LaMARR HOYT : A Trip Down a Twisting Road . . . Without Sleep

“Rotten luck,” LaMarr Hoyt is mumbling to himself. “I get a new Porsche, and it don’t work right. Rotten luck.”

He drives over to the Porsche doctor (his local mechanic), but somebody’s following him.

“Who’s behind me?” he whispers. “More trouble? Not again.”

Zooooooooom.

But Leadfoot LaMarr can’t ditch the car behind him. And, now, the guy in the car is waving frantically.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!”

Hoyt pulls up to a red light. Heaven forbid, he should run it and get a ticket and go back to jail. Now, this guy is out of the car and knocking on Hoyt’s window.

It’s a reporter Hoyt knows from his San Diego days.

So LaMarr Hoyt surrendered. Silent all these months, he finally opened up. “No, I ain’t no alcoholic,” he said. “And no, I ain’t no drug addict.”

Hoyt is a sleep addict, and if you wonder what that is, try going 6 1/2 years with little or no shut-eye. That’s what LaMarr Hoyt has done. Remember the 1983 Chicago-Baltimore playoff game when Cy Young Award winner LaMarr Hoyt five-hit the Orioles and won, 2-1? He had bags under his eyes that day, because he’d had a fight with his pillow the night before. Hadn’t slept a wink.

But that was just the start. In February 1986, doctors in San Diego told him he was probably washed up. The rotator cuff in his right shoulder didn’t rotate quite right. And if he had surgery, they told him there was a 95% chance he’d never pitch again. They gave him two choices: Surgery or pitch through it.

At this point, sleep was out of the question. Even before he’d seen the doctors in San Diego, he’d gone to a physician at his home in South Carolina to get some Valium and sleeping pills for his wife, Sylvia. He’d done some drugs as a kid. He’d even messed with Valium in his teens.

But now he was alone in San Diego, wondering if he’d gone from Cy Young to Sayonara.

“I was sitting there saying, ‘God, it’s over with. That’s it,’ ” LaMarr Hoyt remembers now.

Sylvia was back in South Carolina, but he had taken some of her Valium with him. He needed some sleep, so what the heck. He swallowed a few. And he had some marijuana on him. He needed some sleep, so what the heck. He smoked it up.

“I used it (marijuana) a lot late at night to sleep,” he says now.

Hoyt is a sleep addict. He’s someone who needs sleep so bad, he’ll do anything to get it. Hoyt smoked joints, popped pills, read boring novels, whatever it took to get some rest. Who knows why he couldn’t get any? His psychiatrist in San Diego still doesn’t know for sure, but he figures it’s probably a cumulative result of Hoyt’s troubled marriage, his troubled childhood and his bum shoulder.

“If someone doesn’t sleep for days and days, they tend to . . . look psychologically ill,” says Hoyt’s psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas Rodgers.

So is this why Hoyt got detained at the Mexican border with marijuana and Valium in February of 1986, just days after doctors told him he was probably washed up as a ballplayer?

Is this why eight days later, having just been served his divorce papers, he got a ticket for running a red light and for carrying more joints and for carrying a huge switch-blade?

Is this why he got arrested at the border with more pills and more marijuana in October of 1986?

Is this why the San Diego Padres released him and refused to pay his $3-million contract?

Is this why Commissioner Peter Ueberroth suspended him for a year?

All because the guy couldn’t sleep?

You decide.

Hoyt filed complaints against both the Padres and Ueberroth and recently won both rulings. Good thing, because he was going broke. The arbitrator, George Nicolau, decided Hoyt should get paid again and should play again, and the White Sox signed him last week, even though he might need shoulder surgery and might not pitch again until 1989.

Larry Himes--the White Sox general manager who wasn’t around when Hoyt played for the Sox--says he hates drug addicts, drugs, alcohol, whatever. Recently, he told his players to either wear socks to the ballpark or pay a big fine. He recently banned beer from the clubhouse, too.

But he agreed to sign the 32-year-old Hoyt because everyone--the team owner, the public relations director, the secretaries, the players, the trainer--all said: “Gee, Larry, LaMarr’s a great guy. We were shocked to see him get into trouble.” Himes then sent a memo to every minor leaguer and scout in the organization and told them they better not do drugs, that he does not condone them. But he wrote that everybody thinks Hoyt is a pal, so he’s going to give the guy another chance.

Hoyt, who is thankful to finally have something to look forward to, says he can use the White Sox doctors and their minor league system to get ready. He still feels a “twinge” when he throws, and tests were done last week to see if surgery is necessary.

Hoyt has a belly and a half now (he weighs about 250 pounds). The White Sox--who once asked him to go to a fat farm in 1984--have told him to diet.

