11

Vincent van Gone

When I get on, nobody’s going to throw me out.

—Vince Coleman

Ever since he was a little boy, Vince Coleman has been running. Growing up an only child raised by his mother, Willie Pearl (he never knew his father), in a rough part of northwestern Jacksonville, he once told a reporter, “I had to survive as best I could and a lot of times, I got out of trouble with my feet.” His need to escape was so deep-seated that it seeped into his sleep. “Even now my dreams are just running, running, running. I think that just carried over to sports, so that stealing bases was a natural.”1

He’s so good at running, in fact, that I have no idea where he is. While I had strong leads on every other Wax Packer before I hit the road, the man once nicknamed Vincent van Go for his base-stealing prowess has gone completely AWOL. He is a base-running instructor with the Chicago White Sox, but the team’s PR rep said that Coleman had not been with the team in weeks, and the rep had no idea when or if Coleman would return.

9. Vince Coleman

I have my work cut out for me, but after the Carlton ordeal and the emotionally exhausting couple of days with Don, I’m spent.

I lie under the covers in my Jacksonville hotel room, splayed out on my stomach with my head turned sideways. The smell of the coffee I put on five minutes ago percolates through the air, but I have no will to get up and taste it. I peek out from under the covers and see the bright red light of the coffeemaker, the same shade of red as the uniforms of Van Go’s old team, the St. Louis Cardinals. On the floor next to the bed lies a stack of notebooks and newspaper articles where I dropped them last night, too tired to set them on the desk a few paces away.

I’m at the All-Star Break of the trip, halfway through. I’ve driven almost six thousand miles in less than a month through eight different states. Outside the womb of my air-conditioned room lies another Florida Groundhog Day, more unrelenting humidity and clear blue sky. But right now I want nothing more than to turn off my brain and lie completely still, to be swallowed whole by this soft mattress. For twenty-four days I have followed a strict writer’s regimen of late nights, early mornings, and too much coffee; I’ve blogged daily when the last thing I wanted to do was to be creative, let alone entertaining, when all I wanted to do was watch old reruns of Wings on my shitty hotel TV. I’ve eaten food whose grease soaked through the wrappers and watched the whites of my eyes turn more and more the color of rosé with each passing day. I haven’t done laundry or gone to the gym in a week and have reached the low point of recycling underwear.

Somewhere out there is the fifty-three-year-old Vincent van Go, even more intractable and difficult than Carlton, not wanting to be found. I should be in detective mode, working the phones, looking for leads as big as the ones Van Go used to take off first base with his eye on stealing second. Instead I want nothing more than to turn off the radio in my brain and disappear into the sheets.

*

Several hours later, a text message wakes me up. I squint at the screen, disoriented from a deep sleep, the coffeemaker light still burning red across the room.

The message is from Dwight Gooden Jr., better known as Little Doc, who is the youngest of Dwight “Doc” Gooden’s seven children and who serves as his dad’s agent. We have been negotiating back and forth about setting up a meeting when I’m in New York in a few days, and the answer at last arrives: “We will be here.”

I bolt up like a piece of toast, suddenly invigorated by landing the second most famous Wax Packer (and some might argue that his fame rivaled that of Carlton’s). I pour myself a cup of still-warm coffee and fire off a text reply. The only way the Goodens would agree to talk to me was for me to pay them, which I’m not thrilled about (the practice of paying sources is frowned upon in journalism) and which I would only do as a last resort and with full disclosure to readers. I consent to pay Little Doc $200 and Doc $500 for an interview.

“He is doing a documentary with [Darryl] Strawberry and maybe when they start shooting you can come follow and make it happen. I know they will be shooting some day in July. If not, there’s plenty of signings or public appearances coming up,” Little Doc texts.

This is big. So big that I jump right into the shower, washing away the road grime and weariness, turning my sights back on Vincent van Go. He is the reason why I’ve come to Jacksonville, the largest city (by land area) in the United States, consisting of a maze of bridges and buildings centered around the St. John’s River on Florida’s northeastern coast. The city’s numerous pockets and neighborhoods include a major naval station and university, but despite its immense size, it lacks any defining character. When I ask the bartender downstairs what Jacksonville is known for, he simply shrugs and offers, almost apologetically, “The Jaguars?” (the football team, not the animal). Still, Jacksonville has more character than San Diego.

