Five O’Clock Comes Early

A Young Man’s Battle with Alcoholism

Bob Welch and George Vecsey

Robert Lynn Welch

1956–2014

Too Soon Gone

Contents

Prologue

One: In the Shower

Two: Mary Ellen

Three: A Tradition of Drinking

Four: Addicted to Sports

Five: The Fragile Athlete

Six: Learning to Drink

Seven: Majoring in Baseball

Eight: Going West

Nine: My First Alcoholic

Ten: The Promised Land

Eleven: The Series

Twelve: Crying for Help

Thirteen: People Were Watching

Fourteen: Out of Control

Fifteen: A Game of Twenty Questions

Sixteen: Holding Back

Seventeen: Part of a Family

Eighteen: First Steps

Nineteen: Letters to Mary Ellen

Twenty: Family Week

Twenty-One: Family Week—Monday

Twenty-Two: Family Week—Tuesday

Twenty-Three: Family Week—Wednesday

Twenty-Four: Family Week—Thursday

Twenty-Five: “Thanks for Being a Drunk”

Twenty-Six: Spring Training

Twenty-Seven: The Season

Twenty-Eight: A Warning

Twenty-Nine: My Other Team

Thirty: It’s Still One Day at a Time

Afterword

Appendix

Acknowledgments

For

Lue, Ray, Die, Donnie,

and

Meri

—BOB WELCH

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.

—GEORGE VECSEY

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 games—more 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 it’s 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 Bob’s this book.

After Bob’s 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 Welch’s 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 hadn’t 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 clubhouses—the 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 families—all 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, let’s 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 year’s season, I traveled to Houston and arranged an interview with him.

Was it my imagination that a few of Welch’s 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. I’ve 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. I’ve 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 o’clock batting practice late in the 1979 season. That episode in San Francisco’s 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 Times on how Bob Welch, the Dodgers, and professional baseball were trying to tackle alcoholism. A few months later, Bob and his attorney at the time, Robert L. Fenton of Detroit, asked me if I would like to write Bob’s autobiography.

Before I agreed, Bob and I met during the Dodgers’s last trip to San Francisco in September, 1980, while they were fighting for a pennant. We met in a restaurant, Original Joe’s, where the only seats available were at the huge oak bar. We sat a few feet from the bartender, who was pouring early-afternoon shots, which meant Bob had to eat where he could smell alcohol, hear it being poured, watch it being consumed. He was clearly fascinated by the process; it was a world he knew well—a world of companionship and good times but also a world that had led him to overturn cars, mistreat the woman he loved, antagonize friends, and jeopardize a career that offered fulfillment and a life of comfort.

At just twenty-three years old, Welch was already at a crossroads most of us will never face. Many alcoholics destroy their lives slowly, but an athlete with the pressure of a short career could do it in a few months.

“I’m sober today,” Bob told me. “That’s what counts. I can’t make any promises about tomorrow, but I’m sober today. If I follow the things I’ve been taught, I know I won’t die of alcoholism.”

Those words resonate with me now, more than ever.

At that lunch, I asked Bob if he was willing to tell everything about himself, to expose himself. He convinced me that he wanted to talk openly and honestly about his alcoholism so that others would know. As an athlete in a nation that so readily idolizes professional sports stars, Bob had a rare opportunity to tell his story about alcoholism and have people seriously listen.

I told Bob I would be honored to write his book, but that it had to be his thoughts, his story, and he had to approve every word.

Yet this book also became my book, in a way I could never have predicted. To learn more about Bob, I asked permission to spend a few days at The Meadows in Arizona, where he had received treatment. I thought I was going to sit in on the process, to be sympathetic, as I try to be as a reporter, perhaps even to help someone else with a problem. But I was told bluntly that there are no observers, only participants, at group therapy meetings. On my first morning there, several counselors challenged me not to hold back, but to share myself.

I spent five days at The Meadows, the entirety of Family Week, becoming part of the alcoholics and drug addicts and their families. I saw firsthand how The Meadows treated drug and alcohol addiction as a disease, and how people hide behind addiction to escape from themselves, from the feelings they cannot handle. Sometime in the middle of that highly emotional week, I realized that although I was not drawn to drugs and rarely drank, aside from some foolishness in my teen-age years, I had often used my work, my busyness, to keep from tapping into my own feelings.

I began to see plenty of myself in Bob—the nerves, the fears, the drive to succeed. I thought of him in the words of Robbie Robertson’s song “Stage Fright”: “But when we get to the end / He wants to start all over again.”

