The Unnatural

Part 2

After almost twenty years writing for Sports Illustrated, I decided to take some time off from crisscrossing the country and settle down with my wife in Houston. She was thirty-six, and we were eager to start a family. Within a year she was pregnant with twins, and three years later we had a third child. I picked up a job with the Houston Chronicle covering local sports teams. Although Texas is a football state, I was assigned to the baseball beat. No Texas team has ever brought home a World Series championship. To add insult to injury, the Rangers were, once upon a time, owned in part by George W. Bush. This is a team that dealt Sammy Sosa, Alfonso Soriano, and Alex Rodriguez away…and then eventually brought Sosa back in 2007, after he’d hit over 500 home runs for other teams. They went to the World Series two years in a row (2010 and 2011) and returned home empty-handed. And don’t even get me started on the Houston Astros.

When the Rangers picked up Gordon for a one-year, $10 million contract in the off-season, all appearances pointed towards business-as-usual for the Rangers. Covering Texas’ spring training camp in Arizona was the first assignment that had taken me out of Texas since I’d moved there; with three kids under the age of four I was happy to take the assignment. For the record, I love my wife, and I love my kids…but everything in moderation. Well, everything except baseball.

The first day in Arizona, the assembled sportswriters of America were subjected to the typical company line: It was a new year, a new lineup, a new manager, and, this being the Rangers, a new over-the-hill slugger. “We’re not looking to win in a year or two, we’re looking to win this year,” the Texas GM said. It was the same thing that he said every year. I wasn’t the only sportswriter rolling his eyes in the pressroom. Midway through a group Q&A with the new manager, I slipped out the back to look for a restroom. I found myself a urinal in the locker room, unzipped, and did my business. The players were on the field putting on a show for the fans. As I zipped up, I heard the metallic clang of a locker swinging open behind me. I peeked around the corner.

Mitchell Gordon stood there in full uniform, all six-foot four inches, 255 pounds of him rippling as he jabbed a needle into his arm. I slipped back into the area with the urinals, out of sight. He hadn’t seen me. After a minute, I snuck a look back into the locker room and Gordon was gone.

Now, seeing an athlete shoot up isn’t quite the damning evidence that it would seem. Anyone stupid enough to shoot up in the middle of a locker room in the post-steroid era probably isn’t doing anything illegal. It was probably insulin or vitamin B. Still… Since Gordon wasn’t around any longer, I peeked into the locker that he had padlocked. All I could see through the locker’s peephole was a zipped gym bag. Damn, I thought. Then, on a whim, I looked into the trashcan as I left. Jackpot: the needle, half-filled with a cloudy liquid, sat on top of a pile of wadded tissues. I picked it out of the trash and slipped it into my jacket pocket.

When I turned to leave the locker room, I was standing face-to-face with a six-and-a-half foot middle-aged man with muscles bursting out of a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. I recognized him from the media guide: Jackson Novelle, the Rangers’ strength-and-conditioning coach. For a second we both paused. Novelle shook his head and smiled like he’d just caught my hand in the cookie jar. He ushered me out of the locker room without a word.