My childhood, in many ways, ruined rock stars for me. Athletes were similarly destroyed – if I am being honest – by a standard I am afraid is unfair. Because coming of age in the 1980s, I believed everybody played basketball like Michael Jordan and everybody sang like Whitney Houston and Bruce Springsteen, with an absolute willingness to strip themselves raw, an ability in any moment to leave those of us watching in stunned awe and taking what seemed like complete joy in doing so.
I did not have words for this kind of genius back then, just knew it was extraordinary. And I knew I wanted to be Whitney.
"You cannot be Whitney. You are not black," I remember my friend scolding me. "And you cannot sing."
My mom noted Whitney sang from a place so deep inside there was no color, and all any of us could hope for was to find something we did as well as Whitney sang.
That thought has stayed with me as I watched talented athletes unable or unwilling to go into the hard areas necessary to win and singers who have to be synthesized into listenable. There seem to be more of them, the lip-synchers and athletes for whom giving everything is too much. And I judge them, just a little, because I know more is possible.
What they also do is make it easier to spot the genius. And Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton plays baseball the way Whitney sang, every last morsel of his body going into diving for baseballs and swinging. It was impossible to miss as he hammered home run after home run in the derby in New York during the 2008 All-Star Game. Even hardened New Yorkers were on their feet cheering for this recovering addict as he embraced the moment and excelled in it.
And again in this World Series, after the St. Louis Cardinals had come back from being down to their last strike in the ninth inning of Game 6, he banged a home run to start the 10th. He did so with a jacked-up groin he had been playing with for a while. And when the Rangers ended up losing, you could see the pain on his face.
Of course, Whitney and Hamilton have another thing in common. They both battled drug addiction. Very publicly. And at times, very painfully.
In fact, when news broke Saturday that Houston was found dead at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and later reports said that prescription drugs may have been a culprit, I was saddened yet not surprised.
This is what sometimes happens to drug addicts. They use again, and they die as a result. This is what got me thinking of Hamilton and just how scary his very public fall from sobriety a couple of weeks ago had been.
As he noted, for a guy like him, there is no tiny slip. It is all a slippery slope, and the worst is always a possibility once he gets on the downward swing.
It is scary. It is real. And it has nothing to do with a baseball or a contract.
It really has nothing to do with celebrity or lack thereof. As Whitney and Hamilton's history remind us, having millions of reasons to stay clean is no guarantee of anything. It gets the rich and the poor, the famous and the forgotten, those with everything ahead of them and nothing left.
Even in a sports landscape littered with cautionary tales like Len Bias and Dwight Gooden, there is this feeling that it could not possibly happen again, especially when we're talking about a likeable guy loaded with extraordinary talent and a sincere desire to stay clean, like Hamilton.
No way, right?
History tends to agree with Garth from Wayne's World: "Way".
It is why I cannot stomach those trying to profit from pictures and videos of Hamilton's drunken relapse. I certainly have nothing but disdain for the woman who figured Hamilton's fall from sobriety was a good chance to bag her a Ranger.
As Hamilton himself pointed out, it is a short distance from drunken screw-ups to much, much worse. What he needed in that bar that night was somebody to say, "I'm not going to let you do this to yourself," not a bodyguard blocking the door as he did it to himself. What he needs now is what he asked for in his press conferences — prayers.
It is the irony, of course, that was on full display at the Grammy Awards on Sunday, which came a day after Whitney's death. We usually wait until after a person is gone to say a prayer, or realize how serious the problem was, or wish we had done something besides gawk at the train wreck.
And that is part of the tragedy of the death of Whitney, and the lesson.
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