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Recovery in the News
Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton inspires those who have battled addiction
David Mayo
The Grand Rapids Press
November 10, 2009
GRAND RAPIDS -- To the handful of poor people who can't find forgiveness in their hearts, Josh Hamilton always will be the crackhead ballplayer -- and in that equation, it isn't the Texas Rangers outfielder who deserves pity.
To the rest of the populace, particularly those of us who have endured our own substance-abuse issues, he is a flawed, admirable, once-troubled, now-recovering figure who has confronted his issues forthrightly and found peace.
He is not perfect. He relapsed this year and heard about it the minute he stepped back on the ballfield this spring. For any of us who has worked a 12-step program, you see it just about every week, in a much less public fashion: Joe was here yesterday; today, Joe went "back out."
There is an inherent sadness every time.
There also is an inherent energy to recovery, and to seeing someone like Hamilton, a childhood baseball prodigy who almost lost his career to a cocaine haze, as people embrace the former No. 1 overall draft pick whose all-star ascension was delayed several years.
"Our society is built on second and third chances," Hamilton said Monday before the Pine Rest Foundation dinner. "They want the underdog to come back from that, generally. There are always going to be those people out there who, whatever you do, it'll never be good enough once you made that mistake.
"But they don't look at the bigger picture. If they take a real look at their lives, the things they do and the mistakes they make, they wouldn't be able to judge you. I don't discount those people. I pray for the people who feel that way."
We talked about our different journeys to similar depths. About the program. About the impact of a higher power in an addict's life.
About dreams of using.
"The more time you get under your belt, the less it creeps out in your dreams -- or your dreams go away," he said. "When I just stopped using and was getting sober, like you said, I'd wake up, wondering where I was, thinking 'Did I do it?' Then, the pee-test guy started appearing in my dreams. So I had a choice in the dream -- either take a test or use. And I started taking the test. Slowly, it just started fizzling out."
He still drives down the road with the window down and will smell something "like the way cocaine used to taste." He breaks into a cold sweat.
"But that's where the scripture comes into play," he said.
Hamilton's story is well documented. He was fast-tracking in the Tampa Bay farm system until, while recuperating from a series of back injuries, two tattoo artists introduced him to cocaine between the 2001 and '02 seasons. By 2003, he was keeping drugs in his pants pocket and in his locker at spring training when he started showing up late, then not at all.
The day he returned from a leave of absence, he knew he would be required to provide a urine sample. He used that day anyway, leading to the first of several suspensions that kept him out of baseball until 2006 and delayed his major-league debut until '07, during which he underwent rehabilitation at eight centers.
The grandmother who finally helped him snap out of it died Saturday and will be buried this week. He came to Grand Rapids anyway to share his redemptive story.
For three weeks in January, he put baseball ahead of faith. During that time, he relapsed in Tempe, Ariz., where he was photographed licking whipped cream off one of several women with whom he was drinking.
He heard about it his first time back on the field.
"I had people screaming 'hypocrite' at me, 'Where's the whipped cream?' stuff like that," he said. "It was probably four or five guys. Then, I had probably 25 to 30 people stand up and say 'Hey Josh, we're praying for you, we believe in you.' "
It wasn't much different than when young children screamed "crackhead!" during his first trip around the National League.
"The less I responded to it, the more it went away," he said.
He doesn't attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings much now. He relies on faith and public speaking for personal catharsis.
"It's just a matter of putting myself out there," he said. "The more I talk to the media about it, the more I'm open, that's like my meetings. I don't get the feedback, like in a therapy session, but who cares what they say? It's my recovery, it's what I'm doing. It's a little different for everybody."
It is absolutely heroic, in a way that has nothing to do with hitting a baseball 500 feet.
© 2009 Michigan Live LLC.