My world was crumbling, and I was the only one who knew the full extent of it. I’d look up into the crowd at Turner Field and see signs kids had made for me. All I could think was I’m not worthy of that. I felt like a hypocrite. And I was playing awful.
I’d be in the batter’s box or at third base thinking about my personal life. I knew I was going to have to tell Karin, but trying to figure out how consumed me for weeks.
We were playing the Marlins one night in August, and Kevin Brown was pitching. He was one of the toughest guys I ever faced. His delivery was all elbows and kneecaps and he had phenomenal stuff. If you were not mentally focused, he could embarrass you.
I stepped into the box, got both feet set, and started thinking, How am I going to tell Karin?
I stepped out of the box and called time. Bro, this dude is filthy enough. You’ve got very little chance with a clear brain, much less thinking about Karin and your relationship. It was like Crash Davis in Bull Durham when he’s trying to get Annie out of his mind. I had that Kevin Costner moment.
I couldn’t play baseball at the major league level with this hanging over my head. Coming clean would change my life forever, but I had to do it. Two weeks went by before I finally got up the nerve. It took a disaster of a game against the Reds to get me to the breaking point. I went 0-for-4 and made an error in extra innings that cost us the game. I was plain horrible.
I sat in my locker afterward thinking, I’m living a lie. This is not healthy. I’ve got to get it off my chest. I’ve got to tell her.
I had no intention of walking into Bobby’s office that day, but for some reason, on my way down the back hallway, which I took to avoid the media, I turned left into his office. I shut the door and sat down.
“What’s going on, Chip?” he said.
“Skipper, I want to apologize to you,” I said. “I’m playing like crap. But my life is falling apart. I’m probably going to get divorced. I’ve got a lot of shit going on.”
“Are you OK physically?” he said. “Nothing to do with drugs or anything?”
“No, no, no,” I said. “It’s nothing like that. I feel like the weight of the world is coming down on me, and I’ve got to get out from underneath it right now. You’re probably going to hear some stuff in the next few days because I’m coming clean on everything today when I get home. If I show up with black eyes tomorrow, don’t worry about it.”
He gave that a little chuckle and said, “Well, whatever you need to do to get your life in order, baseball is secondary. Get your family and your personal stuff in order and then we’ll worry about baseball.”
That was really comforting to me. I hadn’t even told Mom and Dad yet, but Bobby had my back.
“If you need a day just to clear your mind, let me know,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to miss any games. I just wanted to come in and apologize to you for the way I’ve been playing. But I’m about to fix it, and I promise you it’s going to get better.”
The entire ride home up Georgia 400, I was thinking, How do I start this conversation? How do I look somebody in the face that I supposedly love and tell her the hurtful things I’m going to have to tell her?
I decided not to beat around the bush. I would get it all out, and whatever happened after that, happened. It would probably get violent, and she’d probably never want to see my face again. Not that I’d be able to blame her. I just knew I had to take whatever came.
When I walked in the front door, she was in the kitchen. I picked up a box of Kleenex on the counter, walked over to the dining room table, and sat down.
“Come here,” I said. “We need to talk. You need to have a seat.”
She sat down and started welling up right away. She knew what was coming; she just didn’t know the depth of it.
“Karin,” I said. “This is killing me and I’ve got to get it out, so let me get it all out. I’ve been having affairs with three girls: the girl from LA; a girl from Atlanta; and a girl from Detroit, who I met in spring training. I’ve been having these affairs since the beginning of the season.”
For some reason, I didn’t tell her about the girl in Philly. Maybe it was because I thought she might be lying to me about being pregnant. But I got it out that I’d had three affairs and then I lowered the boom.
“The girl from Detroit, Jennifer, is pregnant,” I said. “And she’s going to have the baby.”
There was a long silence, followed by uncontrollable sobbing from both of us. Eventually we got up. I needed to gather myself. I heard something behind me, and when I turned around, I saw she had picked up a vase. She threw it at me, and it hit me on the side of the head.
