Beyond Belief by Josh Hamilton, Tim Keown Page B

are the words, “The EAP director will arrange for an appropriate and confidential medical evaluation of the individual, and will assist in prescribing the appropriate treatment, counseling, and after care.”
    I’ve often thought about that episode — how it happened, whether it was right, if I should have questioned the confidentiality aspect of my conversation. I always come back to the same answer: It needed to happen that way. The script was being written somewhere else, and even though the sequence made no sense to me or anyone around me, it made sense to someone somewhere.
    That night, I made the toughest call of my life. I punched in my parents’ number back in Garner, took a deep breath, and prepared myself for the worst. I closed my eyes as it rang, wanting to hang up but knowing I couldn’t. My daddy answered. We made small talk for a few seconds, but there was no hiding my mood. Daddy knew there was something going on, so I stopped trying to pretend otherwise.
    “I’m going away for a while tomorrow,” I said.
    “Okay. What for? Your back?”
    “No, the team’s sending me to Betty Ford.”
    No response. The silence was thick as he tried to digest the information.
    “What? Wait, what are you talking about, Josh?”
    I could hear my momma in the background, reacting to his disbelief. He held the phone away from his ear for a second and said, “They’re sending Josh to Betty Ford.”
    “Betty
Ford
?” she asked. “The
rehab
place?”
    I sat there, in an empty apartment in Florida, listening to this drama play out in the big house in North Carolina. They were shocked, angry, confused, but there had been signs. The tattoos, the injuries, the time away from the game — believing I was a drug user didn’t take the huge leap it would have just two years earlier.
    Feeling the need to fill the silence, I said, “They sent me to talk to someone about my injuries and I told him I’ve been experimenting with drugs. They called me back and told me I’m going to Betty Ford.”
    They were helpless. They didn’t understand. Nobody did, least of all me. They wanted to come down, but I was leaving the next day. They wanted to go with me, but they knew they couldn’t. They wanted to rewind and start over, figure out how to keep this from happening in the first place, but that was impossible.
    They didn’t want to hang up, but there was nothing left to say.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    THE DRIVER PICKED ME UP at the airport and drove me through the desert and past the rows of palm trees to the front of the famous Betty Ford Clinic, a sprawling single-story white complex in Rancho Mirage. I walked through the doors that had opened for hundreds, maybe thousands of well-known people seeking to reassemble their lives.
    This whole trip was a shock to me. I didn’t know what to expect, and I didn’t really know why I was there. I was met at the desk by an intake coordinator, who gave me a quick tour of the facility — dining room, meeting rooms, all very nice — before showing me to my room and introducing me to my roommate. I shook his hand but the name filtered in and out without registering. I wasn’t interested.
    I walked around in a daze, looking and nodding but not really hearing or seeing. It felt like I was living somebody else’s life.
    I didn’t associate myself with addicts, and that was the first issue wrestling around in my mind. I’d used maybe seven or eight times to that point, and now I was about to hear that I was powerless in the face of my addiction and all that other stuff. It just didn’t compute.
    The label
addict
had been attached to me just the day before, and sitting there in my room with a suitcase at my feet gave me some time to sort through the events of the last twenty-four hours. My attitude began to change from one of straight confusion to one of anger. I didn’t know why the Devil Rays would unilaterally decide to ship me off to a treatment center, where the label was affixed