Van Go grew up in the blue-collar Moncrief Park neighborhood in the northwestern part of the city, spending as much time as he could in Scott Park playing sports with his older cousin Greg and other local athletes. Without a father in his life, he found male role models in Greg and his uncle Carter, a deacon at Abyssinia Baptist Church who made the best sweet potato pies around. Van Go followed in Greg’s footsteps to Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, where he excelled as a punter and kicker on the football team and as a center fielder in baseball, once stealing seven bases in a single game. He dreamed of following Greg to the NFL, refusing to sign with the Phillies when they drafted him after his junior year. The following spring, in 1982, he got a tryout with the Washington Redskins but was put at wide receiver, a position where he had no experience and faltered.

“He could have made it. But you see so few blacks kicking in the NFL. . . . I think there’s really a bias there that kept Vince from getting a fair opportunity,” his college coach Rudy Hubbard told Sports Illustrated in 1985.2

When the baseball draft rolled around again a month later, he was quick to sign with the St. Louis Cardinals in the tenth round for $5,000. Possessed of otherworldly speed, he shot through the Minor Leagues, swiping 145 bases in only 113 games for the 1983 Macon Redbirds, a pro baseball record that would stand for twenty-nine years. By 1985 he was the St. Louis Cardinals’ starting left fielder and the National League Rookie of the Year, and by the time the playoffs started that fall against the Los Angeles Dodgers, he was a bona fide celebrity, hanging out at the Playboy mansion. Young, single, and on top of the world, Van Go was the personification of the American Dream.

But he never grew into his fame, never matured enough to know how to handle the success. He was cocky by his own admission, frequently referring to his “egotistical” attitude like it was a good thing. On the rare times he got caught stealing, he attributed it to something he had messed up, refusing to honor the opposition. “If I get thrown out, I always think I did something wrong. I don’t give credit to the catcher,” he said.3 The sportswriters who covered Van Go said he dripped with entitlement, outraged when umpires would call strikes on him and overly sensitive to any negative press even when it was justified. “Some of the time, if the play is close, shouldn’t it go in my favor?” he said when asked about his frustration with umpires.4 It didn’t help that he was woefully ignorant of history; when he was asked about Jackie Robinson during the 1985 World Series (after Robinson’s widow threw out the first pitch), he infamously replied, “I don’t know nuthin about him. Why are you asking me about Jackie Robinson?”5

Pride goeth before the fall. The man known best for stealing bases took his larceny a bit too far at Florida A&M, the first of a series of run-ins with the law. In 1981 he and his roommate were arrested for stealing one hundred dollars’ worth of wood from a lumberyard in the middle of the night. They said they were going to use the wood for bookshelves, and after they pleaded no contest, the judge dropped the charges and put them on probation with community service. During his six seasons with the Cardinals, Van Go stayed clear of legal trouble, but as soon as he chased the money to New York, signing a four-year, $11.95 million contract with the Mets after the 1990 season, his problems resumed. The small-town kid from the Florida backwaters who had been nurtured by midwestern kindness was now eaten alive by the Big Apple. Overrated to begin with, injuries and age slowed him down, turning Mets fans against him. (Other than stealing bases, he was a pretty mediocre player, subpar defensively and striking out way too much for a leadoff hitter—his career WAR was only 12.5.)6 He didn’t do himself any favors with an increasingly cantankerous attitude and immaturity in the clubhouse. “Coleman had also long since alienated reporters with his surliness, and he had a piercing laugh that seemed to echo throughout the clubhouse, sometimes even during the quiet brought on by a tough loss,” wrote beat reporters Bob Klapisch and John Harper in their book on the 1992 Mets. His round, cherubic face and pencil-thin mustache became stuck in a permanent frown. Through it all, Van Go became more and more delusional; rather than listening and learning, he doubled down on his own greatness and victimhood. “What this field is doing is keeping me out of the Hall of Fame,” he said, claiming that the playing surface of Shea Stadium was the only thing keeping him from immortality (a truly preposterous remark; even in his prime, Van Go was nowhere near Hall of Fame status).7