It didn’t break until it hit the floor and I wasn’t cut up or anything, but what was I going to say anyway? I deserved it. The only thing I could do was walk out of the room and give her time to cool off.
I went into my office and shut the door. I sat on my chaise longue and sobbed. I could hear her through the door sobbing uncontrollably and screaming. This probably went on for about thirty minutes. Then there were about ten minutes of silence.
She walked into my office and sat on the arm of the chaise longue beside me. She leaned into me. We sat there in silence for a long time.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“I don’t know where this is going to take us,” she said. “I love you and we’ll see what the future holds.”
Ultimately, Karin decided she wanted to stay married, but she couldn’t coexist with the child in the picture. I didn’t fault her for feeling that way. A child would be an everyday reminder. She was being honest about her feelings. To ask her to bury those feelings would be even harsher. I knew coming into our conversation, I’d probably have a decision to make—her or the baby—and she basically made it for me.
I was scared to get divorced, and I’d already hurt her so badly. I didn’t want to hurt her anymore. I felt that I owed it to her to give it a try. So I decided to recommit to the relationship and not to see my child. I would do what I needed to do to take care of Jennifer and the baby, but I was going to stay with Karin.
—
I knew I had to tell my parents. That was just as hard as telling Karin, if not harder.
Mom answered the phone.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” I said.
My voice got really low as I tried to find the words. When I got it all out, she let me have it.
“We didn’t raise you to treat women this way,” she said. “We didn’t raise you to treat anybody this way. I thought I taught you to respect women. This is a slap in my face.”
My dad had picked up the phone, too. They took turns at me with a lot of cut-to-the-bone comments.
I didn’t say much. I listened. And I cried.
Once they said their piece, there was a long silence. Dad took a deep breath, and with a shaky voice, he said, “We are extremely disappointed in you, but you’re our son and we love you. You’re going to learn a valuable lesson from all this. If you need us, call us. We’re here to talk.”
When I hung up the phone, I took comfort in knowing that no matter who turned their back on me, I could count on my parents. It took Mom longer to forgive me than Dad, but I knew they had my back. That started my healing process. For the first time in weeks, I had something to feel good about.
I should not have made the decisions I made, and consequently I ended up hurting the three people in my life that I loved the most. I was not happy in the marriage, and I should have gotten out.
—
The second I unloaded everything on Karin, a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I had cleared my conscience. I cut off all contact with the other women. Karin and I started going to counseling two or three times a week, and for a while, it was OK.
But every argument—no matter what it was about and whether it was a 1 or an 8 on the Richter scale—led back to “You cheated on me.” Before long, it was every single day.
I remained recommitted, even though things weren’t going well. I was not going to rock the boat. I knew it had to be torture for her, sending me back on the road to those same cities and trying to trust me after what I had done.
I wasn’t going out anymore, but I looked forward to road trips. They were my sanctuary. I didn’t get beat over the head with my transgressions every day. I dreaded going home.
Karin and I floundered through the 1998 season but I had a good year baseball-wise. I had learned how to compartmentalize my job from my personal life and that helped. I took out my frustrations in the weight room and tried to forget about my home life while I was at the ballpark. But Karin and I continued our downward spiral.
We got into an argument at my twenty-sixth birthday party that April. I had invited some high school teammates and friends from Pierson up to our house. A bunch of Karin’s girlfriends were there, and so were some of my Braves teammates.
It was late. I was liquored up. We all got a little blurry.
I was talking to one of Karin’s friends, and Karin construed it as flirtatious. She didn’t even know what we were talking about—we were talking about this girl’s husband—but it set her off, and we got into it.
“Are you frickin’ serious?” I said. “You think I would do that right here in our own house? We were just having a conversation.”
I let her storm off, and I stayed out by the pool. We had a DJ playing music in the basement, and after a while, I looked in and saw Karin and Pedro Borbon, one of my teammates, dancing. They were rubbing up on each other.
