Doc: A Memoir (23 page)

“Call your grandmother,” I told her. “Tell her what happened. The police are coming, and I’ll have to go with them. Tell Grandma to call Dave, the attorney. Can you remember that? Dave.”

I walked back to the front of the apartment. Two uniformed Tampa police officers were already in the living room.

“What’s going on?” the short, stocky one asked. Then a strange look crossed his face. “Are you Dwight Gooden?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So what happened?” he asked calmly. I told the two cops everything, including the fact that I struck Monique. I was hoping when they heard the full story, they would understand this was a two-way battle, and it was over now. A minor domestic dispute, nothing we needed the police for.

“Wait a sec,” the first cop said. “You hit her?”

That was all he needed to hear. “Put your hands behind your back.”

This being a Friday night, I ended up spending the whole weekend in the Hillsborough County Jail. I felt so defeated. I’d been staying off drugs. I’d been a round-the-clock dad. I’d been taking care of business at work. And now I felt like I was back at square one.

The lawyer, David Stamps, got me out of jail on Monday. Ron Dock drove me home. He started to speak as soon as we got in the car. I cut him off. I knew what was coming.

“George wants to know what’s going on,” I said. “Right?”

“Yep,” Ron answered.

When I walked into George’s office, he held up his hands like a school crossing guard. Before I could say anything, he said, “Slow down, Doc. Just slow down.” George didn’t fire me. I don’t know where the man got his patience.

I couldn’t return to my apartment immediately because the cops had given Monique ten days to get her stuff and move out. I stayed with my mom until then. But our separation didn’t last long. After a month, Monique and little Dylan moved back in.

I pretty much stopped working for the Yankees at that point. George never fired me exactly. I never quit. I just had so much else going on in my life, I wasn’t getting any work done. My duties sort of faded.

On Sunday night, August 21, I had a couple of beers at home. I wasn’t close to drunk. I didn’t use any drugs. I hadn’t planned on going out.
My sister Betty was having a party at her house in St. Petersburg, and she had asked me to come. On the spur of the moment, long after midnight, I thought maybe I would go by. I knew the party would be running late. It was after two a.m. when I left home.

My apartment complex on Harbour Island in South Tampa usually had its own security guard at the gate. But this time, as I drove out, I saw a Tampa police car idling at the guardhouse. That struck me as strange. Then I noticed the cop was following me. At a dark section of Cleveland Street, the cop threw his lights on. My car was familiar to the Tampa police, a little 2004 BMW convertible coupe. I pulled over. The squad car pulled up behind, lights still flashing.

After what seemed like forever, an officer walked up and rapped his knuckles on my window. “License and registration,” he said.

“Uh-oh,” I thought. “Here we go again.”

Before I could even hand him my license, he said, “Mr. Gooden, where are you headed so late?”

“To my sister’s house,” I replied calmly. Inside, I had a bad feeling about this.

“Where’s that?”

“St. Pete.”

He squinted, leaned back, and stared in at me. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Everything’s good.”

“Little late for a family visit, no?” I figured he was looking for a reason to get in the car, rip it apart, and find any drugs I’d stashed. I knew the car was clean. There was nothing to find. He could search away if it came to that.

“She’s having a party, Officer, that’s all.”

He peered in again and walked around the car, sizing it up and down. “This is really your car?”

“Yes,” I said impatiently.

“Okay,” he said, shrugging. “Just give me a second.”

He went back to his car for another ten minutes then came back to my window with more questions for me. I don’t know if he was trying to tell if my speech was slurred. I had no idea what his plan was.

“I just don’t get why she would have a party so late,” the cop wondered aloud.

“It’s been going on a while,” I explained. “I’m just getting a late start.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked. “Have you been drinking tonight?”

“Just a couple beers, but I’m fine,” I told him.

The cop nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Give me a second. I’ll get you out of here.” He went to his car again. Within minutes, cop cars came flying in from every direction.

If he’d asked me to step out of the car and take a Breathalyzer when we were by ourselves, I probably would have done it. And I would have passed. I didn’t know what he was waiting for. But when a bunch of police cars screeched up, I got nervous. I had no idea what might happen next. My mind filled with memories of flashlights in my face and me on the ground being beaten by the Tampa police. “This time,” I thought, “there aren’t even any witnesses.”