When that week was over, I was much better prepared to understand Bob. He came down to The Meadows and sat in on my graduation from the program. We hugged and I told him, “Now I understand what happened here. Now you can tell me more.”

Over the next year, I spent hundreds of hours with Bob, mostly sitting across a table with a tape recorder between us. I watched him saunter into the room with his athlete’s poise, tossing off short, hip phrases, the language of the clubhouse. But as the tape began to turn, I could see him crystalize from jock to sensitive young man, sharing stories of his twenty-three years of life. His face would soften, his speech would slow down, his eyes would stop darting, and his sentences would elongate into paragraphs, into pages. He recalled how he had morphed from one of the smartest children in his elementary school into an assertive jock in junior high. We talked about alcohol and sports, the ethos of the clubhouse, and the programs that treated alcoholism.

Bob was wonderful to work with. I always say that the two athletes whose books I helped write, Bob and Martina Navratilova, were both smart and intuitive and demanding. They thought like writers, like editors.

Bob and I would be disappointed if people saw this as just another ghostwritten celebrity autobiography. I have now written over a dozen books, and Bob’s is the one that gives answers, that could save a life.

—GEORGE VECSEY

Chapter One

In the Shower

I was sober, and it was the saddest I had ever felt in my life. My tears mingled with the warm spray from the shower, and I slumped against the wall of the shower, and I cried and cried and cried.

I thought about other showers I had taken—the laughter in the clubhouse when five or six Dodgers were washing off after a game, the insults, the lies, the good times. Even when I’d give up a home run in the ninth inning to lose a ball game, when I’d feel angry at myself for letting my team down, I could always look ahead to better days. In this shower, I was down. I had never been so far down.

I thought about the showers I had taken with Mary Ellen, giggling and kissing and getting soap and water in our mouths, and washing each other’s backs. That made me cry more, because Mary Ellen seemed so far away at this moment. I had never been so alone, so naked, so empty.

As sad as this shower was, I didn’t want it to end, because there was nothing ahead for me, nothing I wanted to do. I had reached the bottom. If I stayed in the shower all day, all night, I wouldn’t have to face where I was, or what I was. At least it was warm and private in that shower stall. Outside it was cold and frightening.

I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. I was a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers who once in a while drank too many beers. I was twenty-three years old, the kid who had struck out Reggie Jackson to win a World Series game, and when I walked near the stands, women would call to me, and Mary Ellen was always waiting for me back home. I had it pretty good.

There were times when I’d tell jokes, seem happy-go-lucky, the life of the party. I’d try to entertain, be more at ease with people, make people laugh. But what it was, I usually had a buzz on.

That’s a phrase I use a lot—getting a buzz on. People ask me what it means, how it feels, and the best I can say is “clumsy, woozy, good.” At first, I’d laugh my ass off, until I couldn’t talk anymore. I was funny at first unless I was drinking whiskey and then the results would be a lot more serious. The first beer was all I ever needed. If I had time for twenty, I’d drink twenty and get all fucked up.

That’s another phrase I use a lot for the stage that comes after getting a buzz on. It means being truly drunk, sloppy. When I’d get fucked up, I’d have an “I don’t give a shit” attitude.

I didn’t drink all the time, but usually when I did, problems would happen, including wrecking my car or starting a fight or passing out. One night on the beach I had overturned my Bronco, damn near killing myself and two buddies. I knew all this about me, but I had always said I would take care of it soon. I kept promising myself, but what the hell, I was young. You’re supposed to have a good time when you’re young.

As the shower poured all over me—I’d been in there half an hour by now—I thought about how I had arrived at this place, The Meadows, the day before. I was way out in the desert in Arizona, feeling lost, with people telling me I was an alcoholic. I didn’t believe I had that problem because I had always thought of alcoholics as Skid Row bums. I wasn’t a Skid Row bum. I was Bob Welch the baseball player—a Dodger. I didn’t belong at this place.

I was enraged. I didn’t know it was going to be like this when I arrived the day before. They put you in one of those zoot suits, those pajamas, man, you feel like you’re sick. You stay in those pajamas until you’re a good boy, maybe three or four days. But if down the line you’re a bad boy, they put you back in the pajamas again. That’s horseshit. I could have sat around in my jeans and it wouldn’t have made any difference. At The Meadows, they want you to feel like you’re sick.