I went barreling into the house.
“What the hell is going on here?” I said.
She started yelling. I told her to shut up. Next thing I knew, Pedro sucker punched me.
Slowly, I turned back around. Somehow I had the presence of mind to grab something to wrap around my right hand—there weren’t going to be any broken bones this time. I came over the top and smoked him. Pedro went down. All hell broke loose.
I flew on top of him, and everybody started jumping in. My buddy Stacy Jones from Pierson and his wife, Sonya, tried to break up the fight. I had no idea who had me. I was seeing red. I went after Pedro with everything I had. Unfortunately, in the process, I broke Sonya’s nose. I felt just awful.
Clearly, the party was over. Karin and I were, too. We just didn’t know it yet. We tried to make it work for the rest of that season. For what reason, I don’t know.
—
Karin’s mom is an ordained minister. She and Karin sat me down one day and her mom said, “Whenever something bad happens, God comes along and spreads grace over it. Karin and I think the way that you can help cleanse everything and we can get some closure is for you to come out publicly and own up to your mistakes.”
I have no problem owning up to any mistake that I make, but deep down, I didn’t think my personal life was anybody’s business. They convinced me that it would help Karin heal. My parents, my friends, and my agent were all against it, but I did it anyway.
There was one guy in the media I trusted to tell the story word for word and that was Bill Zack, the Braves beat writer for the Morris News Service. With Bill, I could say something off the record and it wouldn’t show up in his stories. And when I said something on the record, he printed what I said. So I had Bill out to the house, and Karin and I sat at our kitchen table and told him about my infidelities and that there was another woman with a child on the way.
This was well before social media, so I didn’t get much of a sense of people’s reaction until I went on an Atlanta radio station shortly after the story came out. I sat in the studio for three hours and got lambasted on live radio. I answered to all of it.
Some callers told me they’d never root for me again. Atlanta is in the Bible Belt, and obviously a lot of people frowned upon what I did. I didn’t really know what to say except “All right. That’s your decision.”
Some callers asked, “Why are you doing this?” My answer was to clear my conscience because I felt like I was living a lie, which I was. But what I wanted to say was “Because my wife is making me.”
After we went public, I lost all my marketing deals. Coke dumped me. Lowe’s, too. We were done with the Wendy’s contract anyway, but by spring training, it was all over.
There was a certain part of telling everyone that was therapeutic. I no longer carried the burden of living this hypocritical life. My secret was out. Everybody could make their own judgments, and I could live my life and go play baseball.
But going public turned out to be the beginning of the end of my marriage. There was just too much damage, too much pain. For every one step forward, we took three steps back.
A little before Thanksgiving in ’98, Karin went to Texas to hang out with Staci Borbon, Pedro’s wife. Karin was the godmother of their kids. I thought it was all pretty innocent until I tried to call her. Two days went by and I didn’t hear back from her. So I called Staci.
“Where’s Karin?” I said.
“She’s not here,” she said.
“Where is she?” I said.
“She went to the store,” she said. “She’ll be back in a little bit.”
I called an hour later, two hours later. Staci finally picked up again.
“Where’s Karin?” I said.
“She’s not here,” she said.
I found out later during our divorce proceedings, she’d been out on a date. At the time, I just knew something was up. Karin finally called me back after about three days and said, “I’m not coming home until you’re out of the house.”
It was like bells going off in my head. Lightbulbs came on. I didn’t even say goodbye. I just hung up the phone. Then I picked it back up and called my mom and dad.
“I need you here tonight,” I said. “I’m moving out of this house first thing in the morning.”
I called a moving company. I took everything that was mine and left anything she could have an argument about, and I was out of there by noon the next day. As I was pulling out of the driveway, Karin’s mother pulled in.
“Don’t do this,” she said, bawling. She and I had a great relationship.
“She was very clear,” I said. “‘I’m not coming home until you’re out of the house.’ What do you want me to do?”
