Young Stars Having Trouble Coping With Too Much, Too Soon

When she was 21, Nancy Lopez felt like she was 26. Before long, she was crying herself to sleep at night.

Boris Becker is 19 and feels like he’s 24. He has long since fled his homeland for privacy.

“When you’re young, deep down inside you can’t cope,” Lopez said. “You think you can, but you really can’t.”

Sports zillionaires--15 going on 50, hounded for time and money, pestered by agents and friends looking for meal tickets.

Fame is thrust upon them at an age when their peers worry about acne and dating.

It happened to Dwight Gooden. Mike Tyson, too.

“You wake up one morning, and all of a sudden you’ve got more money and more attention than you ever dreamed of, more people who want a piece of you than you ever dreamed possible,” Michael Jordan said.

NANCY LOPEZ

It was in her third season that Nancy Lopez’s life began to crumble.

Barely 20 years old, she won a record nine tournaments in her 1978 rookie season, perking up her tour the way Arnold Palmer revived the men’s game 20 years earlier. She was No. 1 again in ’79 with eight victories. She married sportscaster Tim Melton on Jan. 6, 1979, her 22nd birthday.

In 1980, she won four events, three in ’81 and two in ’82. She lost her golf swing and gained weight.

“I had gotten married, and I kind of stopped working on my game,” Lopez said. “I got into bad habits. I didn’t practice. I was miserable. I cried every day back at the hotel. I was really disgusted with myself.”

She was on the road 10 months of the year, playing in 25 tournaments as a rookie, 19 in ’79 and 24 in each of the next two seasons. In her spare time, she managed a growing endorsement empire, which now includes accounts with Nabisco, Endicott-Johnson shoes, Geritol and interests in Japan.

She and Melton were divorced in May 1982.

“My husband really couldn’t handle the time that I was away from him and the things I was doing to further my career,” Lopez said.

Lopez said her false sense of maturity contributed.

“It was an unreal time,” she said. “All the time I was winning, I never got to sit back and enjoy it because I was so busy. It’s hard for me to even remember what happened because I never absorbed it.

“My biggest problem was getting married at 21. When I was 19, I never thought I would have gotten married at 21. But when I was 21, I thought I was 26. I felt like I was grown up, but I really wasn’t.

“The way my career started, I felt like I really was thrown into growing up too quick.”

Lopez is 30 now. She was No. 1 again in 1985, setting records for single-season earnings ($416,472) and scoring average (70.73). She took off most of last season to have her second daughter with baseball player Ray Knight, whom she married in 1983. Their home in Albany, Ga., has a batting cage out back and a Volvo in the driveway. Knight won the car as MVP of the World Series with the New York Mets.

Lopez’s first victory this season at Sarasota, Fla., was the 35th of her career, qualifying her for the Hall of Fame. It was her dream as well as her father’s.

Before she ever went on tour, Domingo Lopez admonished his daughter: “Even if you’re the greatest player in the world, and the richest player in the world, you be the same Nancy.

“I told her, ‘You don’t use people like some women do. They get good and turn their backs on people. Those people are the ones who like you and they keep you where you are.’

“That’s why she’s still my Nancy.”

BORIS BECKER

Elvira Becker watched her red-haired, freckle-faced son of 17 walk through the lobby of an English hotel on his way to the awards dinner. Boris Becker, who had just won Wimbledon, was dressed in a white dinner jacket--suave and elegant, looking more like James Bond than Tom Sawyer.

“He’s not our little boy anymore,” she said.

Becker, now 19, has since won another Wimbledon title. His earnings in 1986, including endorsements, were estimated at $10 million, and some newspapers report his career bankroll already at $24 million.

West Germans, particularly teen-agers, gave him a hero’s welcome in 1985 when he became the youngest player to win Wimbledon. The love affair lasted until they found out he had left home for Monte Carlo.

Becker was criticized by reporters and by the German parliament for pulling up stakes. He said he wanted privacy, but he was accused of leaving for tax purposes and to escape military service in his homeland. An “Anti-Becker Club” was formed by a Frankfurt post office worker, and there were death threats.

At the same time, he was applauded at home for being named sports ambassador of UNICEF, and he was still pursued by the media. Demands from the press became so intense he signed a contract with West Germany’s largest circulation newspaper, Bild Zeitung, to limit his exclusive interviews.