But first, even before the rehabilitation and diet begin, Dr. Rodgers will put Hoyt in a “sleep clinic,” to find out what kind of sleeping disorder Hoyt has. They’ll hook wires up to his brain and try to find out.

Certainly, the White Sox are understanding. Owner Jerry Reinsdorf has eased the pressure, telling Hoyt not to worry about the comeback, not to rush it at all.

Reinsdorf, according to sources, feels indebted to Hoyt because of that great ’83 season and because of that great playoff performance against the Orioles when Hoyt had tremendous bags under his eyes.

LaMarr Hoyt has taken, in the last 16 months, a swerving Alice-in-Wonderland type journey through hell.

He never met a Mad Hatter, but he did meet Joan Kroc and Ballard Smith and Bob Fredricks and a cab driver named Javier. He went through a drug rehabilitation he swears he didn’t need, and he went to a jail with cable television. He and Sylvia argued but did not get divorced.

Of course, a lot of noteworthy things happened to him before 1986, but they weren’t much fun either. In a nutshell, his parents were divorced when he was 1, his father won custody, his mother took him back, his father took him back again, his father dropped LaMarr off at his sister’s house, quit his job, and reportedly didn’t come around again for a long while.

Hoyt began calling his aunt “mom,” and his cousins “brother.” One day, his favorite “brother” was killed in a rifle accident. Then, his uncle died. One good thing was that he married his high school sweetheart, Sylvia, but you know how that has turned out.

Still, he managed to reach the big leagues and win a Cy Young Award with the White Sox, and he won the Most Valuable Player award in the 1985 All-Star game as a Padre. He hurt his shoulder near the end of the 1985 season, and during the winter, he could hardly throw curveballs to a neighbor friend.

So that takes us to 1986. What follows is Hoyt’s version of the last 17 months.

LaMARR, WHAT HAPPENED ON FEB. 10, 1986?

Hoyt says he and Sylvia were having trouble at the time. He also says she was suspicious of there being other women. He also says there was no need.

“Sylvia was raising hell and causing trouble,” Hoyt says. “When you do what I do for a living, there’s always groupies, people hanging around. And the worst thing is when you get letters from people you don’t even know. I mean . . . females offer themselves in any particular way. I mean, you don’t ask for these things.

“I’d get them (letters) sent to the ballpark a lot. And they’d forward them to my house during the winter. She (Sylvia) would open them.”

Hoyt said that Sylvia was vacationing in Myrtle Beach, S.C., last week and was unavailable for comment. He wouldn’t reveal her exact location nor help to locate her so that she could be interviewed for this story.

“We were having marriage difficulties. My wife was upset all the time, crying. And I wasn’t sleeping well. So I went and asked for sleeping pills. I wasn’t sleeping at all. Never. Period. And my arm hurt. It’s hard sleeping with a bad shoulder.

“We were getting a divorce for one thing. Or talking about it. And that’s when I left for San Diego. We were separated.”

He had left the bottle of Valium with Sylvia, but he took a few pills with him on the airplane. He needed sleep, and that’s why he also had the marijuana. On Feb. 10, after he’d been told his shoulder was messed up, he figured he’d go to Mexico to look at jewelry.

Before he left, he says he stuffed some of Sylvia’s pills (he says between four and six) into his pocket, as well as two marijuana cigarettes. In case he wanted to sleep. He also says he carried between $2,000 and $3,000 in cash. For the jewelry.

He says while he was down in Tijuana, he saw a switch-blade in a store window. He had all that money, so he bought it for protection.

Hoyt says he also met a taxi driver, known only as Javier. He says he can’t remember how they met, just that Javier was sitting there on the sidewalk, and they began speaking. The subject somehow turned to Valium and sleeping pills, and Javier told Hoyt he could get him some more soon. Hoyt left Javier some money (“Over $100, that’s all I’ll say.”), and said he’d come back in a week or so to get the pills.

Hoyt headed for the border, where the U.S. Custom officers found the pills.

“I’d given her (Sylvia) the (prescription) bottle,” Hoyt says. “That’s why I didn’t have the bottle. If I’d had them in the bottle, I’d never gotten in trouble. I had them in my pocket.

“I told the guy what they (the Valium) were for, and they laughed and said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ But, see, I had the two joints in my pocket, too. Two joints, four Valium and a knife.”

Hoyt says the officers told him to pay a $575 fine and be on his way.

The next day, Padre President Ballard Smith called Hoyt. Smith was unavailable for comment last week, but he testified in Hoyt’s recent grievance hearing that he told Hoyt not to let it happen again or else. And he also wanted Hoyt to visit Bob Fredricks, who at the time was the Padres’ part-time Employee Assistance Program coordinator.

