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http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/mets/doc-details-coke-and-booze-hangover-new-memoir-article-1.1339608
Dwight Gooden details his coke-and-booze hangover after ‘86 World Series win in upcoming book: ‘Doc: A Memoir’
Gooden writes that the first person he called as his teammates celebrated their victory over the Boston Red Sox was his dad. The next person was his drug dealer.
BY MICHAEL O'KEEFFE / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2013, 3:58 PM
FOCUS ON SPORT/FOCUS ON SPORT/GETTY IMAGES
Dwight Gooden fires a pitch during Game 2 of the 1986 World Series against the Rex Sox at Shea.
Doc Gooden got so blitzed on cocaine and booze the night the Mets won the 1986 World Series that he missed the team's ticker-tape parade down New York's Canyon of Heroes the next morning, the former All-Star pitcher writes in an unflinching new memoir.
In "Doc: A Memoir," Gooden writes that the first person he called as his teammates celebrated their victory over the Boston Red Sox was his dad. The next person was his drug dealer.
"Champagne corks were flying as the TV crews grabbed their postgame sound bites," Gooden says, describing the chaos in the Shea Stadium locker room after the Mets won Game 7 of the Series.
"The players were shouting each other's names. People started pouring champagne on other peoples' heads. All of us agreed how great we were. But in the early craziness of the locker room, two thoughts were crowding all the others out of my head: I gotta call my dealer. And I gotta call my dad.
The book, written with veteran journalist Ellis Henican, will hit bookstores on June 4, but excerpts are already posted on Amazon.com.
'Doc' Gooden misses Mets' World Series celebration in 1986 after a night of coke and booze.
Gooden says he told his dope dealer that he would come by later that night to pick up a large quantity of cocaine. "Just make sure you're available, okay? It's gonna be a big party," Gooden told the dealer in a furtive call made from a trainer's office.
"I got whatever you need," the dealer responded.
Gooden writes that he spent the biggest night of his life in a "sketchy" housing project on Long Island, snorting lines and snapping back shots of vodka with people he didn't know. By the time the sun came up, he knew he would never join his teammates for the parade honoring the Mets' dramatic championship victory.
"I was nursing a head-splitting coke-and-booze hangover, too spent, too paranoid, and too mad at myself to drag my sorry butt to my own victory parade," Gooden says.
Gooden also writes about growing up as the youngest child in a tight-knit family and the trauma that lurked behid his seemingly solid middle-class childhood. Gooden's mother, he writes, once shot his father with a .38 Special after she learned he had been fooling around with another woman.
The gritty memoir also chronicles Gooden's rise as the best pitcher in baseball, his descent into drugs and alcohol, his years with the Yankees and his ultimately successful battle against his inner demons and the substance abuse that derailed what should have been a Hall of Fame career.
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