Everybody’s walking around and the old pros at The Meadows, they look at you like, “What’s your problem, young boy?” I remember the first guy who asked me, I told him, “None of your damn business.” A lot of the guys with three or four days left, they mark off the time like they were in prison—big shots, they’re gonna show you how the program works. They knew I was a baseball player so they’d snicker a little. “Man, they got you in the right place.” I felt everybody was staring at me. I could even imagine their eyes on me in the private shower.

The longer I stayed under the spray of water, the more I could formulate my plan. I was going to dry off, get dressed, sneak out the back, and hitch a ride into Phoenix. From there I could wire Mary Ellen for some money to get back to Detroit. And at the airport, I could talk somebody into buying me a couple of beers and a few shots to forget about this place.

How did I get here? I felt a pulse of anger toward the sons-of-bitches who sent me here. Early in January the Dodgers had called me in Detroit and said they wanted to see me about something. I think I knew what it was about, but I got on the plane to L.A., got me a buzz on the way out. When I arrived in L.A., a guy named John Newton, who’s a consultant to the Dodgers, told me I was an alcoholic. I didn’t believe him but the way he put it, I was going to screw up my baseball career—my whole life, even—if I didn’t stop drinking now. Not six months, not a year, but now. So then I decided to get on a plane and fly to Phoenix, to this treatment center.

One thing I have learned about being an alcoholic is that we are the greatest bullshitters in the world. It’s part of our personality. John is an alcoholic, too, but I have to say he never bullshit me about The Meadows. I mean he never promised me any winter vacation. I couldn’t say he lied to me. He told me they’d dry me out, teach me about alcoholism, and put me in groups where I’d be confronted about my drinking.

What he couldn’t have prepared me for was my guts feeling like they were carrying a hundred pounds of sand. He never told me I’d be standing in the shower crying like a baby, afraid that I’d never go back to Mary Ellen, never go back to Dodger Stadium, never go back to laughing and cussing, never go back to being a picture on a baseball card. He never told me I’d feel lost and forgotten in a grubby little room which I was sharing with an alcoholic who had the shakes and snored in his sleep.

I remembered how John Newton turned me over to Pat Mellody, the director of The Meadows, a small, quiet guy who hadn’t seemed very friendly as he drove out of Phoenix into the rolling hills. I remember how I took notice of the landmarks as if I were Hansel dropping bread crumbs in case I wanted to split. On the way to The Meadows we had stopped for tacos, and a couple of people were having beers, so I said, “Maybe I should have one before I go there,” but Pat didn’t smile at my little joke and of course I didn’t have a coldie.

When we pulled up to The Meadows I thought what a dinky place, just a little old dude ranch on a hill, surrounded by mountains. It was nothing compared to the hotels where the Dodgers stay. I thought how I had arrived at those hotels with the Dodgers, and there’d be all sorts of people clamoring around: the autograph hounds, the fans, the groupies, the bellhops fighting to do favors for me. I looked around and nobody rushed over for my autograph. As Pat opened his car trunk and put my suitcase on the pavement, I noticed a few people lounging on chairs, and some others walking around. Everyone was curiously checking out the new arrival. But in my mind I wasn’t just another drunk. I was Bob Welch of the Dodgers, No. 35 in your program, right-handed pitcher, the kid who struck out Reggie Jackson in the 1978 World Series. But if I had been honest about it, I was also the kid who got so smashed in the last week of the ’79 season that they had to throw me into a cold shower to keep me from tearing down the clubhouse and starting a riot on the field. That was me, too.

Nervous and arrogant at the same time, I looked around to see if anyone was going to help me with my suitcase. Pat Mellody eyed me with a fishy look that said, “Carry your own bag. There are no stars at The Meadows, just people diseased with addiction who want to recover.”

I checked in at the office, signed some papers, and started casing the joint like I always do, looking for ways I could get out, seeing if there were any good-looking women, wondering who was staring at me. They put me in this room with a wino in the detoxification section, near the nursing station, and they said our door had to be open at all times.

Then they sprung the real news on me, telling me that for the first few days they would regard me as medically ill and I’d have to wear pajamas and a robe to all meetings. I was really angry. In the Dodger clubhouse you walk around naked with reporters standing around taking notes, even a few women these days, but that’s a clubhouse, home away from home. I didn’t want to wear pajamas and bathrobe in the middle of the day around a bunch of strangers. I could feel myself getting real angry when the nurse bought in these blue pajamas. I was thrilled when they didn’t fit me. The nurse said I could wear my jogging suit until they came up with new pajamas. That was a small victory. My only victory.

