For me, the chair was an escape. I could sit there and escape from baseball and the people who wondered why I wasn’t playing and the whispers that suggested I wasn’t really injured and had lost my drive for the game. With my eyes closed and the ink taking shape under my skin, the world got a lot smaller. There were no expectations, nobody telling me how great I was or how great I could be. There was nobody wondering when they were going to see a return on their nearly $4 million investment. If I had been peppered with baseball questions while I sat in the chair I would have found somewhere else to hang out.
The hours I spent inking my body could be seen as self-punishment, maybe even self-mutilation. I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day with that, and several of them tried. Even an amateur could see I was abusing myself on the outside to mask the pain on the inside.
But what caused that interior pain? I’m still not sure, but like everybody, I have my theories. My entire life had been devoted to baseball. I’d been playing since I was old enough to remember, and from the time I turned seven years old people who watched me thought I was destined for the big- leagues. All around me they would whisper, “That’s Josh Hamilton; he’s going to make it big someday.” And not just the big leagues, but big-league stardom. And not just stardom, but superstardom. The idea was never phrased as a question, or delivered as an opinion. It was a given, as certain as the changing of the seasons. I thought the same thing myself, obviously, since I first voiced that intention to my parents when I was twelve years old. I accepted the expectations, even encouraged them, but at some point they began to feel like a burden.
What started as a compliment — “Josh Hamilton, can’t miss prospect” — began to take on a different tone. In my mind, it started to sound like an order. And if I didn’t fulfill the order, if I didn’t step up to meet and exceed each of the expectations placed upon me, did that by definition make me a failure?
I expressed none of this verbally, of course, because it wasn’t something I owned the words to articulate. And who would have understood, or even listened? Were the tattoos a simple backlash against this growing burden, a desire to experience something new, just because I could? Was I changing myself on the outside to reflect the changes I felt on the inside?
It started as a release, a mostly harmless act of rebellion. But after a while, it no longer felt like a release. It felt like confinement, another master to obey.
At this point in my life, at nineteen years old, I was considered the best minor-league player in baseball. My future was a consistent topic of conversation in the Tampa–St. Pete area. Since the team came into existence in 1997, the Rays had done nothing but finish in last place. They lost with young players, and they lost with old players.
The fans wanted something different. Ownership wanted something different. The team looked destined for another hundred-loss season. The roster was filled with a collection of past-their-prime veterans — Greg Vaughn, Vinny Castilla, Fred McGriff — with a few not-ready-for-prime players mixed in. And the pitching staff, like all Rays’ pitching staffs since the team was born, was better left undiscussed.
This is where I came in. I was something different. The fans always want the top prospects to be brought up quickly, no matter what the people making the decisions believe is right. On a team like the Devil Rays, there is more pressure to move forward. The number-one pick in the draft — a guy who is rated the top prospect in the game after two minor-league seasons — is seen as someone who should be in a major-league uniform right now, no questions asked.
I was very close to fulfilling my dream and taking a big step toward making everybody’s expectations a reality. And yet I was in a state of mental anguish, unsure how to escape. Was the pain a backlash against baseball, against expectation? Was it a fear of failure, or a fear of success?
I started to question myself. I understood where the baseball people were coming from, but I was too young to see the bigger picture. The team was searching for an identity, and it was dying to put guys on the field who might be able to sell tickets and generate excitement even if the team wasn’t quite ready to win.
The theme of spring 2001 around the Devil Rays could be described as optimistically defeatist. If the team was going to be bad anyway, why not be bad with young players who could get better and might be fun to watch?
I was the centerpiece of that idea, the number-one pick who could wear the label The Future for now, and The Franchise for later.
I wanted this, too, but it couldn’t happen the way my back felt. They put me through another round of MRIs and CAT scans and every other test they could think of, and still they found nothing, and still I told them the pain was too much to bear. I was taking prescription painkillers without much relief. The Devil Rays’ frustration was rapidly turning to exasperation, even anger. Was I imagining it? Was my internal pain manifesting itself as physical pain?
Clearly, the designs that kept springing up on my body, working from the top down, were an exterior sign of my interior confusion. In a sense, I became addicted to the feeling of getting tattoos — the first sign of my addictive personality. I almost laugh when people ask me to explain the meaning behind each of my body’s twenty- six tattoos. The truth is, most of the time I wasn’t interested in what they were putting on my body. Some of the symbols really didn’t mean that much to me, and some of them meant nothing at all. The artists were in charge; they’d make suggestions and I’d take a passing glance at what they were going to do and give it a shrugging okay.
I had six tattoos by the time my parents went back to North Carolina. I had more than fifteen by the time they came back.
My momma likes to say she knew things weren’t right from the moment she saw the first tattoo. She saw it as an omen. When I walked in the door and she saw the word hammer across my right biceps, she closed her eyes tight, as if hoping she could wish it away.
And there were more. There were many more. Blue flames running up my forearms. Various demons on my legs. The devil on the inside of my left elbow. An eyeless demon on my right leg.
I didn’t know it at the time, but no eyes is a symbol of a soulless being. And that’s exactly what I was on my way to becoming.
When I showed up with tribal signs on my stomach, my mom’s reaction was one of anger mixed with disgust.
“What tribe are you from, Josh?”
Her tone was mocking.
When I tried to smile her comment away, she pressed on.
“No, I’m serious, Josh. Tell me what tribe you’re from?”
I didn’t have any idea what the tribal signs meant. Kevin thought they looked cool, so I let him go. If it bought me some time in the chair, time away from facing the real problems in my life, then I was fine with it. Two or three tattoos in a day, I didn’t care. A day spent in the chair meant another day I didn’t have to fill.
