, girl,” I said. “That’s cold.”
She shrugged, laughed a little. The other guys went on up to the hotel suite, but I hung by the pool for a while, drawn to this woman for reasons I cannot quite explain. We ended up sitting by the pool for quite a while, talking deep into the night about music and basketball and life in general. We didn’t drink. We didn’t have sex or become intimate in any way. We just talked. Then we went to our respective rooms.
I never saw her again.
9
A Functional Alcoholic
When you’re an NBA all-star, accommodations are made and rules are bent, all in the name of money. I was a functional alcoholic in a world where that description shouldn’t even be possible.
Drinking after games led to drinking on nights when we didn’t have games, and sometimes during the daylight hours when we didn’t have practice or games. Slowly I eroded, until I woke up one morning and discovered that I was an alcoholic, that all I really cared about was taking the next sip. It became less about having fun with my boys than about dulling the pain. The pain of withdrawal, hangovers, the pain of living. Fun was replaced by survival.
My statistical output during that first year in Seattle was impressive, as was our performance during the regular season. But all of that was overshadowed by our early and unimpressive exit from the playoffs. This, in turn, led to even greater pressure the following year—there was a sense of urgency surrounding the Sonics during the off-season, a feeling that we would win a championship because, well, we had to win a championship. The time had come to stop making excuses.
That summer, however, brought a labor dispute and the third lockout in NBA history, which precipitated a shortened season and left the players with a lot of time on their hands. Rather than work out all summer in preparation for the new season, I drank. I figured the season would be canceled, I’d roll right into my free agent year and negotiate a new deal, and then I’d cut back on the drinking, get in shape, and nobody would be the wiser.
Early in the fall, the players staged an unofficial all-star game in Atlantic City, New Jersey, just to let fans know that we were still out there and ready to play ball. A lot of guys showed up for this event in less than prime condition. I remember seeing Shawn Kemp, for example, and marveling at his girth. The guy must have weighed 325 pounds.
“Whoa,” I said to Gary Payton when we arrived at the arena. “Did you see Shawn? Man, he looks like hell.”
GP just laughed. “Bro, have you looked in the mirror lately?”
I knew I was out of shape, but for some reason I didn’t think anyone else would notice. I played like crap in that game, and had trouble even getting up and down the floor. But I was hardly the only person playing at half speed, so it was far from a wake-up call. In fact, the whole weekend was just an excuse to party. I had rented a limo to take me and some of the boys to Atlantic City from Connecticut. After the game, we went out and drank hard for several hours. The next morning we got up, showered, and crawled into the limo for a five-hour ride home. I poured my first drink roughly thirty miles into the trip.
What the hell, I figured. It wasn’t like I had to report to work on Monday morning. The season was shot. Might as well have some fun.
Then an unexpected thing happened: cooler heads prevailed, management and labor reached an agreement, and the lockout came to an end. We were expected back in training camp in early December, and we’d be playing shortly after the holidays. To say that I was unprepared would be an understatement. By this point I was knocking back a fifth of Hennessy every day. Hennessy is a cognac, not as strong as whiskey, but in the amount I was consuming, it was strong enough to do a lot of damage. I showed up for an intense, short, preseason weighing nearly three hundred pounds, or roughly forty to fifty pounds over my playing weight. There was no way to hide it. I had a tendency to get heavy in the summer under the best of conditions, but this was different; this was liquor weight . . . thick, heavy calories that stick.
“How long will it take you to get in shape?” one of the assistant coaches asked me on the first day.
“Not long,” I lied. “I’ll be fine.”
But I wasn’t fine. I was an addict now, and I couldn’t just throw a switch and reverse the erosion. Instead, it got worse. I kept drinking, every day, mostly by myself, and my performance predictably suffered. I was slow, unfit, and unfocused. Interestingly enough, my diminished state was most apparent not while trying to get up and down the floor, but at the free throw line, where I did not convert a single attempt in the first two games: 0-for-12. I was so bad that it quickly became a running joke, with fans in the arena standing up and applauding and cheering sarcastically when I’d go to the line. One night, a buddy—not a teammate—came up to me after a game and jokingly offered a suggestion.
