Beyond Belief by Josh Hamilton, Tim Keown Page A

I sat and thought about it for a minute. I ran it through my mind at warp speed, over and over: Should I? Should I trust him, or should I leave?
    I stayed in the chair.
    What if I had gotten up and left? How different would my life have been?
    “There is something,” I said.
    “Yes . . .”
    “The last couple of weeks . . . well . . . I’ve kind of been experimenting with drugs.”
    No shock registered on his face. He retained his professional detachment and asked the normal questions — which drugs, how often, with whom. I had used cocaine with the tattoo guys seven or eight times — roughly every other day — to this point. I continued to like it, and I saw no real reason to stop. Since I wasn’t playing, I wasn’t concerned that it might hurt my ability to play. I liked it, and I liked how it let me enter a different world and forget my problems.
    He nodded politely to keep me talking. He didn’t act judgmental. We talked about the set of circumstances — frustration with injury, boredom, loneliness — that led me to make such a flawed decision.
    I don’t know where I expected this discussion to lead. I knew he worked for the team, but I believed it was a confidential doctor-patient conversation.
    My decision to bring up the issue showed how conflicted I was. As I was making my confession, it didn’t seem real to me. It felt as if I was talking about someone else, describing someone else’s life. Experimenting with drugs? This couldn’t be me.
    The focus of drugs in baseball had shifted from the cocaine era of the 1980s to the performance-enhancing era of the past decade. In 2001, MLB unilaterally implemented its first random drug-testing program for minor-leaguers. All players outside the forty-man roster were subject to testing for “ steroid-based, performance-enhancing drugs, plus drugs of abuse (marijuana, cocaine).”
    Steroids never interested me. I would wonder at times how much better I could be if I did them — mostly when I saw someone less talented tearing it up with the extra help — but I was never tempted to do them. Strange as it sounds coming from me, I thought taking performance- enhancing drugs would cheat the game. I had always been taught to respect the game, and whenever the topic of steroids came up, my daddy would say, “If you can hit the ball five hundred feet and the fences are four hundred feet away, why do you need to hit it any farther? And if you can throw the ball from the outfield fence to home plate, why do you need to throw it any farther?”
    The strength of the Major League Players Association made the minor leagues the first battleground in the drug war. The first positive test carried a fifteen-game suspension, the second thirty, the third sixty, and the fourth a full year. A fifth offense called for a lifetime ban from professional baseball.
    The morning after I met with the psychologist I received a call from the same EAP employee who had arranged the appointment.
    “Josh, we’re sending you to the Betty Ford Center for rehab,” he said.
    His words took my breath away. Rehab? You mean drug rehab? The doctor turned me in? He went right back to the Devil Rays and told them what I confided. I couldn’t speak, but my mind raced.
    I couldn’t keep this secret. People will find out. I’ll have to tell my family. This will follow me wherever I go.
    He kept talking, but I wasn’t really listening. Something about leaving tomorrow, a plane, thirty days in treatment, the best thing for me, get my head straight, come back ready to play.
    I didn’t really know what to say, but I blurted out something that probably made no sense. I was in shock. I had no idea how that conversation had led to this. I had tried cocaine seven or eight times, and now I was branded an addict? I was going to Betty Ford?
    I hadn’t failed a test. I had simply confided in a professional. I hung up the phone and tried to make sense of the past twenty-four hours. Right there in the drug policy