All dolled up in my jogging suit, I put on some cologne and sauntered forth to further my investigation of the joint. I avoided all those alcoholics. I avoided the counselors’ eyes. My counselor was a woman named Lynn Brennan, a soft and gentle-looking lady, around forty years old with piercing green eyes. I felt like those eyes could see right through me, and I didn’t want any part of that. “I really want to help you,” she said, “but the only way is if you help yourself. I can be really tough. I can really be bitchy at times.” I was looking for a safe harbor and I tried my luck at the nursing station. I figured nurses would be more sympathetic than counselors. Maybe I could bullshit them, do my cute-little-boy act, flash my pale-blue eyes on them. Man, I know how women feel when I flash my eyes on them.

“I have a few beers, but I’m not an alcoholic,” I told them. “I can stop whenever I want. I’m just here to make the Dodgers happy—so I can start the season again.”

They stared at me and nodded. It wasn’t until much later that I would learn how often they had heard that story. But I think I knew down in my guts that they knew. Everybody knew. The winos knew. The teen-age drug addicts with their bruises and scars knew. The puffy-faced housewives knew. All the patients knew that Bob Welch was an alcoholic. I wasn’t ready to admit it but deep down inside I knew my career as a Dodger was in jeopardy, and if my career was in jeopardy, what would the people back in Hazel Park think of me? What would my parents think about their baby, Bobby, screwing up? What if I blew it? What if I couldn’t beat this stuff?

If I was an alcoholic—and I wasn’t sure—I felt like this place had been waiting for me all my life, waiting for me to screw up. I had been practicing getting screwed up, wrecking cars, picking fights, messing up my life.

The shower was still pouring all over me, my eyes were pouring tears, and I felt my body shaking with sobs deep in my stomach. The shower was warm but my legs were cold. I turned the hot water as high as it would go. I wasn’t going to leave this shower until I knew: How was I going to get out of here?

Chapter Two

Mary Ellen

The thing that bothered me most as I cried in the shower was that they wouldn’t let me call Mary Ellen. I wanted to hear Mary’s voice, wanted to tell her I’d be back someday, inbetter shape, not the way I’d been the past year. But when I asked Lynn, my counselor, for permission to use the telephone, she told me no. Just flat-out no. I wasn’t at The Meadows to call my girlfriend, I was there to save my life.

I remembered John Newton telling me that The Meadows would be the toughest challenge of my life, even tougher than pitching to Reggie Jackson in the World Series. But right now, Reggie Jackson was a long way off. I was scared, lonely, and I wanted a reassuring voice to remind me who I was. I wanted Mary Ellen Wilson.

The last time I had spoken to Mary was on the telephone from Los Angeles, right after my four-hour conversation with John Newton. I was in my hotel room at the Biltmore and I told her, “Mary, I just committed myself,” like I had signed myself into a loony bit.

“Committed yourself to what?” Mary had asked. She thought I had committed myself to not drinking, like the New Year’s resolutions and all the other promises I had made and broken.

“I committed myself to a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Arizona, so I can stop drinking.”

Mary’s first instinct was to protect me and she had said, “You don’t have an alcohol problem. You just drink too much.”

Maybe I was trying to get sympathy and denial from Mary to reinforce that I was different, that I wasn’t like those other people with their red, wrinkled faces, their shakes from years of drinking, their puffing on three cigarettes at the same time, the look of an alcoholic all over them. I guess I wanted to pull the old “that’s not me” routine on Mary, I wanted to be reinforced. But I had just finished four hours with John Newton, the world’s greatest talker, and I was full of the spirit.

“I’m telling you, Mary, this guy gave me a test, twenty questions, and I scored eight out of twenty. This guy says I’m an alcoholic.”

Then Mary said, “Well, it’s good you’re going for treatment, because there will be psychologists there and you’ll find out a lot about yourself.” It was very important that Mary had given me support over the phone, that Mary thought I could get help at The Meadows.

Now that I look back, Mary was not aware I was that sick, that alcoholism is a disease. Most people don’t want to realize that. When Mary finally joined me for family week, people kept saying that one of the key factors in our relationship was that Mary was the motherly type and I liked to be mothered. There were reasons I was sick and maybe there was even a reason why Mary didn’t mind if I was an alcoholic. The counselors would later suggest that Mary and I had been searching for each other before we even met. But standing in the shower, crying my eyes out, I only knew that I missed Mary, that she was my girl, that I would feel better if she could be with me.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve known Mary all my life. We’re just a couple of kids from Hazel Park, who had the same friends and the same way of doing things.