Out of this mixed bag of adoration and revilement, Becker says he most misses his freedom and lost youth. Others think he’s just another spoiled tennis brat.

“It’s not easy for me to walk around the streets at home anymore,” Becker said. “I can walk in the streets in Monte Carlo. I can go to the movies. I can go to discos, and I won’t be mobbed by fans like I am in Germany.”

Said his manager, Ion Tiriac: “Being young or being old, you have to worry about the attention. He’s handled it decently. He has to get used to it and cope with it.”

Meantime, Becker says he has aged beyond his years. “I feel like I’m 24, not 19, like I skipped a few years in my life.”

Last month his trainer, Guenther Bosch, quit after Becker spit at the umpire, broke his racket and threw tennis balls at the crowd while losing to a nobody in the Australian Open. Bosch said Becker had poor work habits, and he feared further association with Becker would “put my good name at risk.”

As for money, friends say he carefully tends to his fortune, limiting his spending to discos, music and his new girlfriend, 22-year-old Benedicte Courtin, a law student and daughter of Monte Carlo’s chief of alien registration. Becker also bought himself a sports car, and a few sports coats, reportedly at Courtin’s behest.

DWIGHT GOODEN

It was a Tuesday night in April of the 1986 baseball season, and Dwight Gooden’s reputation was about to take another rap.

Before training camp opened, he tried to cover up an ankle injury, and later he was fined for missing a spring workout. This time, Gooden had been detained by police at LaGuardia Airport after he, his sister and fiancee were involved in an argument with a rental-car agent.

“Maybe future pictures of me will have a number under my face instead of on my back,” Gooden joked.

Mug shots don’t seem funny any more to Gooden.

Those around Gooden characterize him as a good kid, still trying to hold onto a youth he never had, a little out of place in a world of blazing lights and seven-figure salaries, a straw hat at the Metropolitan Opera.

Gooden’s trouble may have had its start in Tampa, Fla., where he still lives with his folks, in a new four-bedroom home not far from their old house. Besides his parents, he is surrounded by friends and relatives--two sisters, cousins, nephews and three half brothers.

“Some things about him are going to have to change, let’s be frank,” said Billy Reed, Gooden’s Little League and high school coach. “Sometimes people want to make you do things. Buy this, do that. They think he has all the money in the world. You’ve got to pick your friends. You’ve got to say no.”

The Mets considered asking Gooden to move from Tampa during the offseason, but they have not because “he’s so close to his mother and father, we’re afraid of a backlash,” General Manager Frank Cashen said. “He really wants to go back to Tampa. That’s where he’s comfortable.”

And he still doesn’t want to let go of his youth.

“One time, he’s supposed to do a commercial,” Cashen said. “He didn’t show, so we went looking for him. He’s out in the schoolyard shooting baskets with the kids. That’s what he wants to do. He’s really just a kid. We kind of robbed him of that.”

At 19 and already in his third professional season, Gooden was named the National League’s 1984 Rookie of the Year with the Mets. In 1985, he won the Cy Young Award with a 24-4 record. He set a hatful of strikeout records and was rewarded with a $1.32 million contract.

That’s when the real trouble began for young Dr. K.

In 1986, the Mets won the World Series, but Gooden had the year of a mortal, 17-6, and failed in two World Series starts against Boston. He skipped the Mets’ ticker-tape parade, saying he had partied too much the night before. In November, he broke off his engagement to Carlene Pearson and revealed he had a son by another woman.

Last Dec. 13, Gooden was arrested along with a nephew and three other friends after a late-night fight with Tampa police. He was on his way back from a basketball game when police stopped him in his $44,000 silver Mercedes with “DOC” license plates.

Gooden pleaded no contest to two third-degree felony charges of battery on a police officer and resisting arrest. He is on probation.

Then, less than a week before the start of the current major league season, Gooden checked into a drug rehabilitation center, reportedly to be treated for a cocaine problem. It’s possible he may not return to the Mets until June 1.

“Dwight is fighting himself,” said Gooden’s boyhood friend, Montreal Expos pitcher Floyd Youmans. “He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to be now that he’s a millionaire. . . . It all came so fast to him.”