I rented a condo in Buckhead, in the heart of Atlanta, and I never looked back.
We’d been playing this charade for almost a year and a half and it wasn’t getting any better. At some point you’ve got to fold your cards.
I’m sorry for the way things happened. It was my fault. If I had it to do all over again, we would have divorced two years earlier. But when I slammed that phone down, I started the next chapter in my life.
—
The next call I made after asking Mom and Dad to help me move was to Brad Clontz. I wanted to know if he’d been in touch with Jennifer.
Thanks to Brad, I knew I had a son. Jennifer had named him Matthew, which means “gift from God.” Jennifer and her mom had taken Matthew to one of Brad’s minor league games in Toledo to meet him.
Matthew was eight months old now and I wanted to see him. The disappointment of not being a part of his life had been eating at me. But Jennifer was on the lam. She wasn’t in Detroit anymore. She wasn’t in Florida. I hadn’t realized that when the shit hit the fan, people in the media tried to get ahold of her, so she got as far away as she could. I had to hire a private investigator to find her.
When he tracked her down, she was living in Seattle, Washington, with another guy. That complicated things a little bit, but she sounded upbeat about wanting me to see Matthew.
We had to cut through some red tape to get them to Atlanta, so it didn’t happen until February. But Jennifer flew in with her mom and Matthew, who was eleven months old by then.
No Game 7, no Opening Day, no first day in the big leagues ever made me more nervous than I was that day, waiting for them to arrive from the airport. I hadn’t seen Jennifer in two years. On top of that, I was going to meet her mom, which was a little awkward. And most importantly, I had an eleven-month-old son I’d never met before. Is he going to be shy? Will he take one look at me and start bawling?
I planted myself by the front door. Every time I heard the elevator ding I looked out my peephole. When Matthew finally waddled through the elevator doors in a little red sweat suit and looked up at me with these big blue eyes and blond curly hair, life as I knew it changed on a dime. Seeing those big ol’ chubby cheeks and that big ol’ smile, I was staring at myself at eleven months. It brought tears to my eyes. In an instant, I knew I was going to be as big a part of this little boy’s life as Jennifer would let me.
Before that day, I hadn’t been 100 percent sure if divorce was the right way to go. As soon as I met him, I knew it was.
Now I could focus on getting to know Matthew. He and I spent our first couple of hours together messing around on the floor, rolling a little ball back and forth. I pushed him around my condo on an ottoman that had wheels on it. I bounced him on my knee. I did whatever I could to make him smile. I wanted him to know who his daddy was. And I spent the next couple of years trying to make sure that no matter who Jen was with, he knew who his proper father was.
Jen got married a couple of years later, but she let me move all of them to Atlanta so I could be close to Matthew. I bought them a house down the street from Country Club of the South, and I got to see Matthew pretty much whenever I wanted to.
They were in Atlanta for a year or two before she got homesick for Michigan. I’m sure some of it was pressure from the husband and also the fact that she didn’t have family down here. I was gone a lot, and I couldn’t always be around for her. I understood.
—
A friend of mine from Florida roomed with me that winter in Atlanta. I needed a running mate, and he had played college football, so he was in great shape. He was single, didn’t have kids, and could be at my beck and call to work out whenever I needed him. We ate together, hung out together, and worked out constantly.
We took a break over Christmas and he went home to Pierson with me. We went out one night to a country bar on the north side of Orlando called Eight Seconds that had a mechanical bull in the back. We got there around midnight. I wasn’t really in the mood to talk to anybody, and it must have been written all over my face. A couple of girls actually came up to me and said, “Dude, cheer up. You’re out having beers and you look miserable.”
I loosened the collar a little after that. My buddy was talking to some girl, and I was people watching when a buxom blonde walked by.
“Oh my god,” I said. Not only had I thought it, apparently I’d said it out loud.
She didn’t hear it but the girl my friend was talking to did and took it upon herself to go tell the blonde, “You need to come talk to this guy.” She brought her back over and introduced us. Her name was Sharon.