Everybody knows how much I love Mary Ellen. I’m comfortable with her, I don’t have to put on any false airs when I’m around her. She knows me and I know her.

We’re not married, and I can’t claim I have any immediate plans in that direction. There are times I think my family is throwing hints that I should get it over with and marry Mary Ellen and have a few kids, but I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. In some ways I’m in my middle twenties, but in other ways I’ve been sober only since January of 1980, and my sober personality is just forming. I’ve heard Ryne Duren, the former Yankee pitcher, describe how he had to go through adolescence at the age of thirty-nine, when he confronted his alcoholism. I guess I’m ahead of the game, doing it in my twenties.

Mary is just out of college, working at her first job. I give her a lot of freedom and she gives me a lot of freedom. She’s got things she’s going through, she’s got to do things for herself. She wants to work. I was so happy when she got a job and came home with a big smile on her face. I could tell she felt good about herself.

Who knows what either of us is going to be like in another year or two?

Mary is slender, dark-haired, with an expressive face that lights up when she’s happy and pouts when she’s upset. She’s the fifth of six kids in a close family. Living with me in California, she misses her family, especially the weeks before Christmas, when she starts looking out the window as if she expects a snowstorm to come whipping in off the Pacific Ocean. It’s about that time I know she’s dreaming about being home in Hazel Park making Christmas cookies with the snow up to her ass.

Mary and I grew up about six blocks apart, but we never met until my senior year in high school. She was a sophomore in my chemistry class, giggling with her four girlfriends and taking up time in class, and knocking over stuff in the laboratory. I was a jock, sitting in the back of the room, thinking more about the basketball game than chemistry. Depending on whether I had gone out for a few beers at lunch or not, I was either very subdued or boisterous. Alcohol made the difference.

I was reading in the newspaper the other day that one third of high-school kids in America are problem drinkers, which they defined as being drunk six times a year, or having experienced “negative consequences of drinking with friends, family, school, the police, or while driving.” Negative consequences—that was me. By the time I was a senior in high school and meeting Mary Ellen, I had been drunk a lot.

The main reason I drank was to get drunk. I loved getting drunk, but I also drank because I was shy. Scared, really. Scared of girls. By the time I went to high school I had discovered that if I had a few beers, I wouldn’t be so awed of girls, who had such different bodies and acted so different from boys. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was in twelth grade, which is late in life, the way things are going these days.

I met Mary Ellen at a party or a dance or something and started flirting with her. When I went away to Eastern Michigan University, I used to come home and visit her. We got it together from that, even when she went to college over in Kalamazoo, at Western Michigan University.

It’s no secret that when I went away to play baseball in the Dodger organization, there would be other girls. There’s nothing in this book that Mary doesn’t already know about—not since The Meadows.

Whenever school was out, Mary would join me—San Antonio, Albuquerque, Los Angeles. We’d live together the way young couples do these days.

I never much thought about the way we acted together; just did what came naturally. The Hazel Park way of acting is to give a lot of verbal abuse, like among all the guys at the Rainbow Bar. I think it carries over into the way men relate to women. I would tease Mary because she was not particularly buxom. It was a way of getting a jab into her. I would tease her about her cooking also. Anything that made her smaller would make me feel better. But I didn’t realize that as I stood under the shower and cried. That realization was still ahead of me.

I never tried to hide my drinking from Mary Ellen. I never felt the need to. She had grown up around drinking. There are probably a few people in her family who drink a lot, just as there are in a lot of families. She takes a glass sometimes, but two glasses and she’ll fall asleep. In a lot of alcoholic relationships, one person will try to persuade the other into drinking more, but I don’t think it had gotten to that state. Mary never abused alcohol, at least around me. I didn’t care if she drank with me or not. The way I figured it, there was more for me if she didn’t.

Standing in the shower, I couldn’t remember all the bad deals I had pulled on Mary when I was drunk—that would come out later, and I would be amazed at some of the things I’d done. But even then, I could remember a few things:

• The times we’d go over to a neighbor’s house and we’d have shots of whiskey. Whiskey makes me mean, man, and I’d have about fifteen shots if I got started at all. There were a couple of times when I made her look like an ass in front of other people. I would say things like, “What the fuck are you doing here? I don’t give a fuck about you, anyway. I can get rid of you and find somebody else.”

I knew I did it, but I don’t know why. It was just my way of abusing her verbally, taking her apart like that. It was as if I were talking to myself.

