The High Price Of Hard Living

"I didn't think it happened before, but in '92 and '93 all the drinking started to affect my performance," he says. "It was cumulative. After a while, abusing your body catches up to you. I'd be the first to admit it."

In December 1993, after one of his nocturnal sojourns into Tampa, another drug test turned up positive. Inexplicably, according to a high-ranking major league official, baseball's medical people chose to let it slide without informing the executive council or the players' union. "They didn't do him any favors by doing that," former trainer Garland says. "It does make you wonder if there were any other times they did the same thing."

But the dirty test last June was not ignored. The Mets told Gooden he was facing probable suspension for violating his aftercare program. Gooden, in deep denial, told friends that it was no big deal, that he simply had missed a test because of oversleeping. He learned of his 60-day ban on June 24, a day he was scheduled to start against the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Mets, paranoid as ever, coaxed him into going ahead with his start anyway. After all, baseball wasn't ready to announce the suspension, so what would people think if Gooden was scratched from his start? It turned out to be the worst performance of his career. "If I had to do it again," he says, "there's no way I'd go out there."

At first, Gooden says, Millman and Solomon, his counselors in New York, did not recommend that he undergo another inpatient rehabilitation. His aftercare program, including the testing regimen, needed to be stepped up. Gooden, after meeting with the doctors on July 1, went home to St. Petersburg. At an outing over that Fourth of July weekend, he decided, "Well, I'll just have a couple of beers."

He continued to slide. "I always knew one or two guys who had the coke," he says. "It wasn't like I had to go driving through some bad neighborhood and roll the window down." Once, on the morning of scheduled drug tests, he called up Lans and said, "I was using last night. Should I still go ahead with the test?" Lans advised him, yes, he should let himself be tested.

Finally, on July 22, he checked into the Betty Ford Center. When he broke the news to his wife, Monica, that he was heading to the clinic, she looked puzzled and asked, "Why?"

"She didn't know how bad it was," he says. "She'd always be asleep in bed when I'd be coming home late."

But three weeks after Gooden left the clinic, his depression returned and his cocaine use continued. "Looking back on it," he says, "I should have called Jim [Neader] and told him what I was feeling. It's almost like you want to isolate yourself from the world. I didn't want to see anybody, even my family."

Then on Sept. 15 the Mets confirmed that Gooden had again violated his aftercare program. Baseball withheld any further action, essentially allowing him more time to pull himself together. But more samples came back dirty. On Nov. 4 he was suspended for the 1995 season.

"People ask, 'How can you use when you know you're getting tested?' " Gooden says. "It's not that easy not to. I remember when Otis Nixon tested positive again [in 1991, while with the Atlanta Braves]. I was like, Oh, man, how could a guy do something like that with so much on the line? Now I understand."