I’d been warned more than once by my friends in law enforcement. “Be careful in Tampa. The cops are still pissed at you.” I was starting to believe all that. This was not paranoia. I’d had years of experience.

The first officer came back to my car. He leaned in my window and said, “I need you to get out of the vehicle.”

That sounded risky to me. If I made one wrong gesture or took an unexpected step, would all these cops suddenly jump me?

“I’m fine,” I insisted.

“Sure you are,” he said. “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

“I really only had a couple of beers,” I said again. “I’m okay.”

“I need you to get out of the car,” he said again.

I didn’t budge from the seat. No other cars had driven past us since we’d been there. I tried to think of some way out. I picked up my cell
phone. Who could I call? My lawyer? My sister? Monique? None of them could get here fast enough.

“Get out of the fuckin’ car!” the cop yelled.

In that split second, I panicked. What I did made no sense at all. I didn’t analyze the consequences. I just did what I did. I turned on the engine. I threw the car into gear. I stomped on the gas. And I flew out of there. They tried, but there was no way those Tampa police cruisers were going to catch my BMW. Within half a mile, I was taillights to them.

Once I crossed the bridge into St. Petersburg, I was afraid to go to my sister’s house. I’d already told the cop I was heading there. That was outside the Tampa police jurisdiction. But they could certainly radio across the bridge.

I called a friend who lived in the area. When he picked up, instead of “Hello,” I said, “Open your garage.”

“Doc?” he asked. He sounded confused. “What’s going on?”

“Please, just do it,” I said. “I’ll explain when I get there.”

I parked the BMW and lowered the garage door with a mixture of relief and fear. Inside, I told my friend the whole story, which freaked him out even more. I had run from the police and was hiding out at his house. I don’t think he’d harbored too many fugitives before. The whole thing was totally surreal. I sat on his sofa and turned my cell phone off. “They might be able to track me through the signal,” I told him. “But don’t worry. No one knows I’m here.”

The next morning, we turned on the TV. The local news was showing my picture and describing my escape. For the two days that followed, the local papers and TV treated my road stop like a manhunt of major proportions.
America’s Most Wanted
asked the public to help find me.

“We’ve got nothing,” said police spokeswoman Laura McElroy, urging me to turn myself in at once. “It’s not like he’s been in touch with us.” Then she turned the heat up a notch. “He’s in serious trouble,” she said.

My old Little League coaches, even my mother’s pastor, spoke to
reporters and pleaded with me. “Go ahead and turn yourself in,” said Monty Bostick, my coach when I was thirteen. “We love him,” said the Reverend Gordon Curry of the Greater King David International Church in St. Petersburg. George Steinbrenner said through a spokesman, “I feel very sorry for Dwight.”

All that time, there were helicopters hovering over my mom’s house, cops in front of my kids’ schools and my apartment. I kept checking my voice mail as it filled up with messages from Monique, my mom, Betty, Sheff, Ron, Ray, George, and almost everyone else I knew, including my attorney, Dave, and his partner Peter Hobson. “It’s not as bad as you think,” they said.

I used my friend’s phone to call the lawyers back. There was a warrant for my arrest, they told me, on charges of driving under the influence, eluding police, and resisting arrest without violence. “Relatively minor stuff, if you turn yourself in,” Peter said. “If you make the cops find you, it’s gonna be ugly. Meet me somewhere. We’ll go to the precinct together.”

A decision to go to a party at my sister’s house had turned into the plot from a bad car chase film. In this one, the cops followed for a minute but then they just let the hot-rodder go. I hid in the backseat of my friend’s car to meet my attorney in a mall parking garage. I was still nervous, afraid of getting caught. But my lawyers convinced me I had to turn myself in. I switched cars, and we drove together to the warrants facility at the county jail. My lawyers were right. As a criminal case, running from the police that night was a not a huge crime—despite all the public uproar. But in a life as tumultuous as mine, bad decisions somehow get multiplied.

Once Dave had cleared up the fugitive issue, he reminded me of another problem I had. While I was at my friend’s house, I had been scheduled to take a mandatory one-hour class on domestic violence. It involved the case I had with Monique. I needed to do this if I had any hope of getting
the charges against me dismissed. When I was on the lam, I missed the class.