One day, Fredricks went to Hoyt’s home in Rancho Bernardo.

“I didn’t know the guy (Fredricks) was an ex-alcoholic,” Hoyt says now. “I didn’t know he was the head of Operation Cork (an alcohol rehabilitation center formerly owned by Kroc). I hadn’t been in the house in four months. I had some bottled water, some orange juice, Diet Pepsi and some beer. And I had a bottle of tequila sitting on the wet bar. It’d never been opened, and it’d been sitting there since the July before.

“I asked him if he’d like anything to drink. I was trying to be a gracious host. I said “All I’ve got is some OJ, some Diet Pepsi, some water and a beer if you’d like a beer.’ He looked at me with this weird look on his face and said: ‘A beer? I’m an alcoholic. I can’t have no beer.’

“It was kind of strange. I just thought, ‘Alcoholic? An alcoholic might want a beer.’ But, after that, he just kept looking at that bottle of tequila.”

LaMARR, WHAT HAPPENED ON FEB. 18, 1986?

That morning, Sylvia served him with divorce papers. He found out she’d hired divorce attorney Marvin Mitchelson. He figured sleep was out of the question.

He went out for a ride in his new red 1962 Corvette. He didn’t have any pills on him, but he had the marijuana and the knife. He ran a red light in Kearny Mesa, and the police were there. But they didn’t come quietly. Instead, the police drew their guns on Hoyt, and he claims they searched him illegally. They found the marijuana and the knife and wrote him up.

Word got back to the Padres again, and negotiations began to send him into the Hazelden Foundation, a drug and alcohol clinic which Joan Kroc--the Padre owner--supported financially. Smith called Hoyt’s agent, Ron Shapiro of Baltimore, and they worked out the details. Shapiro then called Hoyt in Yuma, Ariz., where spring training had just begun, and told him to go home to San Diego and bring everything with him. He didn’t tell him why.

Hoyt, who was going to be returning to Tijuana soon to get those pills from Javier, didn’t mind. He drove 175 miles home, and he called Shapiro when he arrived.

According to Hoyt, Shapiro told him to go back and bring all his belongings. Hoyt then drove 175 miles to Yuma, got all his stuff and drove 175 miles home. That’s 525 miles in one day, and Hoyt got home at 4 a.m. He didn’t mind, because he couldn’t have slept anyway.

At 7:30 a.m., on Feb. 27, Shapiro called Hoyt again. He told him Fredricks was coming over in an hour to take him to Hazelden. Hoyt argued that no one would be around to take care of his finances.

“Give me a couple of days!” Hoyt shouted. He broke down and cried.

But, as soon as he hung up with Shapiro, Fredricks showed up at the door.

According to Hoyt, Fredricks said: “Yeah, I knew you had a problem. I came in here that day, and you offered me that beer, and I saw that bottle of tequila over there. I think you’ve got a drinking problem. I don’t think you have a drug problem, but a drinking problem. But we’re gonna take you somewhere to find out. . . . You’ll thank me for this.”

Fredricks, who is now starting his own engraving business, would not comment on the events of that day.

LaMARR, WHAT HAPPENED IN HAZELDEN?

Fredricks and Smith told him he’d be there only five to seven days, but he was in there for 28. He came close to sneaking out.

“After five or six days in there, I found out there was no such thing as a five-to-seven day evaluation period,” Hoyt says. “So I got a little ticked off and called Ballard and told him where to stick his contract and where he could stick his baseball team and everything else. I didn’t appreciate what was going on.”

Hoyt says that Smith told him that if he really wanted to leave, give him a call the next day. Hoyt did call, but Smith pleaded with him: “You’ve been in there 10 or 11 days now. You’ve got only a little over two weeks to go. You can handle anything for two weeks.”

Hoyt says people screamed a lot in Hazelden. You would tell stories about your life, and counselors would shout: “You’re lying! You’re denying the truth!”

Hoyt says it got to him, so he clammed up and never told the truth.

Of Hazelden, Hoyt says now: “Worst experience of my life. Something I’ll never forget. . . . I’m up there on my own, and my paychecks are somewhere else, and I’ve got bills to pay, house payments, a condominium in Florida. It caused a lot of extra pressure I didn’t need. And, plus, all these people were all over my back about participating in the program. I couldn’t concentrate on the program at all. It was just a big, big mess.”

Nicolau, in his grievance report, said Hoyt never should have been sent to Hazelden, because he didn’t appear to have an alcohol or drug problem.

