The Headliner

And then there will be a riff about the time he and Met manager Bud Harrelson went at it in the dugout after Cone shook off a pitchout call from the bench. Cone, come to think about it, might need a whole chapter to explain his behavior, since it has mystified so many for so long—how one minute he can seem a precious cherub and the next a woolly, screaming beast: "You put your hands on me, Bud, it's no longer manager to player! It's man to man! Man to man, d'ya hear!"

He'll also want to mention his trade from the Mets to the Blue Jays late last summer since as a hired gun he went 4-3 (on the way to his third major league strikeout crown) and helped Toronto win the World Series. He didn't earn a victory against Atlanta in the Series, but the Blue Jays won both games he started.

And if he really wants to move some books, he'll be compelled to deal with his off-the-field problems. He might even stick in a headline from the tabloids, such as the one that ran on the front of the New York Post last March. New bombshell rocks Mets as woman says pitcher David Cone performed...WEIRD SEX ACT IN BULLPEN. Potentially the stuff of great literature, as even he has argued: to be lampooned as the second coming of Pee-wee Herman while you're trying to be the second coming of, say, Nolan Ryan.

Anyway, defining moments are what he's contemplating this morning. And he seems to be having a hard time lassoing them in. Oh, yeah. All right. Don't forget about the time in 1988 when Los Angeles Dodger first baseman Pedro Guerrero sent a bat helicoptering over Cone's head and then charged the mound. Don't forget how Cone, then in only his first full season in the majors, didn't back off an inch. It says a lot, that moment. It says: combative, combustible, crazy.

It also says: But why on earth, Conie?

"Here's one you wouldn't know about," Cone is saying now. "I've never really talked about this before." And he launches into a story about how his father shot the neighbor—that's right, the neighbor from the apartment building next door!

"He shot him?" Cone is asked.

"Shot him."

At the time Ed Cone has four children and a wife named Joan, and he works the graveyard shift at the Swift meat-processing plant in Kansas City—a mechanic, Ed is—and they're living in a neighborhood two quarters Italian, one quarter Irish and one quarter everything else. There's a park across the street from the Cone house, and one night David's big brother Danny gets into a fight there with the neighbor. To begin, the thing's mostly cussing back and forth, but it quickly graduates to pushing and shoving, and before you know it, Danny and the neighbor have moved near the Cones' front porch, and the whole household is up, everybody throwing robes on, yammering "What the...? What the...?"

The neighbor goes about 6'4", 250, but Danny, who's a skinny 6'1", 175, is undeterred. He lets loose a hard right jab and drops the man. The blow prompts Joan to jump on Danny's back and wrestle him to safety, and Joan in turn finds the neighbor's girlfriend jumping on her back and trying to wrestle her to who-can-say.