• I never hit Mary or anything, but if I had continued to drink, I can see that later on down the line I might have hauled off and belted her. One time in a cabin in North Michigan, I was drinking shots and lost my temper really fast. I just got mad at her for no reason. I pushed her onto the bed and started ranting, “I don’t need you,” and then I fell asleep on the couch. She was miserable the whole night and the next day she told me what I had done. I didn’t believe her, but that shows the state of blackouts I was getting to.

• During some of the incidents, I might not even have registered 1.1 or 0.9 on the blowgun, which measures how much alcohol is in your body. One beer or twenty, I’d be in trouble. One time I was supposed to pick up Mary to go to her cabin up north. I went to the barber to get a haircut, and coming back, I had one beer. This lady pulled out of her driveway and I hit her in the right corner. I couldn’t see her. (I have a fetish for the right corner, which will be more apparent later in the book.) I really popped her, so I called up Mary and I said, “I’ve been in a wreck,” and she said, “You didn’t have a wreck, you just don’t want to go up north.”

Long after Mary joined me at The Meadows, I asked her what she thought about all the drinking I did. She said, “I just took it for granted. I thought it was what all guys do.” She had no concept of alcoholism, or that I might be an alcoholic. A lot of people are like that. They see somebody drinking and they say, “Well, that’s the way it is.” They don’t know how destructive it is, or how unnecessary.

A lot of people had been throwing hints to me and Mary Ellen about my drinking, but it wasn’t until I went to The Meadows that I could help myself. Standing in the shower was the lowest point of my life. I wanted reassurance that I’d be all right, which was why I wanted to call Mary. Deep down inside, maybe I knew I wasn’t all right and the only way I’d get better was to take care of myself one day at a time. Like the sign I had seen the first day I came to The Meadows: “Let Tomorrow Take Care of Itself.”

I felt energy stirring in me. I felt like my body could move again. It was like after losing a game, when you know you’ve screwed up, and you want to bounce back. I’m very competitive, I always have been. I do everything hard: pitch hard; love hard; drink hard. I never started anything in my life that I didn’t want to finish, whatever it was, a ball game or a bottle of booze. I’m bullheaded in some ways. Alcoholics tend to have strong feelings because we’re sensitive people, so sensitive we try to hide from ourselves. I knew what I’d think of myself if I snuck out of The Meadows and hitched back to Phoenix. I could see the mental headlines, just as if I’d given up a game-winning home run:

WELCH QUITS.

PITCHER THUMBS RIDE FROM THE MEADOWS.

Stops for Beer at First Bar.

All Messed Up.

I didn’t like those kinds of headlines. I don’t like losing.

I reached for the faucet and turned the water off. I felt like a damn prune, all wrinkled from forty-five minutes of hot water. My eyes stung from the crying and my chest ached from the sobbing. Deep down inside me, although I couldn’t put it into words just yet, I knew I was different. I knew I was an alcoholic. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, or what these people would do with me, but I was going to stick it out. I wanted to win.

Chapter Three

A Tradition of Drinking

I don’t know when I became an alcoholic, not even after thirty-six big days and nights at The Meadows. I do know I was an alcoholic when I went to The Meadows. My second night at The Meadows, right after my long shower, I listened to the symptoms of an alcoholic and it made sense to me. I said, “Shoot, that’s what I am,” so I got up at the AA meeting and said, “I’m Bob, I’m an alcoholic.” But how did I get there? How does anybody?

I go back home and my mom takes out the family albums. There’s a picture of me striking out Reggie Jackson, a picture of me afterward, big smile on my face. I wasn’t drunk when I struck out Reggie. I was stone sober for that man. I didn’t even get drunk afterward. Went out and had a couple of belts with my family and rushed home to pack for the trip to New York. But I was already an alcoholic.

I sure as hell was an alcoholic the time in 1979 I chugged a bottle of wine in fifteen minutes and got drunk on the team bus giggling and crying, drunk as a skunk. I was an alcoholic when I gave Mary Ellen a hard time, and I was probably already an alcoholic on that college all-star tour to Japan when I stood on the edge of the hotel roof and started tightrope walking.

I know Rod Dedeaux of the University of Southern California, our head coach on that Japan trip, told me I was acting “just like an alcoholic,” which was the first time I had ever been called that. In the best of worlds, I would have thanked him for the insight and maybe done something about it. As it was, it scared me for a second and then I forgot about it.