“Hey, you ever think about”—here he paused and lifted his elbow and flicked his wrist toward his face, as if emptying an imaginary glass. “You know . . . before the game?”
“You’re crazy,” I said, laughing.
He shrugged. “You never know. Might help.”
A couple of nights later, while drinking with the fellas, I decided to give it a test. I had a passkey with twenty-four-hour access to the Sonics’ training facility, so I got into my car and drove over (drunk, of course). I hit the lights, grabbed a ball, and walked to the free throw line. Took a few dribbles, a deep breath . . .
Swish.
And then again.
Swish.
I must have hit 70 percent that night. While totally inebriated. In my addled condition, I started to rationalize.
I’m a free agent soon. I have to do something to turn this around. Maybe I really do play better drunk.
I was looking for any excuse to keep drinking, and to drink as much as possible. So I started drinking in the afternoon. Every day, including game days. Then I’d go out with GP and the boys after games, and then I’d wake up in the morning hungover, my body crying for relief, and I’d take a drink to cut the pain. And then another drink. Many mornings I’d drink an entire bottle of champagne before even getting out of bed. Pretty soon the drunk hours outnumbered the sober hours.
Remarkably enough, I didn’t get caught. I’m sure some people suspected—anyone who douses himself in cologne and keeps a stash of Altoids in his locker at all times is probably trying to mask something—but there was no intervention. One of my teammates, Olden Polynice, sort of called me out on the team bus, but he did so in a half-assed, benign way, walking by my seat and shouting, “What’s that smell?” He knew I was drinking, and he wanted me to be aware of it, but he didn’t want to confront me directly. Another time I almost got into a fight with Dale Ellis. It happened during a birthday party for Billy Owens, one of our teammates. The party was thrown by Billy’s wife at their house, so it was a relatively quiet and subdued affair. Dale was a serious and competitive athlete who had no qualms about getting in the face of a teammate if he felt that person was not giving maximum effort. He had done this on numerous occasions in the locker room, and I had felt the sting of his words more than once. Ordinarily I didn’t mind, because I had tremendous respect for Dale. He never slacked off, never did anything to compromise the team’s chances of winning. A guy like that has earned the right to challenge his teammates once in a while. But the challenge should come wi
thin the privacy of the locker room, and on this night Dale called me out in public.
During a birthday party. For a teammate.
“You know, V . . . you gotta start bringing it every night, man. You can’t just play when you feel like playing.”
I bristled at the accusation. “Dale, I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove tonight, but I’m not in the mood for it.”
He scoffed. “Bro, I don’t care what you’re in the mood for. I’m telling you the truth.”
It escalated from there, with the two of us in each other’s faces, trading veiled threats and insults, until finally I asked him to step outside. The only reason we did not come to blows is because somewhere, deep inside, I knew that Dale’s anger came from a place of love and friendship and concern. Yes, he was upset because I was not living up to my reputation as one of the best frontcourt players in the NBA. I had let my team down, and because of that we all suffered. Dale knew that I had a problem. He knew that my drinking had gone well beyond the stage of being a benign hobby. He was legitimately concerned about my health and well-being. I certainly wasn’t willing to admit the depth of my problem, but on some level I understood what he was doing. So we hugged it out and went back to the party.
Another time I even got into it with Gary during a practice. He started talking trash, questioning my toughness. He had no idea what I was going through, the depths to which I had sunk. As much as Gary liked to go out at night, he would have found it inconceivable that anyone would drink before playing basketball. I was his little brother, and he was just trying to get me to play harder. It was, in his eyes, a very simple solution. Like most people around me, he was clueless as to the extent of my problem.
One person who wasn’t clueless, but who said nothing, was Hersey Hawkins. I had the utmost respect for Hersey not only because he was a talented and dedicated athlete, but also because I knew he was a Christian. A part of me still felt strongly enough about my religious background that I was drawn to anyone leading a more moral and spiritual life than I was—even if proximity to that person sometimes made me feel ashamed.
