Commentary : At Least Gooden Has Time on Side

Dwight Gooden’s comeback Tuesday night was a scene that perfectly combined the sad, the hopeful and the ridiculous.

Of all our stumbling modern baseball heroes, from Denny McLain to Willie Wilson to Keith Hernandez, none seems so sorrowful or so worthy of our best wishes for full recovery as Gooden.

None of our other publicly humiliated idols came to fame so young. Gooden was a national celebrity as a teen-ager, at 19. At 20, he had one of the 10 best pitching seasons in history. At 21, he was a disappointment. And by 22, he was in a drug rehabilitation clinic.

No one in baseball ever came to glory less prepared. Shy and roughly educated, Gooden always looked like a gentle deer frozen in the headlights of his own parade. He arrived at the nadir of the New York tabloid war triggered by sleazemonger Rupert Murdoch. Gooden’s private life became an open innuendo. He couldn’t miss an appointment, misreport an injury or even have a bad-mannered girlfriend without being back-page news. Discovery of his out-of-wedlock child and the scandal over his fistfight with Tampa police were flogged for months.

No player ever picked a worse time to acquire a drug problem. Gooden was in the wrong vice at the wrong time. A year after Commissioner Peter Ueberroth said baseball had beaten its cocaine problem, Gooden--the most famous and popular young player in the sport--made him look like a liar.

If this were 1982, when coke was a fashionable indulgence, a “recreational drug” connected with the ritzy, Gooden’s month in rehab might have found its way into sports page “transactions” as a mere visit to the disabled list with a slow-to-heal groin-muscle pull. Lots of stars have taken the cure for liquor or drugs without the public hearing a word.

But Gooden slipped in an era of knee-jerk conservatism when Just Say No had supplanted Do Your Own Thing--one simplistic silliness replacing another.

Perhaps no player has ever suffered so great a punishment of shame in relation to so commonplace a crime. Even the Smithers Clinic, where Gooden was treated for 28 days, claims he never was addicted to cocaine. Gooden himself requested the drug test that came back positive. Presumably, and it’s all guesswork at this point, Gooden felt his life slipping in a destructive direction and asked for the test as a kind of cry for help. Surely, it will complete his break from young peers on the Tampa streets who tempted him.

“Socrates admitted to those who recognized in his face some inclination to vice that that was in truth his natural propensity, but that he had corrected it by discipline,” wrote the philosopher Montaigne.

The natural propensity to vice, even in the most gifted and decent people, is so common that Gooden should not waste a single night’s sleep over discovering it in himself. Rather, he should focus, as so many have, on putting that normal inclination on the leash of self-discipline.

As though Gooden’s misfortunes were not bad enough, the circus that now surrounds him is in danger of stinking worse than anything he has done.

The Stadium Club restaurant behind home plate in the Tidewater Tides’ ballpark was full here Tuesday as Gooden pitched three shutout innings in his first get-back-in-shape effort. However, the restaurant’s owner, Spike White, had mixed feelings about the boom business.

“If Gooden had a torn rotator cuff and had come back here in the regular course of rehabilitation, would the stands be full?” White wondered. “Isn’t that shame on us? Isn’t this what they mean (in defining pornography) by prurient interest?”

More than 100 members of the media gathered, despite the Mets insistence that Gooden would not talk directly to anybody about anything. After Gooden threw his 39 pitches, the reporters were herded into a batting cage--a sort of outdoor lobster tank--where a Mets official, without consulting any notes, attempted to paraphrase his long postgame conversation with Gooden. Then, for a second wave of reporters, the Mets man did his number again, quoting Gooden on many of the same subjects but using substantially different phrases. Talk about getting what you deserve.

Despite all that’s depressing about Gooden’s last six weeks, there’s also much that seems encouraging. Norfolk may not be Peoria, but Gooden certainly played well here. The fans loved him, welcomed him back without a hint of a single boo and even cheered when he struck out. The Tides are the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate, and Gooden was a big star performing in a smallish town. But it would be nice to think that a 22-year-old with so much to give and so much to bear will be greeted this way everywhere.

George McClelland, sports columnist for the local Virginian Pilot said, “This country has been built on the second chance. Even George Washington got a second chance after his army got smashed. Just because Gooden’s a rich athlete, I don’t see why he shouldn’t get that second chance.”

In some ways, Gooden has gotten terrible breaks. He’s had to grow up in the center of the largest public spotlight in sports history. He’s been handed millions of dollars and a society fraught with temptations. Like many a young man, he thought the fast lane looked like it might be worth a try. When he showed up for spring training in 1986 with a satin jacket with an embroidered dragon on the back and a wet, curly Billy Dee Williams hair style, the handwriting was on the wall. It was just a matter of time ‘til he’d tried on the whole life style to see how it fit.

Perhaps Gooden’s one piece of good luck, and it may prove to be a large one, is that all of this has hit him so suddenly and so hard. If the last few months haven’t served as shock therapy, nothing could. If Gooden doesn’t see how much he has to lose, how far he can fall, and how quickly, then he isn’t just young. He’s foolish.

Denny McLain, the last man to win 30 games, cultivated his vices--gambling, drugs, mobster friends--over a longer period. He’d been in the majors eight seasons before the crash of exposure turned his life upside down.

McLain could never lose his tastes or get rid of his wrong friends once they were an ingrained pattern in his adult life. He’s in prison now--a huge, tragic joke. And an example.

Gooden is in his formative years, his changing years. He should still be able to make himself into something like the person he wants to be. Fortunately for him, the American principle of a clean-slate second chance seems to be locked firmly in the public mind in the case of appealing young 22-year-old pitchers nicknamed Dr. K.