I was so embarrassed.
“Look, I can mow my own lawn,” I whispered in her ear. “I realize you’re with people. I’d love to buy you a beer later on if you’re up for it.”
She smiled and said OK and walked off. About fifteen minutes later she came back and we started talking. We talked all night. We exchanged numbers.
As we left, I dropped her off at her truck. It was a Toyota with forty-inch Bogger tires on it. Wow. I didn’t see that one coming. She was this ninety-eight-pound petite blond-haired, blue-eyed girl, and she went mud bogging and rode horses. She was a redneck! I couldn’t get her out of my head.
I called her the next day and we set up something for Christmas Eve at another country bar in Downtown Disney. We hit it off.
She wasn’t a real big baseball fan and didn’t have much of a clue who I was. She deemed herself a football fan. That was fine by me. We were both smitten, and it wasn’t long before she moved to Atlanta with me.
I had a new spark in my life, when I was least expecting it. I was just beginning to go through a divorce, so it was complicated, but I looked forward to seeing somebody again. After three years of fighting with Karin, I was ready for some fun.
Sharon and I were from the same part of Florida; we were a year apart in age, and we grew up the same middle-class way. I’d found somebody a lot like me. That’s what I told friends and family who thought I was jumping into yet another relationship too soon. I liked having Sharon in my life. I never liked being alone. And I wanted that support system because I had a lot going on professionally. I was facing some major damage control in my baseball career.
—
I knew my image would never be the same. I had disappointed a lot of fans who thought I was throwing away the gifts I had been given with a series of bad decisions. That motivated me to go home that winter, shut everybody out, and say, This is not going to affect the kind of baseball player I am.
I had no idea how people within the Braves organization were going to react, much less the fans. So I conditioned myself to block everything out. I knew there would be hecklers, and I couldn’t do anything about that. But for the fans who might still be unsure about me, I was determined to win them back by having the best year I could possibly have. If the bases were loaded with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and we were down a run or two, I wanted every Braves fan to want me at the plate. I was twenty-seven years old and coming into my prime as a baseball player. It was time to take the next step.
Not only could I use working out to make myself a better player, it became my release. Normally, when something is bothering me, I clean out my closet. I reorganize the garage. I prune and burn trees. But that entire offseason, I went to the ballpark. I went to the weight room. I exercised.
Other than a few nights out over the holidays, I was a recluse. I didn’t want to read the newspaper. I didn’t want to listen to the radio. I didn’t want to have to look people in the eye until I was ready, and I wasn’t going to be ready until spring training.
I either worked out with my roommate or I met up with Frank Fultz, our strength and conditioning coach at Gold’s Gym. Under Frank’s guidance, I started “maxing out” more often when I lifted weights. I’d always focused on staying long and lean by doing a lot of reps, not piling on the weight. Now I was throwing two manhole covers on each side of the barbell and throwing up 275 like it was nothing. We got up to 350 on the bench that offseason, which is territory I never thought I would see.
I still did some of my old routine. I did my Jobe exercises to keep my shoulders in check. I did the “curls for the girls,” with the biceps and the triceps, too. But for the first time since I blew out my knee in ’94, I concentrated on my legs. Frank convinced me I needed to build up my base.
I went from doing 700 pounds on the leg press to maxing out at around 1,000 pounds. I had every weight in the whole place on that leg press machine.
By the time we opened spring training, which was our second year in Disney, I was in as good a shape both physically and mentally as I’d ever been. Normally, I came to camp weighing about 215 pounds. In 1999, I was 225. I was ready for April 1 on February 14.
When you’re an established major leaguer, spring training at-bats are generally pretty meaningless. The games don’t count. Nothing is on the line. But after all my personal turmoil played out on the front page of the sports section, my first at-bat of the spring was huge; I’d been thinking about it for months. I was scared to death of how the fans would respond.
I knew the quickest way to make people forget was to come out rolling.