Off to a bad start in New York, things got even worse. During spring training in 1992, a thirty-one-year-old Manhattan woman accused Van Go and his teammates Doc Gooden and Daryl Boston of having raped her the previous March 30 in Port St. Lucie, where the Mets spent spring training. As Gooden wrote in his autobiography, Doc, “At night, we’d go out drinking and looking for women, and women would go out drinking and looking for Mets. The hookups were never hard to come by.” He went on to recount how he met the accuser at a nightclub and brought her back to the house he was renting, where they found Van Go and Boston playing the Nintendo game R.B.I. Baseball. Doc says he and the woman had sex, and when they emerged from the bedroom, Van Go allegedly asked her, “You ever been with three guys in a night?”8 She allegedly said no, that she had only been with two guys in a night. Van Go then asked her if she’d like to go to the bedroom with him. She ended up sleeping consensually with all three players, Doc says, and a year later came out of the woodwork to accuse them of having raped her.

The Port St. Lucie police conducted an investigation, with the state attorney general ultimately dropping the charges as the accuser’s story of coercion fell apart. But the damage was done—Van Go was once again in the headlines for the wrong reason, and his wife, Lynette, back in their Arizona home, was not happy.

A little more than a year later, the Mets visited Los Angeles for a three-game series. At 32-65, the Mets were buried in last place, and the team had started to go a little stir-crazy. Pitcher Bret Saberhagen threw an M-100 firecracker near a group of reporters in early July and then a few weeks later smashed a hamper with a baseball bat in the locker room before a game. Following an afternoon game on July 24 in front of 43,301 fans that was won by the Dodgers, Van Go and teammate Bobby Bonilla met up with their buddy Eric Davis (who played for the Dodgers) in the players’ parking lot, climbing into Davis’s Jeep. Van Go, always looking for a prank, dropped a firecracker out of the car window only thirty feet from a crowd of fans seeking autographs congregated behind a gate. The device exploded, injuring three people, including two-and-a-half-year-old Amanda Santos. Davis, Bonilla, and Van Go drove off, having no idea they had hurt anyone and leaving a bloodied Santos to be consoled by her parents, Marivel, an unemployed legal secretary, and Derrick, an architectural draftsman without health insurance. When the media got wind of the story, Van Go refused to comment, and Davis, the driver of the car, was incredulous that it was a big deal. “Yeah, he threw a firecracker out of the car,” Davis told the Daily News. “He didn’t throw no firecracker into a crowd of people. Those people were behind a gate 20 feet away from my car.” Davis said Van Go intended it as a joke. “Everybody throws firecrackers. He threw it six feet from my car. We were laughing about it.”9

But it was no laughing matter. As the story rolled in and the picture of what happened became clearer, the Mets were infuriated, putting Van Go on what would become permanent administrative leave. The Santos family was outraged by his lack of compassion, telling the Sporting News that he had promised to help pay their medical bills but had done nothing more than send a teddy bear and balloons to Amanda. Third-degree felony charges were later reduced to a misdemeanor (Van Go hired celebrity lawyer Robert Shapiro to defend him), and in November he pleaded guilty. The judge handed down a suspended one-year jail sentence, three years of probation, a $1,000 fine, and two hundred hours of community service. The Mets considered Van Go’s $11.95 million contract one of the biggest busts in team history. They were so fed up that they cut him with a year to go on the deal. While he claimed to have learned his lesson, his actions said otherwise: when an ambitious reporter tracked him down the following winter near his custom-built fortress in Scottsdale, Arizona, Van Go refused to discuss the incident, other than defiantly saying, “All the facts aren’t out. The people were 30 feet away. How could somebody 30 feet away be hurt? I wouldn’t throw a firecracker at kids.”10

His career and perhaps he would never be the same. He muddled through four more seasons with four different teams, suffering the indignity of many trips back to the Minor Leagues. The prince turned pauper, the denial grew deeper. He got divorced shortly after the firecracker ordeal. Although he returned to baseball for a few years in the mid-2000s as an instructor in the Cubs organization and resurfaced in 2013 with the Houston Astros, his true love, the team that once lionized him, the St. Louis Cardinals, never hired him back. It hurt Van Go deeply that he could not return home.