As a result, I was sentenced to ten days in the Hillsborough County Jail—with some unexpected company.

As I was being processed, one of the corrections officers mentioned something to me. “We have your son,” he said. “Dwight Gooden Junior.” He was being held in another wing of the jail on a probation violation stemming from a crack cocaine sale to an undercover cop.

In jail with my own son? It was devastating for both of us.

Dwight Junior was nineteen years old. He was a little shorter than I was at his age and at least as thin, maybe 150 pounds. With a name like “Dwight Gooden Junior,” I worried that he would be a target—for other inmates and for the guards. It had happened before at school, forcing him to transfer from Kings High to Hillsborough when the taunts about his troubled baseball dad turned into threats. But that was kids’ stuff, and this was jail. So I was concerned.

As Dwight Junior was growing up, I wasn’t around nearly enough. When I was there, I didn’t always set the best example. The years I was suspended from baseball, we got to have an almost normal father-son relationship. I even coached his Little League team, the North Seminole Marlins. I was a proud dad, but his pitching talent was genuine. He even joined my old team at Hillsborough High. But as long as Dwight Junior was playing baseball, there was no stepping out of his father’s long shadow. I think he found that tough. A couple of colleges offered him baseball scholarships. A couple of the Yankees scouts asked me about him. But he had the courage to tell me what I already knew.

“I don’t think baseball is for me,” he said. “It’s your game. Not mine.”

I wasn’t upset at all with that. I respected his independence. I still do, although I don’t like some of what he chose to do instead. He turned his attention to music, which was great, but then he stumbled quickly into drugs. When he got busted in 2003 as part of a Hillsborough sheriff’s sting operation, he was charged with selling and possessing crack cocaine
and did a short stint in jail. I was heartbroken. He could have done fifteen years. And it was hard for me not to feel responsible. When he got out, he moved into my Tampa apartment. But that didn’t turn out too well. The day he arrived, he asked to borrow my car and disappeared for two days. That sounded familiar. When he finally showed up, I told him to go stay with his mother. I was the designated screwup in that household, and I wasn’t sure I could handle another one. Within three months of being released, he was busted for marijuana possession. Just like me, he was taking the lessons of his father and expanding on them. I had set a powerful example.

My lawyers were pushing me to enter a hard-core treatment facility in Tampa. I’d had two run-ins with the law in two months. But I didn’t think I needed such an intense program. I was drinking, but I hadn’t started using again. Still, with the domestic and fugitive charges hanging over me, Dave convinced me I needed to show the judge I was actively confronting my problems. In this case, it was alcohol—though all of us knew where the booze frequently led me.

On November 3, Hillsborough Circuit Judge William Fuente sentenced me to three years’ probation and community service with the agreement that I’d stay in treatment the rest of that year and into 2006 at HealthCare Connection. As spring training approached, I learned that, even after a year, George Steinbrenner still hadn’t given up on me. When I got out of HealthCare Connection, he invited me by for a chat. “You ready to come back to work, Doc?” he asked.

I thought it over for a minute, how nice it would be. But I believed I was making progress in rehab. I was scared to juggle baseball and aftercare.

“I think I gotta stick to my program a while longer,” I said to George. “Believe me, I’d love to work for you. But I have to get my life together first. I’m tired of embarrassing you and myself.”

Behind Bars

H
OW LOW DID I GO?

Counselors and addiction experts are constantly talking about “hitting bottom.” At drug-treatment meetings, someone will describe a struggling friend: “Before he can pull his life together, he has to hit bottom first.” On daytime talk shows, people are “hitting bottom” left and right.

To me, bottom is the cemetery, and I’m not looking to hit there any time soon.

On my winding trip through addiction, I have arrived at some low spots, lower than I could have ever imagined when I first showed up in New York to pitch. Bouncing in and out of treatment programs. Relapsing time and again. Missing the World Series parade. Leading police on a three-day fugitive hunt. Being held in the county jail with Dwight Junior. In my life, I’ve had big ups and big downs. But the closest I’ve ever felt to the bottom was turning
around in a Tampa courtroom—and seeing my mother age right in front of my eyes.