The one thing I know from being at The Meadows is that I can’t blame baseball for my being an alcoholic. I’ve noticed that since Darrell Porter and Lou Johnson and I and some of the other guys went to The Meadows, there have been a lot of stories saying alcoholism and baseball go hand in hand. I don’t think you’ll hear any of us saying that.

If I went around blaming baseball for my being an alcoholic, could writers blame the tensions of a deadline? Could assembly-line workers blame the tedium of the assembly line? Could mothers blame the responsibility of raising children and keeping house? Can 10 percent of the population stand around and blame their occupations, when alcoholics reach into every possible job and income level in this country?

Like most alcoholics, I wouldn’t mind having an excuse for my drinking. But I guarantee you, if you walked into an AA meeting and asked people if I am an alcoholic because of major-league baseball, they would say, “No way.” Alcoholics are great people for denial, excuses. Bullshitting, really. They’re good at it because they’ve worked at it for a long time: telling lies about where they’ve been. Part of the business of alcoholics is covering up. I’m not saying alcoholics are born liars. They develop the skill because they’re alcoholics.

I see now where I used to need alcohol at every point in my life. It’s like Bo Belinsky said when he was everybody’s favorite playboy with the California Angels: “I drank when I lost and I celebrated when I won.” I reacted the same way. The booze helped soften the losing and helped heighten the winning, but the main thing was, I couldn’t face reality. The reality was too intense, so I would use a chemical to give me the mood I wanted. Alcohol is a chemical, a drug. When you’re an alcoholic, you are addicted to a drug, is what it is.

Baseball is no different from other occupations, other ways of life, but I will say this: Baseball makes it easy for the alcoholic to move right along. There’s beer just for snapping your fingers in the clubhouse, there’re all kinds of parties, and you’re on the road a hundred nights a year. You walk through a hotel lobby, and people are standing in line to buy you a drink. It’s easy to say yes, if you’re inclined to say yes in the first place.

Does baseball have more alcoholics then the 10 percent in the rest of the population? I couldn’t say. Don Newcombe, the old Dodger pitching star, who kept tabs on me while I was drinking, thinks alcoholics might be 12 to 15 percent of ballplayers, maybe more. Ryne Duren, who is now an alcoholism counselor, says 35 percent of ballplayers have a drinking problem, including some of the guys you see on those amusing beer commercials. Some alcoholism doctors say no occupation has a higher percentage. It’s hard for me to say. I know a lot of ballplayers who drink, including one or two who are going to lose their families, their livelihood, maybe even their lives if they don’t do something about it. I haven’t gotten around to grabbing anybody by the shirt and saying, “Look, alcoholism is a nasty disease. You’ve basically got three choices: Quit, go insane, or die.” But if they’re afraid they’re going to die, they know where I am. Maybe people will listen to me more than they would to other people, because I was the first player to go through The Meadows.

I don’t mean just ballplayers listen to me. I mean people, people in my neighborhood, high-school kids. I was in high school just a few years ago. If some doctor or teacher had gotten up in front of class and said, “Alcohol is dangerous,” we would have laughed in his face. If it was lunchtime, chances are we already would have been flying on beer or pot or reds—pills to bring you down. But if a ballplayer, somebody near my age, had warned me, maybe I would have listened. I hope young people listen to me.

But where did it start? I look at my family photographs, and I see a regular little kid, well-dressed, well-fed, usually in the company of my mother and my father, or my sister, Diane, or my brother, Donnie. A good family, you can tell from looking at us. My father, Rubert, ran a lathe in an aviation factory for over thirty years. My mother, Lou-Nell, was always around when I was growing up.

When I was little, I was one of the brighter kids in the class, on the honor roll, doing artwork, starting to get attention for athletics. A little nervous, but a good kid. And a future alcoholic.

At The Meadows, they have a saying: “Nobody goes out and thinks up ways for screwing up their kids.” I mean, there’s no handbook for turning your pupil or your star athlete, your brother or your sister, into an alcoholic. They say there’s no blame involved. It just happens sometimes. After I came out of my lengthy shower and started paying attention to what they were saying, I could see where I had my patterns of not showing my feelings even when I was younger. But compared to some of the environments I heard about at The Meadows, mine was pretty good.

Of course, the Welches are a drinking family. Everybody knows that when we get together, we like to drink and have a good time. I’m not pointing a finger at my family, because there are families like us on every block in town.