“I don’t have a drug problem, and I don’t have an alcohol problem,” Hoyt says now. “But when you have someone beating it into your head for a month that you do . . . man, I can say it now. Sending me there was the wrong thing to do. I can say it now, and it don’t bother me. Because I know it.

“I got in trouble at Kearny Mesa (running the red light). I’ve got two joints and a knife. So they (the Padres) say, ‘Oh, it’s his second brush with the law. He’s obviously got a drug problem. Let’s send him to a rehabilitation center.’ Two joints . . . that does not merit going to a rehab center. I guarantee you that.”

LaMARR, WHAT HAPPENED ON OCT. 28, 1986?

Hoyt pitched the 1986 season in pain. In the meantime, February’s incidents were put behind him. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of public nuisance, and teammate Tim Flannery nicknamed Hoyt, “Nuisance.” Everyone laughed.

On June 1, he’d gotten back with Sylvia, but they were still at odds. Some counselors had advised Hoyt to stay separated from Sylvia, but others said get back with her. He says he was confused, but he returned to her.

After the season, they decided to split up for a while. His shoulder still hurt, he wasn’t sleeping and he was smoking more marijuana so he could. On Oct. 28, Sylvia decided to go home to South Carolina, and Hoyt gladly drove her to the airport.

Before the plane landed, he was in jail.

He had been down to Tijuana a few days before with Sylvia, and he’d ordered some leather jackets. He loves leather jackets, has about 60 of them in his closet. So on Oct. 28, he decided to pick up the order.

He parked his Porsche at the border, and there were two marijuana cigarettes inside the car. For sleep, he says. Anyway, he walked across.

The jackets weren’t ready. He came walking out of the store and says he bumped into Javier, of all people. He hadn’t seen Javier since February, and Hoyt asked him for his money.

They went to a nearby restaurant. They spoke, and then Javier slipped Hoyt a couple of Valium. Javier then said he’d be back in 30 minutes. So Hoyt sat in the restaurant, drinking two pina coladas.

“I’d had a couple of pills, and now the drinks,” Hoyt remembers. “So I was pretty zapped when he got back, especially since I hadn’t slept in three days.”

Eventually, Javier came back with about 500 pills and said: “If you want your money, take it. There they are. That’s my money.”

Hoyt said he didn’t want the pills at first, but he says: “I hadn’t slept for about three days. Me and Sylvia were in constant arguments. That’s why she was leaving.

“I didn’t need the pills, but when they were offered, I said, ‘Well, damn, I haven’t slept in three days. It sure would be nice to sleep for a couple of days.’ It was a bad judgmental error. I screwed up.”

He walked for the border. He saw a trash can near the customs office.

“The funny thing about it is . . . I looked down at the trash can and said: ‘God, I don’t need these things. I should just chuck ‘em.’ Then I said, ‘Nah, they won’t stop me.’ ”

They did.

Hoyt had bought a leather polo shirt, and the guards searched through that. According to arrest reports, Hoyt was shaking visibly and had a bulge in his crotch area, where he was keeping the pills. But Hoyt denies this.

He went to jail and his Porsche was seized. Since it was his second offense, he felt he would go to prison. But his attorney, Howard Frank, told about Hoyt’s sleeping problem in court. Judge Roger Curtis McKee gave him a 45-day prison sentence at Eglin (Fla.) Air Force Base and put him on five years’ probation. His Porsche was forfeited, but Hoyt says his bank eventually offered the car back to him at full cost. He says he turned it down.

To this day, Hoyt thinks Javier set him up. “But I’ll never know,” Hoyt says.

LaMARR, WHAT HAPPENED IN JAIL?

Frank and Hoyt had requested he go to Eglin, otherwise known as “Club Fed.” There’s a pool hall there, a game room, a salad bar, four tennis courts, two basketball courts, a baseball field, a weight room, big-screen cable television, a newspaper stand and a Laundromat.

There are no barbed wire fences. It’s an Air Force base. There is a cement road around the base, and there are two parallel white lines painted on the road. Hoyt says if any of the prisoners crossed those white lines, they were considered escapees.

Hoyt had two main jobs in Eglin. Some days, he raked dirt around a certain dormitory from 7 a.m. until 3 p.m. every day, but he had an hour and 45 minutes for lunch. Other days, he was in charge of washing little towels at the base Laundromat. At 3 p.m., he was free to go, free to watch TV or pitch baseballs.

Neither job was very strenuous. Mainly, he says you had to look as if you were busy.

“As long as you follow the rules and do what they say, you won’t have any problems there,” Hoyt says. “The whole thing is that they give you something to do and you do it. You’re supposed to accept responsibility. I never got in any trouble. I played by their rules.”