Gooden was told by his lawyer to refuse interviews following the Tampa arrest and his admittance to the drug rehabilitation center.

“He’s always been a nice kid, good work habits, very polite,” Reed said. “Whatever he had to do, he did it. I never even saw him get mad.”

MICHAEL JORDAN

The nickname “Air Jordan” conjures a lofty image, but off the court, Michael Jordan is pretty down to earth--with one exception. He’s crazy about clothes.

The Chicago Bulls guard owns about 40 suits and 40 pairs of shoes, and once he made a special one-day trip to a Paris tailor that cost him $8,000.

Still, his basic approach to life is no-nonsense, instilled in him early by his parents, James and Delores Jordan.

“Michael set goals and worked hard to achieve them,” James said. “He was never one who thought he could get by without working.”

Jordan was 22 years old when he was named NBA rookie of the year for 1984-85. Though he missed most of last season with a broken foot, he is averaging more than 35 points a game this year and threatening the NBA scoring record for guards.

Jordan is paying the price of stardom, but he’s getting back a nice piece of change. The “Air Jordan” sneaker contract alone is worth $2.5 million, and he’s in the third year of a seven-year contract estimated at $6 million.

“Nearly everything in the first few weeks were beyond my expectations,” Jordan said, “but I’ve handled everything that comes with the life--the money, the attention, the privileges--the best way I could. I’ve got a family that keeps me in line, that wouldn’t hesitate to let me know if I started behaving different.

“You get so used to being taken care of that you get in a mind-set where you expect it to go on,” Jordan said. “Then, one day, you don’t have people to screen out the danger, no one to go through the people around you.”

Besides the clothes, Jordan has spent some of his money on a retirement home for his folks in Sherill’s Ford, N.C. He keeps a BMW in North Carolina, and he also owns a Corvette and a Chevy Blazer, gifts from a local dealer.

“You hear about the problems (with athletes) and you never know if they are entirely true,” Jordan said, “but you better realize you’re in the spotlight, that people will pick up on what you do. When you do spectacular things, the papers report it. When you do foolish things, you better know it’s going to make the news, too.”

MIKE TYSON

Mike Tyson is only 20 years old, history’s youngest heavyweight boxing champion. He was guaranteed between $5 million and $6 million for his last two fights alone, yet his handlers say his mind isn’t on his money.

“Whatever the antithesis for extravagance is, that’s Mike,” said Jimmy Jacobs, who along with Bill Cayton handles Tyson’s career and finances. “He asks for very little spending money, and, in perspective, he doesn’t spend very much.”

Maybe he remembers when he didn’t have very much. Trouble found Tyson before he became famous, and now he may find the wisdom of the streets working for him.

Tyson grew up in Brooklyn, ran with the wrong crowd and wound up at the Tryon School for Boys in upstate New York after he was arrested for armed robbery. “They held the guns,” Tyson said. “I would just put everything in a bag. I was 11.”

At 13, Tyson was introduced to veteran trainer Cus D’Amato, and the two clicked. D’Amato told Tyson that if he worked hard, he would be heavyweight champion. Old Cus, who later became Tyson’s legal guardian, died before the prophecy was fulfilled, but he lived long enough to do his part.

Under D’Amato’s tutelage, Tyson assumed the single-minded goal of becoming champion. He lives a simple lifestyle. He trains, and he keeps pigeons in his backyard in Catskill, N.Y.

The old days serve as a potent reminder. “Imagine if I’d kept screwing around,” Tyson said. “I’d have been in the same place I was. In jail. Or dead.”

Only one thing really matters to him at this stage of his life.

“I refuse to be hit, to be hurt, to lose,” Tyson said. “I refuse to leave the ring alive without the belt.”

It is his determination and the respect he learned from D’Amato that keep Tyson level-headed, although he is just beginning his struggle with fame.

“I prefer to be alone, but it’s no problem,” Tyson said. “I always knew I’d be a media star or something like that.”

The star shone most brightly on Nov. 22 when he beat Trevor Berbick in Las Vegas to win the title. Twenty-four hours later, Tyson was wearing the ornate championship belt over a jogging suit, walking through the casino, showing off and occasionally stopping in front of a mirror. Not arrogant, just proud.

“I’m a 20-year-old kid,” Tyson said.