The High Price Of Hard Living

He has been a hard drinker since 1986, when he was 21 and in his third year in the majors—abstaining from alcohol only on the two nights before a starting assignment and, flushed with youth, money and stardom, indulging on all the others. At 22 he landed in a drug rehab center after testing positive for cocaine. Now, nearing his 30th birthday and into his third straight losing season, he is drinking out of self-pity. The alcohol hits him like Novocain; it numbs the pain of his depression but cannot remove it.

The beers are not enough, so, as he often has, he switches to something harder. Vodka has always been a favorite. It makes him forget about his combined 22-28 record in 1992 and '93, about how terrible his team, the New York Mets, has become and about the injured toe on his right foot, which has kept him on the disabled list for the past five weeks. The drinks keep coming.

Man, I'm hammered, he thinks. He presses on deep into the night, so deep that he still is drinking when he notices the place is closed, the doors are locked and everybody else except the people who work in the club have gone home. That's when one of the employees pulls out the bag of cocaine. You want some?

I know I shouldn't, he thinks. But that notion passes quicker than one of his old fastballs, dissolving completely into the fuzziness of his alcohol-polluted mind. What the hell, he thinks. I'm on minor league rehab for my toe. They won't test me.

Within 48 hours a representative of the testing agency used by Major League Baseball arrives in Binghamton, N.Y., home of the Mets' Double A affiliate, to collect a urine sample from Gooden.

The career paths of Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden began as parallel lines—twin, unbending inclines headed straight to Cooperstown. How could it be that instead we are left with this ugly tangle of trouble? They both were National League Rookies of the Year, the 21-year-old Strawberry in 1983 and Gooden, at 19, the following season. When Gooden started his first major league game, in '84, Strawberry ripped a home run to centerfield for the game-winning RBI. Before either one of them had turned 25, they were stars, millionaires and, in '86, world champions as members of one of only four National League teams in this century to win as many as 108 regular-season games. How did those parallel lines wind up as twisted as those on a New York City subway map, the two of them intersecting over and over again?

Intersections: In the off-season following the Mets' World Series victory, Gooden was arrested for brawling with Tampa police and Strawberry was ordered by a Los Angeles superior court to stay away from his wife, Lisa, whose nose he had broken with a punch to the face. So when Strawberry reported to spring training in 1987 and discovered he had been assigned a locker next to Gooden's, he cracked in his typical dark humor, "Look, it's Assault and Battery together."

Six weeks later Gooden spent Opening Day in Smithers Alcoholism and Treatment Center in New York City, being treated for cocaine use, while Strawberry, wearing Gooden's uniform pants, drove in the winning runs with a three-run home run. Three years after Gooden checked into Smithers seeking treatment for drug abuse, Strawberry checked into Smithers for alcohol abuse. Both of them now admit they sought treatment halfheartedly. Little wonder then that last year Strawberry and Gooden both had occasion to check into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage for cocaine abuse. One going and the other coming, they missed each other by only 79 days.

Last Aug. 14, Strawberry picked up Gooden upon his release from the Betty Ford Center and drove him the one mile down Bob Hope Drive to Strawberry's new home. He escorted Gooden through the grand marbled foyer and into the living room.

"Doc, you've got to get out of Florida," Strawberry said. "You've got to change your environment to keep from using. The most important thing they told me at Betty Ford was to change the whole atmosphere and get away from the people who use."