Looking back, he says: “I found out what they mean by ‘Doing time.’ When you do time, that’s exactly what you do. You do time. You wait for your time to get up, and then you leave your bunk. You wait for the day to get over. You’re doing time. A strange experience, but it wasn’t bad. Not at all.”

LaMARR, WHAT HAPPENED WITH JOAN AND PETER?

He was at Eglin for 38 days. During that time, he found out that the Padres had released him and were refusing to pay his three-year, $3-million contract. He says Smith had told him nothing would happen until Ueberroth made a decision on Hoyt’s playing status. But the Padres released him, even before Ueberroth’s decision, and Hoyt says it was Kroc’s move.

In fact, Hoyt says Smith was the “fall guy.” He says Kroc--whom he’d met only three times--decided he was a junkie and wanted him gone.

“I think Ballard is a good person,” Hoyt says. “He’s not the owner. The lady can do what she wants, and she did. She’s on the McDonald’s restaurant board, but do you think she makes decisions for McDonalds? No. So why should she make business decisions for the Padres? See, it’s a very high-profile thing. If she wants to promote nuclear disarmament, she can get publicity as Padre owner.”

Kroc did not return phone messages last week and was unavailable for comment.

Meanwhile, Hoyt felt sorry for Smith at the recent grievance hearings. He says Smith, the former Padre president, was grilled on the witness stand and gave a lot of “I don’t know” and “It doesn’t matter” answers. But, afterward, Hoyt said he had a pleasant conversation with Smith.

What shocked Hoyt the most was Ueberroth’s decision to suspend him for a full season. Willie Wilson of the Kansas City Royals had once served a jail sentence for cocaine use and had subsequently been suspended for 45 days in 1984. Then, the commissioner was Bowie Kuhn, not Ueberroth. But Hoyt had never used cocaine.

“When you go and pay $10,000 in fines, forfeit a Porsche, spend 40 days in jail . . . I mean, if you ain’t got the message by then, something’s wrong,” Hoyt says. “And that’s why him throwing the suspension on me just didn’t make sense.”

Fortunately, Hoyt’s agent, Shapiro, advised Hoyt to invest in stocks and bonds. Hoyt badly needed cash after the suspension, so he sold $10,000 worth of investments to get by. Still, he says he became extremely depressed, ate a lot and grew fat. To make himself happier, he traded in his old Mercedes-Benz for a Porsche. Later, Nicolau overruled Kroc and Ueberroth, and Hoyt received his first Padre paycheck last week.

Hoyt giggled when he saw it.

LaMARR, WHAT NOW?

Hoyt must take a urine test once a month, and everything has come up clean so far.

“And it’s gonna stay that way,” he says.

Rodgers says before anything happens with the White Sox, Hoyt’s sleep must be evaluated. In fact, Hoyt says he may need to be on medication for the rest of his life if he wants to consistently get a good eight hours. In the meantime, Rodgers has told Hoyt to exert himself as much as he can during the day, so he’ll want to doze off at night. Hoyt rides his bicycle 10 to 15 miles daily, but it only makes him hungrier.

Hoyt says he goes out at night and has a few beers, but it never gets out of hand. If he gets caught for drunken driving, he will have violated his probation. They won’t send him back to “Club Fed” next time.

During the day, Hoyt yawns a lot. He says if he wanted to, he could maybe go to sleep in the afternoon, but only for a few hours and then there would be no chance of falling asleep that night. So he yawns and yawns and rarely sleeps--not more than three or four hours a night anyway.

He says he doesn’t take Valium. He says he hasn’t smoked marijuana since Oct. 28, the day he was arrested.

“I don’t do any of that anymore,” he says. “I can’t really afford to. It’d be really stupid for me to do it again. But I wouldn’t do it anyway. It’s something nobody needs. I wouldn’t advise it for anyone.”

He figures he has until 1989 to make it back to the big leagues, because that’s when his contract runs out. He’s shooting for 1989, but he’d love to make it back next year--if he can lift his shoulder.

Hoyt says his sleeping became a serious problem seven years ago. Rodgers says his insomnia could be caused by Hoyt’s inability to deal with his marriage, his childhood or his shoulder. But he’s not sure Hoyt’s insomnia is why he kept going across the border and why he kept smoking marijuana and taking pills. Rodgers, however, won’t dismiss Hoyt’s traumatic childhood as a factor.

Rogers says he’s certain that Hoyt isn’t a drug addict.

If he could sleep, LaMarr Hoyt says he would dream about pitching for the White Sox again.

Daydreaming will have to do.