Twenty years ago I covered the New York Mets for the Daily News in New York. They won the World Series that year, and 21-year-old Dwight “Doc” Gooden was the toast of the town, as he had been the previous season when he became the youngest person ever to win the Cy Young Award, going 24-4 with an earned run average of 1.53, 268 strike outs, 16 complete games and eight shutouts.
Gooden is in jail in Florida now, and as this heartbreaking if overwrought story in The New York Post makes clear, he is haunted by regret.
“I kept looking back to the day I got drafted out of high school [in 1982] and remembering all the joy,” Gooden said. “Now I’m in this little box where two people couldn’t fit in there. You keep asking yourself, ‘What went wrong? What went wrong?’ ”
For me, his story, even more than that of his friend and former teammates Darryl Strawberry, is the ultimate cautionary tale of what can happen when life seemingly blesses you with too much, too soon. Those of us who covered him thought of Gooden as baseball’s Mozart, because he was so gifted, and had seemingly harnessed his gifts at such an early age. (He went 17-9 with a 2.60 ERA and 276 strikeouts at the age of 19.)
But he was a shy kid who once told me that the first time the Mets flew him to New York (just after the 1982 draft, I think) he was so frightened by the big city that he stayed in his room at a hotel near LaGuarida Airport and peered out the fish eye in his door for a good long time even before admitting the waiters who were bringing him his room service meals. No matter how fast he threw the ball, or how sharply his curve broke, or how much poise he showed on the mound, he wasn’t ready to be the most famous athlete in the largest media market in the country. And like many people who find themselves traveling extensively at a young age, he wasn’t ready for life on the road.
Gooden was on the cover of Time during the week that the season opened in April of 1986. But there were already signs that something was going wrong. He missed a spring training game because of a fender bender. Later, he and his girlfriend got into a spat with a clerk while returning a rental car. And though he was the starting pitcher in the All-Star game that season, he didn’t look like the same pitcher. The numbers were still very good—17-6, 2.84 ERA, 12 complete games—but sports editors around town began urging their reporters to find out what we could about Gooden’s personal life. I can remember sitting in various bars, known as players’ hangouts, wondering if he would come in, but he seldom did. If you hung around the Mets that season, you had a sense that maybe Strawberry’s ability to suck down gin and tonics deep enough to drown in might land him in trouble. But Gooden, despite the off-the-field dust-ups, always seemed as though he were more under control, and that he learned a lesson from that pair of highly publicized run-ins. (I can remember, after the rent-a-car thing, him saying that he felt like he needed to move all of his furniture into the clubhouse and just live there.)
As it turns out, Gooden didn’t begin using cocaine until after the ’86 season. Had that not happened, I think the conversation about his decline as a pitcher would have focused on whether he had pitched too many innings at too young an age—834 before his 22d birthday. Perhaps something could have been done about that.
As it was, he tested positive for cocaine before the 1987 season and entered rehab. I had moved to Washington by then, so I don’t know what he was like when he came back to the game. Despite everything he and early fame did to him, he still had a remarkable career, but a miserable life, and this most recent chapter just breaks your heart if you knew him when he was barely out of high school and had New York City at this feet.
Click if you’d like to read a piece I wrote for The Washington Post when he went into rehab.
The New York Mets pitchers warmed up early in the morning when the crowds were thin. Just about the only people around were reporters standing in a small knot behind the backstop, watching each toss, trying to figure out who had what. I was in the knot. When the ball exploded into the catcher’s mitt, it couldn’t have been more than five feet away. It was exhilarating to be so close to something so dangerous, like peering into an aquarium at a hungry shark.
The thrill was all the more intense if the man on the mound was Dwight Gooden. This was just over a year ago when many conservative baseball people believed that the 21-year-old from Tampa, Fla., was going to be the best pitcher of all time. Slightly less sober people believed that he already was.
The announcement Thursday that Gooden was entering the Smithers Clinic in New York for treatment of a cocaine problem interrupts one of baseball’s most compelling romances. In just two years, the Mets right-hander had become one of the game’s ambassadors to the larger culture. If you loved baseball, he wasn’t just a marvel, he was a point you wanted to see made. Here, in an era of drug scandals and labor unrest, was a soft-spoken, unaffected kid who’d found fame and refused to let it change him. For every charge that anyone leveled at the game of baseball, you could say, “Yeah, but it gave us Dwight Gooden,” and feel that the matter had been settled in your favor.
Gooden’s career almost certainly will continue. He may be back as early as late May. But one part of his story is over and baseball is poorer for that. His unique talent gave birth to unique troubles and, eventually, the latter overwhelmed the former.
