It was Saturday night when Darryl Strawberry heard about Dwight Gooden’s implied denial of a drug problem in his life, via a text to me that ran in a Daily News story, in which Doc dismissed Strawberry’s own public concern for him as “unreal.”
And that’s when the former Met slugger decided enough was enough.
“I have to try something before he’s dead,” was the way Strawberry put it.
So he called me late Saturday night, then Sunday morning, to take his comments of last week — after Gooden failed to show for an appearance with Strawberry — considerably further, saying that he has no doubt his old Met teammate has an out-of-control cocaine problem.
“He’s a complete junkie-addict,” Strawberry said. “I’ve been trying behind the scenes to talk to him and get him to go for help, but he won’t listen. He thinks he can manipulate and BS his way through everything. His son called me to beg me to help his dad before he dies.
“The condition Doc is in, it’s bad, it’s horrible. It’s like cocaine poison. I feel like I’ve got to get it out there because nobody else is doing anything to help him, and it might be the only way to stop him.”
With that, Strawberry put me in touch with three people he said were close to Gooden, including a woman named Janice Roots who says she had a live-in relationship with Doc for four years, before his cocaine use finally drove her to leave in February.
“It breaks my heart because Dwight is a loving, compassionate man who took care of me when I had health problems,” Roots said by phone on Sunday. “But then he morphed into a cocaine monster.
“I don’t even know if he realizes what he’s doing. He turns into a different person. He’s a great guy who takes care of his family members, but being around him, there were times when it was just a very toxic, dangerous environment.
“I felt helpless to do anything. I finally left because to sit there and watch somebody kill himself was devastating.”
The two other people with whom Strawberry put me in touch spoke only on the condition of anonymity, citing business concerns, but they painted a similarly dark scenario. One said he was in Gooden’s apartment in Jersey City on Thursday, the night Doc was scheduled to appear with Strawberry for a WFAN event hosted by Joe Benigno.
According to this person, Gooden locked himself in the bedroom of his apartment late in the afternoon, when he was supposed to be leaving for the appearance, and wouldn’t come out despite repeated urging from the person in question, as well as three of Doc’s adult children, who were there at the time.
“At one point I’m banging on the door,” the person said, “and he finally came barreling out of the room, but only to yell at me to stop banging on the door before I broke it. Then he went back in his room and wouldn’t come out.
“It’s not the first time this has happened. We all love him but we’ve all been enablers to addict behavior. It has to stop.”
None of this can be completely shocking to anyone familiar with Gooden’s saga, going all the way back to his playing days with the Mets, when his cocaine addiction played a role in derailing a potential Hall of Fame career.
In recent months, especially, whispers that Gooden’s old habit had kicked up again seemed to be everywhere, especially after a well-publicized ESPN “30 for 30” documentary with Strawberry that left many alarmed by Doc’s gaunt appearance.
“I don’t think he weighs 150 pounds soaking wet right now,” Strawberry said.
In May I did a sit-down interview with Gooden before the 1986 Mets reunion, and he seemed brutally honest at the time about his daily fight to stay clean, admitting the temptation is always there, and that staying out of strip clubs, which would lead to drug use, was his biggest weakness.
But if Strawberry and the others are right about him, apparently Doc wasn’t being honest when he said then that he hadn’t used cocaine since 2011. Janice Roots, in particular, said that Gooden has been in a drug-induced spiral since January 2014.
“That’s when I noticed a big change in him,” she said.
Roots said that Gooden always tried to shield her from his usage, never allowing her to see him using cocaine. But she recounted stories similar to that of last Thursday, when Doc would lock himself in his bedroom or his bathroom for hours at a time, running the water in the sink to cover up any noise he made.
“It got to a point where he just succumbed to his addiction,” she said.
Roots said Gooden’s usage was understood between them, as they would talk about him going to rehab, as he had in the past, but this time he would never take the step.
“He was embarrassed,” Roots said. “He went on his book tour (in 2014) and told everybody that he was OK. He’s a celebrity. I think that’s part of the fear. He felt like others would judge him, and they probably would. Most people don’t understand addiction.
“But the man is dying. Everybody around him knows the truth. And it doesn’t matter what Dwight says: He knows the truth.”
Finally, it was Gooden’s denial on Saturday, saying via text that he missed Thursday’s event because he was dealing with “minor health issues,” that convinced Strawberry and the others to attempt what is essentially a public intervention of sorts here.
“Doc won’t let me or anybody help him,” Strawberry said. “By us coming forward like this, he’ll realize that he’s been exposed and it will challenge him to get help.
“The worst thing we can do for him is stay silent. That was a common thread in some of these other celebrity deaths, like Prince and Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. Silence can kill people.”
Strawberry thinks Doc is especially vulnerable since his mother died in July. Roots said she went to the service in Tampa and saw that only a handful of Gooden’s friends, including Strawberry and longtime Yankee executive Ray Negron, showed up to support him.
“It just showed there are only a few people who truly care about Dwight. He needs the support. His mother used to tell me, ‘Don’t give up on my son.’ When I finally left, he was very angry with me, but I still have health problems myself, and I had to do what was right for me.
“Now I just want what’s right for him. There’s no malice here, from me or Darryl or anybody who cares about Dwight. This is done out of love and concern. I just want to save his life.”
In truth, nothing else has worked over the years. I’ve known Gooden long enough to believe that, for all his problems, he’s a guy with a good heart who has always been worth rooting for.
No doubt he’ll be humiliated by some of the comments here, but as Strawberry said, better now than to wait until he’s dead.
