My Dad, Yogi by Dale Berra

Author:Dale Berra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2019-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

Nobody could have convinced me back then that I would harm myself and my career. It seemed so easy, even natural. When I went to spring training for the ’80 season, I had no intention of leaving cocaine behind in New Jersey. It’s not like I announced to my Pirates teammates, “Hey, anybody got some blow?” No one would ever do that. You just made yourself open to it when the opportunity arose. For example, many of the players stayed at the Franklin Plaza Hotel downtown. One night, after dinner and a few drinks, I, Dave Parker, John Milner, and Lee Lacy wound up in someone’s room. We were just hanging when a guy named Curtis Strong came in. He was a caterer and supplied our clubhouse buffet table, and as a sideline sold coke to players. I’d seen him before but just ignored him. But this time when he went into a side room with some of the guys, I followed along. He asked me what I wanted, and I told him. He then pulled a tin foil package from his pocket. I handed him a hundred-dollar bill and he handed me the coke.

That wasn’t the first time I’d scored some coke, or the last. I had other places I could get it, and it got to a point where these kind of deals kept going down, at hotels, even inside the clubhouse. Another guy was named Shelby Greer, a friend of Dave’s who sometimes came on road trips with us. We had a very open clubhouse in those days. Anybody could come in. All you had to do was tell the guard to let them in. Somebody always needed something. Not everyone did coke. Pops, for one, never did coke in his life, but he did use greenies; we all did.

It wasn’t like we were sneaking around. It wasn’t a crack house kind of thing—well, maybe it was for Rod Scurry, who got into freebasing cocaine, the much more dangerous form of the drug that’s smoked out of a pipe, which soon became known as crack. Rod took it so much further than the rest of us that we kind of avoided him, but it was hard ignoring a guy who sat at his locker swearing that snakes were crawling up his arms. He’d frantically shake his shoulders to get rid of the imaginary crawlers. We knew something was up with Rod but pretty much left him alone, and he pitched well, so we never thought, “Hey, let’s get this dude some help.”

Doing cocaine wasn’t something we feared. We just got together like ballplayers do, and instead of getting liquored up, we did something else that made us feel good. With my personality, I felt too good. I liked it too much, although I consciously kept it on the lowest level of usage, purely recreational, a little each time. I never gave Chuck a reason to think I wasn’t completely professional. I never missed a game, a plane, or a team banquet or engagement.

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