We didn’t sit around and get bombed every day. No Skid Row bums. Drinking was associated with weekends and holidays and family gatherings, good times and bad times. At Christmastime we’d have parties at my uncle’s house, and like my uncle says, “Well, hell, Bob, you thought it was the right thing to do growing up—to go out and get drunk.” When Welches get together, we have a lot of fun. We love each other but there is a lot of drinking around.

I remember my father would drink sometimes on Saturday, and when he came home, Donnie or Diane or I would open a can of soup for him—that can opener was a challenge to us. We would have trouble opening the can, but once the can was open, he would heat the soup himself. It was always Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. No other kind would do. It was like a little ritual sometimes on Saturday, but I never remember my father doing anything really bad. He’d finish the week and get a few drinks, just like a lot of other working people.

On my mother’s side, there was drinking, too. All her brothers drank except for one, Teddy, the baby in the family. Maybe from seeing all his brothers drink, he didn’t drink much at all.

I remember a couple of years ago at Thanksgiving time, my Uncle Charles was killed. He was driving his truck and some of those flammable chemicals exploded on him. He hung on for five weeks before he died, and when he died my mother and I drove down to Paducah, Kentucky, for the funeral, and I know that every night I was down there, I got as drunk as a skunk, partying with my Uncle Charles’s daughters. Go out every night and get drunk.

I went to pick up my Uncle Jiggs in St. Louis and I was so drunk I drove eighty-five to ninety miles per hour all the way to Paducah. Just flew along, lucky not to get killed. None of the Welches could ever drink whiskey and control themselves. They’d do some crazy stuff, which is the way I got when I went over the line.

We never really talked about the drinking except in a joking way. We’re a fun family. My Uncle Bud says, “Hell, you think you got a drinking problem, I’ve spilled more than you’ll ever drink.”

My mom never drank too much and she’s been very cautious about alcohol ever since The Meadows. She’s been going to meetings of Al-Anon because she wants to be able to deal with drinking better. She says her life has been very simple compared to other people dealing with alcoholics in their families. She has met women whose husbands beat them up or wouldn’t work, and my father has never done anything like that. But she feels bad that her son turned out to be an alcoholic, and she says Al-Anon is helping her understand more about herself. Like all mothers, she gets to feel guilty about her role, but I try to assure her that as far as I’m concerned she is a loving mother, and always has been.

My mom is dark-haired, a combination of Irish and Cherokee, like lots of people from Kentucky. I’ve read some books that say the Irish and the American Indians have a low tolerance for alcohol. My father’s mostly Irish, too, so maybe that has something to do with my own weakness.

My mom has always been around for me when I needed her—when I was a little kid, and later when I was at The Meadows. I think she’s had a lot of hard times in her life, and I’m sure she’d have liked to have more things. But I know that when I was a little kid and I asked for five dollars for a bat or a ball or whatever, she always found the money. And a lot of love besides. She knows more about hard times than any of my generation can know.

My mom came up to Michigan in 1942 because she was in a family of nine kids, and couldn’t find anything to do back in Paducah. She came up and lived with an aunt and worked at U.S. Rubber and got to like life up North. She was telling us recently how she arrived at night, just a teen-aged girl from Paducah, and she saw the bright lights on Michigan Avenue, and she said, “Why, this is just like New York City,” what she imagined a big city would be like, should be like. So she always wanted to stay in Detroit.

A lot of people were moving to Detroit in the Depression and during World War II, particularly poor whites and blacks from the South, looking for work in the factories, just like my mom. The whites seemed to find neighborhoods where they had lots in common. I bet most of the people in Hazel Park and Ferndale have southern roots. We’re always talking how it’s a red-necked neighborhood, that’s the word we use. It’s part of Detroit like in the song that Bobby Bare recorded, “Detroit City.”

There are a lot of people who came to Detroit to make the cars, “but by night they make the bars.” Lots of them still think of themselves as southern, and they want to go back down to Kentucky or Tennessee or wherever. Growing up around Detroit, I’m definitely from Detroit, but I’d say my roots are southern. My dad is definitely a southern man, a kind of quiet, very proud man, with certain ways of behaving and thinking he wouldn’t change. Even while I was writing this book, he was contemplating a move to Paducah, so he could go fishing and live a more peaceful life.

There was a time when my father couldn’t wait to get out of the South. He grew up around Newport, Arkansas, and picked a lot of cotton when he was a kid. He came North in 1939 “looking for a better life,” as he puts it. He came to Detroit and lived with his older brother, Ross, who later passed away. My father washed dishes at first, waited on tables, and then got a job in a tool-and-dye company. Except for the time out for the Army, he’s been working in Detroit ever since.