The Huge Potholes Along Tobacco Road

Merchants of misery make money selling tobacco. Otherwise, the weed has never done any good for anyone. Thinking here of Brett Favre, Marge Shott, Brett Butler and Bill Tuttle.

Favre’s admitted addiction is to painkilling drugs including alcohol. The Packers quarterback also dips snuff and carries a paper cup to catch the loathsome drool of his saliva running brown. Someday, unless he gets lucky, Favre will pay for that addiction as well.

Schott is good at making a fool of herself. But seldom has the owner of the Reds demeaned herself more completely than by allowing Sports Illustrated to pose her with a cigarette in hand, its smoke rising toward the void of her prison warden’s face.

Butler’s doctors, done with surgery on his tonsillar cancer couldn’t say the cancer was caused by three years of tobacco use 15 years ago. But neither could they absolve tobacco. In fact, Butler’s cancer--squamos cell carcinoma--often is tobacco’s accomplice.

As for Bill Tuttle, anyone who has touched tobacco needs to know his story. There is no doubt what tobacco did to him.

Now 66, the former outfielder for the Tigers, A’s and Twins chewed tobacco for 38 years. At home in 1993. Tuttle heard his wife, Gloria, say, “Have you started chewing in the house now?”

“No,” he said.

She said, “Then what’s that you your mouth?”

It was a lump the size of his usual wad.

Only it wasn’t tobacco . . .

It was cancer.

Soon enough, most of Bill Tuttle’s face was gone. Today his wife says he “looks like a dried-up apple.” She calls the last three years “years of hell, misery and atrocities.”

What’s left of Tuttle’s face is a chilling example of the plastic surgeon’s art. He has no jaw and no teeth. Skin taken from his chest is taut beneath a haunting eye. His cheekbone is a piece of skull moved from the back to the front as Gloria Tuttle explains, “They revolved his head.”

The first of Tuttle’s six operations, done late in 1993, took 13 1/2 hours. “They did, like Roto-Rooter, digging for the cancer,” Gloria says. “And they kept finding it.”

At one point, Tuttle lost 73 pounds. So many nerves were cut during 50 hours of surgeries that he lost feeling in his arms. Unable to speak after one operation, Tuttle wrote his wife a note: “No more. I’d rather die.”

Instead he talks about it. The Tuttles went to spring training this year with Joe Garagiola, once a major league catcher and later a Hall of Fame broadcaster. Garagiola’s best work now is done for the Baseball Alumni Team, a charity helping players and their families.

He also brings passion to a crusade against smokeless tobacco. As chairman of the National Spit Tobacco Education Program, Garagiola invited the Tuttles to help warn players about snuff and chewing tobacco.

The U.S. surgeon general has said oral cancer rates are 50 times higher in chronic snuff users than in non-users. “The tobacco companies use the warm-and-fuzzy word ‘smokeless,’ ” Garagiola says. “ ‘Smokeless’ does not mean ‘harmless.’ ” The surgeon general also says tobacco kills more Americans than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, murders, suicides, drugs and fires combined.

“When we’d begin in the clubhouses,” Garagiola says, “the players thought, ‘Oh, great, another sermon from baseball.’ ”

Then he would say he and the Tuttles had come on their own nickel, not baseball’s.

“Bill and I are not especially religious people,” Gloria Tuttle says. “But we feel a calling about this.”

Baseball is a game of choice, Garagiola told the players: “You choose to throw a fastball. You can choose, also, to chew or dip. We just want to tell you, ‘Here are some of the consequences of that choice.’

“And if you don’t think of yourself, think of your mother, your father, your friends who come to the hospital for your two-hour operation and nine hours into it, they’re still waiting.”

Garagiola showed a picture of Bill Tuttle in his big league days. Then he introduced a man without a face. “Bill didn’t have to say a word to get his point across.”

It was a mortality check for young men who think they’re invincible, Garagiola says. “They might dodge the cancer bullet, but tobacco also brings high blood pressure and periodontal disease. Ten years before his cancer. Bill Tuttle had all his teeth removed.”

Tuttle first chewed tobacco when a teammate handed him the evil stuff. “It burned at first,” Tuttle says, “but he told me I’d get used to it. I got addicted.”

Garagiola had chewed. “A macho thing. And we did it out of boredom. Who could spit the farthest? Who the straightest? Who could drown that bug? There are two baseball traditions: scratchin’ and spittin’. I can’t do anything about scratchin’, but I’m trying to stop the spittin.’

“We pray to God that Brett Butler will be OK. What it’s done already is make him a lightning rod on this issue the way Magic Johnson was on the AIDS thing. I want Brett to know that if he wants to be part of our team fighting this, I’d love it.”

Before Bill Clinton threw the season’s first pitch, Garagiola persuaded the president to meet with interim commissioner Bud Selig and players union boss Don Fehr. They all spoke out against spit tobacco, Clinton using these words: “It disables; it disfigures; it kills.”

As painful as all this is, the more painful truth is that none of it is news. A decade ago, when Hank Aaron ran the Braves’ minor league system, he ordered a change in the players’ uniforms. The uniforms no longer would have back pockets.

Aaron says, “I did it so they couldn’t carry those snuff cans.”