Given all that history, I didn’t expect Vincent van Go to make time for me. When I had gotten him on the phone a few weeks ago he was as cordial as a marooned crab. I explained the project, throwing in that I knew all about his uncle Carter’s sweet potato pies and planned on visiting his childhood home in Jacksonville, but he remained completely unimpressed. “Not interested,” he said.

At least with Carlton Fisk I had a lead on where to find him; Van Go could be anywhere. So if I can’t find the man in the present, my only choice is to travel to his past.

*

Cloudy beads of sweat drip off my arm and onto my steno pad as I powerwalk down a sidewalk flourishing with weeds, causing the blue lines of the paper to smear. The air smells like rotting grass, punctuated by the strident chorus of unseen insects. I reach up and tamp down my damp black hair, hot to the touch.

The ranch-style homes of Moncrief Park are packed tightly together, many bordered by chain-link fences, many with rusted cars parked on the lawn. I walk by a neighborhood watch sign put up by the Police Athletic League with the slogan “Filling Playgrounds, Not Prisons.”

All I’ve got is an address, 4103 West Leonard Court, pulled from a public records search for Van Go and his mom, Willie Pearl. (I could find no record of Van Go’s father.) While I’m not 100 percent certain this is the house Van Go grew up in, it seems likely—I know that he attended Raines High School, only a couple miles away, and I could find no other address listed for Willie Pearl. I don’t know what to expect—I don’t have a plan beyond finding the house and ringing the doorbell. Even if it is the right house, I have no idea if any Colemans still live there.

As I pass two kids playing basketball in the street next to a lot bursting with tall grass, I imagine Van Go and his cousins playing baseball and football here until the sun dipped below the horizon. Retracing his steps, I walk down Leonard Circle West, turning left onto West Leonard Court. Four houses in different shades of pastel with wrought-iron bars over the windows border the half circle, ranch homes with chain-link fences. A red F150 truck is parked in the short driveway of the alleged Coleman homestead behind a fence held shut with a strand of wire. The shiny car belies the rundown appearance of the house, its white paint faded and peeled to reveal splotches of yellow. Stymied by the locked fence, I knock on a neighbor’s door to ask if anyone in the Coleman family still lives next door. A large man with a graying beard wearing a Houston Texans T-shirt answers, greeting me with a smile. “It’s too hot out here for me, buddy,” he says, already wiping his brow.

“Are you a Texans fan?” I ask.

“Yeah. My son plays for them,” he says, proud but not bragging.

What are the odds that an NFL player’s dad answers the door? Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised—this is the same neighborhood that spawned many professional football players.

“Louis Nix III is his name. Nose guard for the Texans. They call him Irish Chocolate.” (I later Google this, baffled by the nickname, and learn that he went to Notre Dame.)

I tell him why I’m standing on his doorstep wearing a backpack and looking like a lost college student, and he says he doesn’t know who lives in the 4103 house, although he’s pretty sure it’s not the Colemans any longer. “Sorry I can’t help more!” he offers apologetically.

I head back to the main street to look for any signs of life in the house other than the truck parked in the driveway. As I snoop, out of the corner of my eye I see a red car approaching to my left. I had noticed the same car circling the block a couple of times, inching along and clearly taking an interest in my presence. I doubt the neighborhood gets much tourist foot traffic, let alone visitors openly toting notebooks in the blistering heat.

The car crawls along, slowing to a stop next to me. The window rolls down.

