Doc: A Memoir (3 page)

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.

“As a pitcher,” my dad said, “you want to build the smaller muscles.
The small muscles are where you get your speed. If you get bulky, everything’s tight and the extension’s going to be shorter. You may look good on the beach, but it won’t help your pitching.” Dad never said anything specifically about steroids. They weren’t even being talked about back in the 1970s. But knowing how they build up the body, I’m sure he would have warned me to steer clear. And when steroids were being described as the number one substance abuse problem in baseball, my dad’s early lessons were still in my head. Steroids were one drug I was never tempted to play around with.

Dad used different techniques in the park with Gary, helping him develop his hitting and fielding. But for me it was always “Pitchers have to train like pitchers.”

Today, training like this is common, up to the highest levels of baseball. But back in the 1970s it was unheard of. I don’t know where my father learned it. I don’t remember him studying anatomy manuals or reading many baseball books. He wasn’t getting it from TV analysts. They were not talking baseball mechanics the way they do today. I never asked my dad how he knew so much.

All I know is, with me at least, his teaching was starting to work.

Dark Side

I
GOT A HUGE SENSE
of security growing up in such a tight family. Never once did I doubt that both my parents loved me and wanted what was best for me. I worshiped my dad, who seemed to worship me back. And my mom was the family glue, running the house, encouraging her kids to do well, and making sure we all felt special in individual ways. I’ve always felt sympathy for children growing up without that kind of support. It’s a terrible burden to overcome.

That said, just beneath the surface—and sometimes bursting right into the open—the Goodens had some crazy stuff going on. Drinking, fighting, philandering, gunplay—you name it. It didn’t strike me as all that unusual at the time or all that threatening. But looking back, I can see that we had some major issues swirling around our loving home on our solid block in respectable Belmont Heights. My father was far from faithful to my mother, and he didn’t make much effort to hide it from me. More than once, my mom threatened to divorce him.
One wild day, she confronted my father directly outside his girlfriend’s house. And I was partly the cause.

On Saturday mornings, before NBC’s
Game of the Week
with Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek, my father and I had one of our little rituals. We’d be in the living room out of my mother’s earshot, and Dad would ask me: “Before the game starts, you gonna need a snack?”

He knew exactly what I’d say. “Yeah!” I loved candy and chips and those twelve-ounce cans of Tahitian Treat fruit punch.

He’d wander into the kitchen and say with a sigh to my mom: “Dwight says he’s gotta have some chips. We’re gonna run to the store. Need anything?”

Usually, she didn’t, and Dad and I would head out to the car. But we didn’t go straight to the market. Dad liked to make a stop on the way. “Got to drop something off for a friend,” he’d say, pulling into the driveway of a house a few blocks from ours. “Be right back.”

As a five-year-old, I was too young to understand exactly what was happening, and I never questioned him about it. But he’d go in the house, and a girl, twelve or thirteen years old, would come out to the car and sit with me. Dad would be inside the house for twenty minutes or half an hour.

The girl was always nice to me. “How are you doing?” she’d ask, trying to strike up a conversation. “What did you do today?”

We’d make uncomfortable small talk. Sometimes, she’d bring out a coloring book and some crayons. On other days, she was quiet and withdrawn. I don’t know if she knew what was happening inside that house any more than I did. She probably did. A couple of times, I noticed a woman coming to the door with my father, giving him a little hug before he left.