The reporters covering the Devil Rays tried to find out why I wasn’t playing, and the answers they got didn’t satisfy them. They wrote about the accident and my back pain, but when they tried to get a diagnosis they were met with shrugs.
I felt pressured to play, so I did. I started swinging a bat and working out in the outfield, and I never felt right. My boastful plan on draft day — three years in the minors fifteen in the majors — veered off course. This was my third year in the minors, and I was sent to Class AA Orlando to start the season. It was a promotion, but this one-step-at-a-time path wasn’t what I had in mind.
And then, adding injury to injury, I tore a quad muscle running out a ground ball in the first month of the season. Young, confused, and impatient, I sat around waiting for my leg to heal, and then I ended up back at Class A Charleston on an injury-rehabilitation assignment.
My leg was better, but my back did not improve. Neither did anybody’s ability to diagnose it. The pain and the uncertainty showed on the field. My mind wasn’t right at any time during this season. I hit .180 in 20 games for Orlando. I had no power and couldn’t turn on the ball for fear of hurting my back worse.
I was a lost cause, and baseball started to feel like a job. All of this happened so quickly; I went from being on the fast track in February, when Rothschild told me he thought I was ready for the big leagues, to being stuck in neutral by the middle of May.
As a last resort, the Devil Rays sent me to a back specialist in Los Angeles named Dr. Robert Watkins. He examined me, then gave me an MRI, and right there on the film was a white spot on the spine that he said was a pocket of fluid pushing against a nerve. Dr. Watkins said I was suffering from Par’s Defect, which occurs when one of the vertebrae doesn’t mature completely. With the trauma from the accident serving as the catalyst, this pocket of fluid had found its way into an opening that would have been covered by a normal-sized vertebra.
There’s your pain, he said, pointing to the white spot.
I could have kissed him.
“So I wasn’t imagining it,” I told him.
“No, it’s perfectly real. Now we have to get rid of it. That’s the tricky part.”
Dr. Watkins said a cortisone shot would remove the pain, but the shot had to be administered to just the right spot. To do that, he had to use a CAT scan to pinpoint the exact location of the fluid sac. When he found it, he plunged the needle into my spine till it felt like it was grinding on bone. But as soon as the needle was removed, the pain was gone. I’d never thanked a man so many times in my life.
I went home to Raleigh to go through rehabilitation. For the first time, I wondered whether I was going to make it to the big leagues. The game had always come so easily to me, and now I was faced with injuries, one after another. The injuries created doubts, and the doubts created a question in my mind: Was all this worth it?
MY IDEAL OFF-SEASON would include a couple of months of fishing and hunting followed by two months of working out in preparation for spring training. The house my bonus money bought in Garner, North Carolina, a five-thousand-square-foot colonial ranch house on twenty-two acres with a pond, was the perfect off-season hangout.
But the off-season following my disappointing 2001 season wasn’t as much fun as I would have liked. I needed to get my body back in shape to play. I needed to quiet the whispers questioning my toughness and commitment to the game.
I had to make a statement, so after the holidays I left home and went to Bradenton to work out at the Bollitieri Academy, which is run by the IMG agency. My quad was fully healed. My arm felt good and my swing felt good and everything was falling into place. If I could stay healthy — knock on wood — this was going to be the year that answered all the questions and silenced all the doubts.
And then, in keeping with my star-crossed existence of the previous twelve months, I injured my back during training and could barely get out of bed in the morning. I was scheduled to report for spring training in less than two weeks, and there was no way that was going to happen.
When word got back to the Devil Rays, I could sense their disappointment turning to anger.
Here we go again,
they thought.
Here I go again,
I thought.
Depression. Disappointment. Discouragement. Whatever lousy feeling you could imagine, I was feeling it. Once again, troubling thoughts started to drift in and out of my mind. Is this worth it? If I put in all this work to get healthy and still end up getting hurt, what’s the point? If my body won’t stay together, how can I expect to play a full season and fulfill my dreams?
With no baseball, no parents, and no responsibilities, I returned to the tattoo shop, my default home away from home. My tattoo collection grew from the low teens to about twenty, and once again I spent entire days doing nothing but sitting in a chair watching my skin turn color. I became part of the landscape there, like another piece of furniture. I didn’t care how much it cost or how long it took. The longer the better, really.
One weekday I hung out until closing time. Kevin and another artist named Bill were talking about something in a low voice, and when they were finished Kevin came back to the chair and asked me if I wanted to go out after they closed the shop.
I thought about it for less than a second and said sure, that would be great. I was the guy who never went out, not even in high school, and something about going out with these guys seemed exciting and new. They were including me, and it was an indication of how far my self-esteem had fallen that I jumped at the chance to go out with them.
I didn’t bother to ask where we were going, or what we were going to do. The particulars didn’t matter. With baseball and my parents out of my life temporarily, it was the perfect storm of vulnerability.
Our first stop was a strip club. I walked up to the door trying to act cool. It was a lie, though, because inside I was nervous, trying not to make it obvious that this was something I’d never done before.
Inside the club, one of the guys ordered a round of beers. I drank one, something I’d never done before.
And then I drank several more.
By this time, I was caught up in the scene. This was far outside the realm of my experience, but it didn’t take long for me to feel comfortable. Too comfortable. After we left the strip club, we went to Kevin’s house. I was in that state of drunkenness where I thought this was the greatest thing in the world, and these guys were my greatest friends in the world. We were all laughing and talking and having a great time.
Baseball and injuries and expectations were the furthest things from my mind.
After we’d settled down for a while with the television and some more booze, someone pulled out a mirror and began to cut up some cocaine. Somewhere inside me an alarm went off, but I ignored it.
I asked them, “What is that?”
I knew, but I’d never seen it before.
“It’s cocaine, man.”
“What’s it make you feel like?”
“It makes you feel jacked up. Try it, you’ll see.”