When they announced I had been given the league MVP award, my daddy shook my hand and said, “You’re on your way, Josh.” He was proud and I was happy, but there was a sense of inevitability about the path my career had taken.
After all, this was the way we expected it to be — certain milestones needed to be met on the way to the ultimate destination. A Class A MVP award was nice, but I had to believe there was more out there where that came from.
IN THE WINTER months after the 2000 season, with an MVP to my name and thoughts of the big leagues bouncing through my head, I spent a good part of the off-season in the Tampa area, in a small house we bought to use during spring training and, with any luck, the regular season.
My parents stayed home in Garner, outside Raleigh, in the big ranch house on twenty-two acres we bought to be our family’s main home. While I was working out and getting ready for the season, I made a decision: I would get a tattoo. A growing number of players had them, and since that day in Wendy’s with Carl Crawford I had secretly — at least secretly as far as my family was concerned — wanted to get one. I found a tattoo shop, and walked in and asked for my nickname — Hambone — to be tattooed in all caps around my right biceps.
I didn’t announce the tattoo’s arrival to my parents, but the next time I was home I showed it to my momma, and she was predictably upset.
“God gave you a beautiful body,” she told me. “Why are you ruining it?”
“I don’t know, Momma,” I said. When I saw how much it bothered her, I said, “I promise I won’t get no more.”
The promise was halfhearted. To me, a tattoo wasn’t an act of rebellion. I’m sure there was some declaration of independence included in the decision to do this, knowing they wouldn’t approve, but I wasn’t actively attempting to make anyone angry. I just wanted a tattoo, that’s all. They didn’t understand that. And over the next few months, leading to spring training, I decided I wanted five more.
So. The path to self-destruction — where did it start? Did it start with an automobile accident? Loneliness? Boredom? Weakness? Could it have been something as superficial as those six tattoos? It’s easy to say my first taste of independence led me down a path to self-destruction, but I’d argue it was a little more involved than that.
When I walked into the clubhouse for the first time that spring, in mid-February 2001, those six tattoos, all on my upper arms and chest, created quite a stir. Judging by the reaction, you would have thought I walked in carrying an Uzi and telling everyone to hit the deck.
I changed out of my street clothes and into my uniform and, one by one, the players who knew me did a double-take. They’d look, then realize what they’d seen, then jerk their heads back and look again in disbelief.
First baseman Steve Cox walked over to me as I stood at my locker and asked, with mock seriousness, “Josh, is that you?”
I had two tattoos on each arm and two on my chest. The ink became the talk of camp for a few days. Guys I had played with in the minors knew me as the All-American Boy, the guy who kissed his momma before every game and did everything the right way. I was the straight arrow, the guy the Devil Rays drafted number one partly because I had shown no inclination to color outside the lines.
Now they looked at me and their eyebrows nearly arched to the ceiling. I didn’t act differently. If I had kept my shirt on, nobody would have noticed.
The next day in the
St. Petersburg Times
, Marc Topkin wrote:
Hamilton showed up early for spring training saying the attention and accolades of being one of the game’s top prospects hadn’t changed him, that he was still the same shy and humble kid from North Carolina who lived with his parents.
And then he took off his shirt.
One, two, three, four, five, six tattoos now adorn his upper body: a nickname and a symbol on each arm, and a pair of designs on his chest. You only had to watch and listen to the reaction of the other players to understand what a shocking development this was.
There was hammer on one arm and hambone on the other. There were tribal designs on my chest. There was a part of me that enjoyed surprising them, in much the same way I enjoy hitting a ball in batting practice that has everyone buzzing and trying to figure out how far it went.
This story went beyond the tattoos and into the issue of my parents’ influence on my career. Since it was unusual for a minor-leaguer’s parents to travel with him and live with him, I understood the interest but wondered if the team wasn’t going out of its way to look for something negative after an overwhelmingly positive start to my pro career. And given the “shock” generated by my tattoos, it was natural to ask my parents what they thought of the “new” Josh.
