George Vecsey - Five OClock Comes Early: A Young Mans Battle with Alcoholism

Five OClock Comes Early

A Young Mans Battle with Alcoholism

Bob Welch and George Vecsey

Robert Lynn Welch

19562014

Too Soon Gone

Contents

For

Lue, Ray, Die, Donnie,

and

Meri

B OB W ELCH

To Marianne Graham Vecsey

When the laughter or the tears erupted at five in the morning, during my week at The Meadows, she was with me, to share the feelings, just as she has always been with me, even before we met.

G EORGE V ECSEY

Prologue

Bob Welch saved lives. This is not some official baseball statistic but rather the testimony of people who are sober today because of his shining example.

Bob won the Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in the league in 1990, winning twenty-seven gamesmore than any pitcher since. He loved being a ballplayer, loved chatting with the fans, the groundskeepers, and the security guards, the working people around the ballpark. He remained a big kid in some ways but also had an intense side that recognized the daily battle for sobriety.

Most athletes recoil from being role models, but Bob put himself out front when we collaborated on this book in the early 1980s. He was one of the first athletes, one of the first public figures, to discuss what its like to go through rehab for addiction. He had the disease and displayed tremendous strength and fortitude in not only telling people about it but also beating it back on a daily basis, with the rough spots that every addict knows.

He also treasured his impact on people who read this book, who heard him talk about his drinking, who recognized themselves in him. I know it reached a lot of people because I have received letters and e-mails from young people in danger of not growing old. A famous sportswriter told me confidentially he better understood addiction in someone close to him after reading Bobs this book.

After Bobs pitching career ended, we kept in touch. I never stopped thinking of him as a hero for saving his own life, for setting an example. He was so much younger than me; I thought he would always be here.

Instead, he dropped dead at the age of fifty-seven, in 2014, with no warning. Many of us are still trying to deal with that.

The best way to honor him is to re-issue this book.

The first time I heard of Bob Welch was on a warm October night in 1978, while I was driving from Boston to New York. I had timed my journey so that I could listen to the second game of the World Series, between old rivals, the Yankees and the Dodgers.

The game came down to two outs in the ninth inning, a duel between Reggie Jackson, the highly intelligent and egotistical slugger who had earned the nickname Mr. October for his exploits in previous World Series games, and Bob Welch, a young right-handed pitcher who had been brought up from the minors that summer. (I was not covering sports in those days and had not paid attention to Welchs name until he entered the game.)

The broadcaster described every snarl and flex by Jackson, and the way Welch peered down at the plate, eyes blazing, throwing fastballs, one strike after another. To heighten the tension, Jackson just managed to flick off a foul ball.

Welch heaved one more fastball and Jackson missed, dramatically ending the game. Jackson flung his bat angrily and stomped off the field. To this day, their confrontation remains one of the most exciting moments in World Series history.

The next time I noticed Bob Welch was in March of 1980. I had recently been enticed back for another whirl in covering sports when a brief item in the paper said Welch had announced to his Dodger teammates that he was an alcoholic, and had just completed a rehabilitation program. This was an unusual step in 1980; people did not talk about treatment back then. I was curious about an athlete who could admit being an alcoholic at such an early age.

At that point in my life, I hadnt had much personal contact with alcoholism. I have since become much more aware of the disease, all around me. In a 2013 survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 24.6 percent of people ages eighteen or older admitted to binge drinking in the past month. Back in 1980, the public perceived alcoholism as a problem among a tiny minority of others.

The journalist in me decided that it took a tremendous amount of courage for Bob Welch to stand up in a clubhouse and admit to his alcoholism. I know a thing or two about clubhousesthe intense focus on performance, on the next game.

I later learned that as long as Bob was winning, his drinking was regarded as amusing. In my first ten years as a sportswriter, in the 1960s, I had seen athletes who gambled, drank, took drugs, had an overactive sex life, and were rotten to their familiesall of which was tolerated by their teammates as long as they could perform on the field.

In working with Bob on this book, I came to realize that this clubhouse tolerance was little different from the traditional attitude toward alcoholism in the office or the home. As long as Pop brings home the check, most of the time, as long as Mom fixes supper, most of the time, lets not say anything.

Bob Welch did say something. He stood up in the Dodgers clubhouse and said, I am an alcoholic, I will always be an alcoholic, but I am trying to combat my illness.

In the spring of 1980, my editors at the New York Times and I decided to write about Bob Welch, a twenty-three-year-old alcoholic. In the first week of that years season, I traveled to Houston and arranged an interview with him.

Was it my imagination that a few of Welchs teammates in the clubhouse were abrupt when I asked if anyone had seen him? Were a couple of Dodgers threatened by his public statement about alcoholism? Did they think he was trying to reform the world? Did they resent visitors asking about alcoholism in a major-league clubhouse where beer flowed like tap water?

Would Bob Welch feel threatened or annoyed by one more journalist poking into his private life?

I soon discovered that Bob was more than eager to talk about himself and his illness. He arrived at the ballpark many hours before the game, dressed in his blue-trimmed Dodgers uniform, and pulled on a blue satin Dodgers jacket. He armed himself with Copenhagen smokeless tobacco (the kind you keep between your cheek and your gum, not the kind you chew), pronouncing it a filthy habit. These days, baseball teams are not allowed to supply tobacco products. But in 1980, before people realized how harmful it is, tobacco was a staple on the clubhouse shelves.

Bob showed me his long, athletic hands with the fingernails chewed down to the flesh, saying it was another bad habit. Ive got to stop doing this. He found two empty paper cups, one to catch his spray of tobacco juice, the other for coffee, and led me through a tunnel toward the dugout. One of the Dodgers nodded at the cup of coffee and asked leeringly, Whaddaya got, Welch, some whiskey? Bob smiled and said, Hell, yes. He said later that he enjoyed the teasing. I need some humor in my sobriety. Ive got to be able to joke about it.

He told me how drinking had taken control of his life, how his personal cocktail hour had been starting earlier and earlier in the day, how he had shown up drunk for five oclock batting practice late in the 1979 season. That episode in San Franciscos Candlestick Park had tipped the Dodgers off about his alcoholism, he said.

We must have talked for about an hour and a half that afternoon, sitting in a quiet dugout in the Astrodome. At times, Bob would stare out at the empty field, his eyes growing distant, even vacant. At other times, his light-blue eyes would bore into mine. I liked him, and was happy about his life-saving decision; I went back and wrote a two-part series for the