No sense in hiding. I walk toward the driver’s-side window. “Hi there!” I announce to the driver as if I was expecting her. She’s wearing a wrap around her hair, and she has kind brown eyes. There’s a kid in the backseat and a younger woman with dyed red hair riding shotgun. She leans forward, peering at me with curiosity.

“Who are you looking for?” she asks.

“Vince Coleman. He was a baseball player from here, and I think this is the house he grew up in.”

Any trace of suspicion vanishes from her face. “I don’t think the family lives there anymore,” she says. “I believe the mom passed away. Her sister too.”

Strike 1. I thank them and head back to my car, satisfied that I’ve done all I can. His alma mater, Raines High School, is only two and a half miles away, so I swig some coffee and work my way through the suburban streets. There are still so many unanswered questions: Whatever happened to his dad? How long ago had Willie Pearl passed? And where the hell is Van Go right now anyway?

Raines High, home of the Vikings, was founded in 1965 as School Number 165, built after nearby Jean Ribault High School’s all-white faculty and students rejected the inclusion of African American students. Renamed for local educator William Raines later that year, the school is now 97 percent African American and has sent twenty-one players to the NFL. Being the middle of summer, there’s construction going on in the lobby, and I walk past a trophy case and up to the front desk to ask about Van Go.

“Are there any old yearbooks I could look at?” I ask the receptionist, a woman wearing a white sweater and blue-and-black dress.

“They’re all in the library, and the library is being renovated,” she tells me. A couple of construction guys march into the lobby covered in sweat, seeking the refuge of air-conditioning, followed by two police officers.

“You know, I went to high school with Vince,” she adds.

“Wait, you went here?” I ask, shocked. She doesn’t look old enough to be Vince’s classmate.

“Yes, sir. Leila Robinson. I was in Vince’s class.” The cops suddenly take an interest, wandering over.

“What was he like? Tell me about him!” I say, getting excited and opening my notebook. But Leila wants no part of my inquiries.

“No, no, I don’t want to be interviewed,” she says politely.

One of the cops chimes in. “Wait, I thought you was twenty-five,” he says to Leila.

“I am twenty-five,” she shoots back, cracking everyone up.

“Class of ’78,” I say, remembering my research. Leila does not seem pleased by my contribution to the conversation.

“Shoot, you old enough to be my mama,” the cop jokes.

“Hush,” Leila replies.

Strike 2. My only other lead is the reference to Van Go’s uncle Carter, a deacon at Abyssinia Baptist Church, in a 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated. Back in the car, back to the coffee, back on the road. Several miles later, I arrive at a lavish drive-in church decorated with purple and white balloons, with a marquee out front advertising the upcoming vacation Bible school. I walk with purpose, striding past a group of children, looking for the minister’s office. I find Minister Richard Black in sermon prep at his desk, which is cluttered with papers and books. His gray hair is pushed back, and he is wearing all black.

“Was there a deacon here named Carter?” I ask after introducing myself. I realize I don’t even know if Carter is his first or last name. Minister Black nods his head slowly, the gears turning, faint recognition on his face.

“Yes, Robert Carter,” he says. “I believe he passed about thirty years ago.” He has no idea who Vince Coleman is but says he remembers Robert Carter talking about his nephew playing professional ball. But this faint recollection is all I’m going to get. Strike 3.

On the way back to the freeway and the solace of my hotel bed, I take out Van Go’s 1986 baseball card, which pictures him in midstride. His elbows are slightly bent, his shoulders are drawn up toward his ears, his compact frame is puffed out to project as much swagger as possible. The photo says it all. He’s always wanted to be something more, something bigger. He wants to be Vincent van Go instead of just being Vince Coleman.

“His problem is that he’s a follower,” his St. Louis manager, Whitey Herzog, once said.11

As I prepare to leave Florida I’m not disappointed, because I never expected much out of him to begin with. Expectations, after all, are a dangerous thing.

Vincent van Go is gone.

*

Next up: New York, New England, and a return to Rhode Island for a reunion with my own father. Three Wax Packers condensed in a tight window and time frame and perhaps the biggest score of all: a date with Doc Gooden.