Down

. . .but not out

I’ve decided I’m not going to play football next year; I’m going to transfer to a school in San Diego, where I’ll continue to play baseball.

As I sat shaking in my football coach’s office at the University at Albany, saying the words that would alter the course of my life, I knew what I said would not go over well.

He took his feet off his desk, leaned forward, and said, Now why would you go and do a thing like that?

I talked about how the neurologist had advised me to stop playing football because I could die if I got another concussion. I said, as he was also the school’s athletic director, he knew about the great baseball season I’d just had, dominating the league with my pitching. I told him how much I’d thought about it and agonized over it, especially how much he and the school had invested in me. Still, the combination of football injury and baseball opportunity made the decision clear to me.

He tried to talk me out of it. He brought in other coaches to talk to me, including even my baseball coach. He explained to me how fortunate I was to go from the dirt road I grew up on to be a highly regarded student-athlete at such a fine university others would kill to get into.

He said most of the students who got accepted into the university had a minimum 93 average in high school, and scored 1300 or higher on their SAT; I had neither, but because I was such a good athlete, he got me admitted and funded as a special talent.

He let me know he was shocked and disappointed, but he was as professional and fatherly as he’d always been. Which made it even harder for me to walk away.

But I did, and I was about to answer the question of who I’d be if I weren’t a football player.

Once again, I put myself in a place completely foreign to me. At Albany, we played 28 games, one of which I pitched in the snow on my way to a 6-1 record. At my new school in San Diego, we played 104 games year-round, with nine-inning single games and seven-inning doubleheaders.

I realized I was over my head on my first day, with the first batter I faced. I had great stuff that day, and I threw everything in my arsenal at him: three types of fastballs, a curve, a slider, and a changeup. He giggled after every pitch he fouled off, fifteen in all. On the last pitch of the at-bat, he lined a shot past my ear and into centerfield.

The catcher also threw the ball down to second faster than I could throw it to home plate, which was generally about 88 mph, perhaps touching 90 once in a while.

Because I had trained to be a football player, I was by that point 6’2” and weighed 240 pounds; not exactly the right physique for a pitcher. It seemed like the other pitchers on the team were all 6’4” or 6’5”, weighed 210 pounds, and casually threw 95 mph.

I had great control and competitiveness; I would chew your leg off to win, and back east, I usually did. But the difference between 88 mph and 95 mph is light-years, and I was just barely getting by.

After the season, I somehow got signed to play in a developmental league for minor league players who came to San Diego from all over the country after their regular seasons were over. My manager was the head scout for the Cincinnati Reds on the West Coast, and my pitching coach was former major-leaguer Clay Kirby.

As overmatched as I was, I thought I was executing my plan to fast-track my way to the minor leagues. However, I had been relegated to mop-up duty, only pitching in relief in games in which we were either way ahead or way behind. But I was so convinced I would succeed, it came as a surprise when my manager called me into his office and told me the news.

I was being traded for two high-school seniors. On top of that, he said, unless I could consistently throw 90 mph at that point in my life, with potential to throw 95 mph, I was not going to have a career in baseball.

To say this was devastating to hear is an understatement. I was crushed.

In response, I did what I usually did when faced with a challenge: I tried harder. I worked on my mechanics. I went to a chiropractor and spent money I didn’t have to try to free up my shoulder and range of motion. None of it worked.

At the health club where I worked part-time as a personal trainer, one of the members offered to inject me with steroids. He said if I did that, I’d be able to throw 95 mph, no problem. I thought back to some of my football teammates at Albany who did that, and took other performance-enhancing drugs—even amphetamines—and got unnaturally bigger, unnaturally faster, and became maniacs in the process. I resented their cheating, and I didn’t want to cheat to achieve my dream in baseball. I said no.

But did I quit? No. I tried to throw harder and harder and harder. Until one day, my shoulder hurt like it never had before. Week after week, far more than is healthy, I got cortisone shots in my shoulder to try to get through it. But all that did was mask the structural damage I’d done to my shoulder.

As a result, I was trying to throw harder, but somehow my pitches got slower, and I was losing control, which had always been my most valuable weapon, along with my competitiveness and preparation.

When I finally couldn’t even raise my arm, I went to a doctor, spent more money that I didn’t have, and learned the horrible news: I had a badly torn rotator cuff and labrum, and bone spurs all over my shoulder. I needed surgery, and in those days, with shoulder surgery not as advanced as it is now, and me having no health insurance, my baseball career was likely over.

There would be no toughing my way through it. No denial; I couldn’t take my hand out of my pocket. And I couldn’t afford to have surgery, baseball or not.

I became deeply depressed. I was no longer a football player or a baseball player. I could no longer afford school. I lost my job at the health club because I couldn’t use my arm. Even my girlfriend broke up with me. With no job and no money, I even lost my place to live, such as it was: I’d been renting a couch in someone’s house.

Until now, I’d never thought about that time in my life this way, and I still feel shame about it, but I was homeless.

That word carries a lot of cultural weight, I know. To look at me and know me now, you’d think I’m exaggerating my predicament for dramatic effect, that I’m appropriating the misery of a whole lot of unfortunate souls.

I am not. The experience, as brief as it was, was so painful to me I even wrote a play about homelessness seven or eight years later. I was spending a lot of time in New York City, and homelessness was unavoidable. My own experience, which paled in comparison to what I was seeing every day, combined with the environment I was in, influenced me to write a play about a desperate and delusional homeless guy who uses a scalding hot cup of coffee as a weapon to hold up a diner so he can get a home-cooked diner meal for himself and his girlfriend.

I’ve learned a lot about homelessness in the ensuing years, especially that it looks different for every individual. I’ve also learned it sometimes only takes one wrong decision or misfortune to begin the spiral down.

In my case, I couch-surfed in friends’ apartments. I slept on their floors. I ate their food. I walked the streets looking for money people may have dropped on the ground. If I could find 99 cents, I could get a burrito at 7-11 and make it last all day. I went to a diner, sat at the counter, got a glass of water, poured ketchup into it, and told myself I was eating tomato soup. I did this a lot. I finally got kicked out when, after I saw a customer pay his bill and leave food on his plate, I walked past his table, took his leftovers, and ate them in the bathroom.

At my lowest point, I sat on the edge of a pool in a condo complex, looked down into the deep end, knew I didn’t know how to swim, and wondered, What if I go down and stay there?

I was terrified of my own thoughts. I got up, ran to the nearest pay phone, called my mother, and begged her to send me money I knew she didn’t have, so I could come home, knowing that home was the place from which I had fought so hard to survive and escape.

In my mind, I knew I’d had everything I’d dreamed of back at Albany. And now, thanks to my pig-headedness, delusional belief in my abilities, and irrational drive to achieve what I wanted in life faster than I was capable, I’d thrown it all away. I saw myself as the ultimate failure, and I was beyond ashamed.

The last thing on my mind was reinventing myself. I needed to survive.

Again.

So I did.