“It’s just him trying to say, ‘This is me,’ ” my momma told Topkin. “If this was rebellion, he’d be out drinking and partying and whatever the other guys are doing. So far, knock on wood, we don’t have anything to do with that.”
And my daddy said, “Put it this way: If this is the worst thing he ever does, I’ll be happy.”
The tattoos represent one notch on the timeline of my life. Some people, my parents included, would call them red flags. There is another event, a car accident, and this one grows in importance with each telling. It is a convenient starting point, serving as a ready-made catalyst for everything bad that happened afterward.
So, since it’s kind of a habit, let’s start with the events of March 3, 2001.
We had just started spring training games, and I got to the ballpark in the morning in preparation for the game that afternoon. I was having a good spring training, and there was some discussion circulating around the team that I might have a chance to break camp with the big club and start the season in right field.
I got called into manager Larry Rothschild’s office. He waved me into a chair on the other side of his desk and shut the door. I had absolutely no idea why I was there.
This was my second spring training with the big-leaguers. The year before, it was more of a courtesy, a nod to my status as the number- one pick. It gave the folks running the team a chance to see me interact and play on the same field with the older guys. This time, though, there was a new feel to it.
It was the feeling that comes with expectations.
Rothschild took his seat and leaned back.
“Josh, if it were up to me, you’d start the season with us,” he said. “But it’s not up to me, and the decision’s been made that you’re going to start the season in the minors.”
I was disappointed but not completely surprised. I hadn’t played above Class A and knew it was a long shot, but I thought I’d get a chance to play at least two weeks of spring games before a decision was made. This removed the suspense pretty early in the process. From that standpoint, I left the manager’s office a little deflated.
It made me wonder if the behind-the-scenes concern over my parents’ presence in my life was an excuse to keep me in the minors for another year. The fans were clamoring for change, and if the Devil Rays didn’t think I was ready to step into the big-man’s world of the major leagues, they could point to my parents as an indication of why I wasn’t quite ready.
After the game, I got into the truck with my parents and told them what Rothschild said. “Guess I won’t be in the big leagues this year,” I said. My daddy reminded me that I always said three years in the minors, and this would have put me a year ahead of schedule. Not many guys make the big leagues at nineteen, he said, so keep your head up, have a good season, and you never know what might happen.
We talked about that day’s game, as always, and I told them I was going to be starting the next day against the great Greg Maddux. I’d heard so much about Maddux that I was excited about facing him; it was like stepping into baseball history.
We were driving through Tampa to our house near Bradenton down one of those endless four-lane roads that connect Tampa with the outlying cities. My mom was driving our Chevy Silverado Southern Comfort edition, I was in the passenger seat, and my daddy was in the seat behind me. We were the third car in line, and as we drove through the intersection of Victory Road and Interstate 301, a yellow dump truck ran the red light and headed right for the driver’s side of our truck.
It was like a slow-motion moment, where I could see it coming but felt helpless to do anything about it. The truck was heading right for my mom, and I reacted by reaching over and grabbing her by the shoulders. I pulled her toward me, away from the door and the point of impact.
Our truck jumped when the dump truck hit the left front of the truck. We started spinning and didn’t stop till we’d gone about a hundred feet from where we started. My mom couldn’t move. My daddy smashed his head against the window behind me. I felt something tweak in my back. Someone called 911 and the firefighters had to extract my mom from behind the wheel. They weren’t sure she would have made it if she had stayed close to the door.
My mom had had neck surgery six months before, and a jarring automobile accident definitely wasn’t in the doctor’s post-op orders. She and my dad were taken to Memorial Hospital, where an X-ray showed my dad had a skull fracture. My mom’s neck was sore, probably nothing more serious than whiplash. I was luckiest; they couldn’t find anything wrong with me. All in all, considering what could have happened when we got hit by a dump truck traveling at about 40 mph, it seemed like we got lucky. We took inventory of ourselves and thanked God for our good fortune. It shook us up, but it certainly didn’t feel like a watershed moment in my life.