In 1984, at age 19, Gooden was the National League’s rookie of the year. In 1985, he had his season for the ages, going 24-4. You couldn’t buy a drink in New York that summer without someone two bar stools downs mentioning his name. Nike used him to sell sneakers. Starter sportswear initiated its Dr. K line. “The Cosby Show” wanted him for a guest spot.
Gooden handled it all with a puzzled sort of what’s-all-the-fuss-about-it’s-just-me-throwing-the-ball kind of grace. In the offseason, he lived with his parents in the home he bought them. His father Dan and his cousin, Gary Sheffield, who now plays in the Milwaukee Brewers organization, were frequent visitors to spring training. After the ’85 season, when it seemed he had all the domestic bliss he could handle, he became engaged. Her name was Carlene Pearson and he’d known her since high school.
At that point, Gooden’s romance turned into a cautionary tale. Sometime last winter his grip on his gifts began to loosen. His control of all that power and all that passion was suddenly erratic. In January, he sprained an ankle at a time when he was negotiating his contract, but failed to notify the Mets. He exaggerated the seriousness of a minor automobile accident to get out of attending a spring training game and was fined by Manager Davey Johnson. In April, he, his sister and his fiance were involved in an argument with a rent-a-car clerk who claimed that Gooden cursed her and his sister threw a drink.
All of this made headlines. “Maybe I should just move my furniture into the clubhouse,” Gooden said after the April incident. I’m not sure that would have helped. Newspapers sent reporters to Tampa to work the streets and the police stations. We talked to people who had axes to grind. We confronted him after every poor performance with vaguely-worded questions meant, I suppose, to induce some sort of public confession.
The truth, of course, was elusive. We couldn’t prove anything and after awhile I began to doubt there was anything to prove.
For awhile I convinced myself that the story would go away. He’d throw a couple of shutouts and all would be forgiven. I wasn’t the only one who thought that way. Nobody in the Mets organization saw it coming. I remember a club official saying, “If that kid has a drug problem, we’re all in trouble.” Whenever anyone mentioned how much pressure he was under, one of his teammates would say, “Yeah, but if anybody can handle it, it’s Dwight.”
They had a point. The guy did go 17-6 last season. But he began to talk more openly about the pressure of living up to steep expectations. He told of how one night in a restaurant a fan took the fork out of his hand, replaced it with a pen and asked for an autograph. Once in awhile you’d see the other players out in bars on the road, but you’d hardly ever see Gooden. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it away from the crowds who plagued him everywhere he went. In a certain way, he was fearful of his own phenomena.
It reminded me of a story he had told about his first trip to New York four years earlier. “I stayed in the room the whole time,” he said, “except when I went to the park.” He ate nothing but room service and peered out the keyhole every time he heard a noise in the hall. By 1985, whoever was out there now meant him homage, not harm, but that made them no less frightening.
His ’86 season continued downward. He struggled through the World Series, abandoning his trademark fastball for an ineffective array of off-speed pitches. His relationship with Pearson floundered. On the night the Mets won the World Series, the couple argued. Pearson moved out. Gooden got drunk and missed the victory parade the next morning. The offseason brought him no peace. Reports that his wedding was off surfaced shortly before reports that he’d fathered a child with a Tampa woman. In the same article, he said he wanted a drug testing clause in his next contract to quiet suspicion that he was using cocaine.
Earlier this year, he was stopped on his way home from a basketball game by Tampa police who said he was driving wildly. A brawl ensued and Gooden wound up face down in a gutter, handcuffs on his wrists. He plead guilty and turned his attention to baseball.
People who were once happy that Gooden would never change were now upset that, apparently, he hasn’t grown. “He hasn’t matured like I thought he would,” said his old high school baseball coach and father-confessor Billy Reed.
Gooden showed up for camp nearly as svelte as the 17-year-old who’d peered out that hotel room door. But his fastball still was flat and he got knocked around in spring training. Then came Thursday’s announcement.
The surprise is deep, but dull. Being disillusioned is boring because it happens all the time. Having your faith restored is a tougher trick to turn, one more worthy of Gooden’s gifts. Whether he has the emotional wherewithal to pull it off is an open question. The circumstances under which Gooden’s usage came to light offer no clue. He requested the drug test that he failed, which either means that he wanted to get caught or he thought that he existed somehow outside of science.
You want to ask why he did it, but that has been the unanswered question after each of the peculiar incidents that marred last season. Leaving unanswered questions was Gooden’s unintentional specialty. Until now. Because the question everyone is asking is whether it is over and that will get answered one way or another. When the answer is in, we’ll know more about Dwight Gooden than we ever did before. And my sense is that he will know more about himself.