Shortly after the accident, my parents left me in Tampa and returned to our house in Garner. I stayed by myself in the house we had recently bought near Bradenton. This is where you should hear the ominous music in the background, portending disaster. Alone for the first time, the sheltered young man faces an uncertain future. Those are the ingredients. When mixed, do they create disaster?
Most people thought my parents went back to North Carolina because of the accident, but they were planning on leaving all along. The accident had nothing to do with it. My mom had to go back to be near her doctors to continue treatment for her neck. I knew they were leaving before the dump truck entered our lives.
I might joke about the importance ascribed to this time, but I won’t downplay the importance of finding myself alone for the first time in my life. I’ve always struggled with free time. I like to keep busy, keep moving. I need to be doing something, and I like being around people. It’s the ADHD in me.
And after the accident, my back didn’t feel right. I had pain in my lower back that felt like a knife jabbing at me. In workouts and on the field, it kept me from going full speed. These events — the accident, my parents’ leaving, my back hurting — created an environment where one bad decision could lead to many more.
With my parents gone, I started spending huge amounts of time at the tattoo parlor. I had already gotten six tattoos there, but the shop didn’t evolve into my hangout until my parents left. There wasn’t much to recommend the place, just a bland storefront next to a shady massage parlor, part of the Tampa area’s endless strip-mall landscape.
This, somehow, became my home away from home. I sat in the chair and got tattoo after tattoo. Some days I’d get three or four. Some days I’d sit in that chair all day long, feeling the needles mark up my body.
I was troubled; my back kept me off the field, and none of the Devil Rays’ doctors could understand what was wrong. They put me through a battery of tests — MRI, CAT scan — and gave me cortisone shots in the area of pain. No test showed anything, and none of the shots helped, which made me more frustrated. I knew what I was feeling, even if the tests didn’t agree. The team started to believe I was losing interest, that maybe I didn’t want to play.
I settled into a routine. My mornings were spent at the spring training complex, getting treatment for my back and trying to figure out what was wrong. The afternoons were spent in the tattoo parlor.
My life had been blessed. I was nineteen, a few months from turning twenty, and I was close enough to the big leagues to spark discussion — and apparently disagreement — within the Devil Rays’ organization. From the outside, it looked like a perfect life, my path paved with gold.
The Devil Rays didn’t pressure me to produce. If anything, I thought my career could have been accelerated faster than it was. I agreed with Rothschild, of course, because I felt like a big-leaguer and wanted to be a big-leaguer. It seemed like a natural progression. The pressure I felt came from me; I’ve always expected more of myself than others have.
So what was wrong? Why didn’t my life feel as good on the inside as it looked from the outside? To me, the problem was incredibly simple: My back hurt, and nobody knew why. Ever since the accident I couldn’t shake the stabbing pain I felt whenever I changed directions quickly or attempted to make an explosive movement.
To that point in my life, I’d never been alone. To that point in my life, I’d never been without baseball. To that point in my life, I’d never been without my parents.
I could sense the doubts from the team about my back, and I began to wonder, too. The pain was there, it was real, but nobody could find anything wrong with me. Doubt started to work its way into my mind, too. Was I imagining it? Did I really want to play baseball?
My mind started to mess with me. My back hurt, but was it real? Were the doctors and coaches who looked at me sideways right?
So maybe it was inevitable that I would find a place outside baseball to hang out. And maybe it was inevitable that once I found a place where I felt I belonged — even if it was a tattoo parlor — I stayed there. It was nonthreatening and comfortable, and nowhere else in my life could I find a place that was both.
The guys in the shop became my friends, I guess, but it seems like I slid into their lives through osmosis. A guy named Kevin did most of the work on me. He would work and I would sit back and we’d talk about pretty much nothing all day long. I didn’t have much in common with the guys who worked there. They weren’t baseball fans, although they came to know who I was and what I did for a living. They were what you’d expect from guys working at a tattoo parlor, I guess: young and kind of aimless. Kevin had a young son, about three or four at the time, and the little boy was around the margins of life at the shop.