SURPRISE, Ariz. — The gates of the condo complex open, and Willie Mays Aikens trudges out. He carries a Kansas City Royals gym bag in his...
Aikens is 57 now, old enough to know second chances don't always come easy. He's half a lifetime removed from when he was on the cusp of becoming a star, in 1980 when he became the first player to have two multi-homer games in the same World Series.
Now his thick mustache is flecked with gray. He walks toward the car slowly, having gotten both a hip replacement and a knee replacement since his release from federal prison a few years ago. He tosses his bag in the trunk, gets in the passenger seat and, as the sun rises over the Arizona sprawl, heads toward his first day of this year's spring training, as a roving hitting instructor in the Royals' minor-league system.
Aikens smiles. The day before, his probation finally was terminated. For the first time in decades he finally feels free: free from prison, free from probation, free from cocaine.
"Back to my wild ways," he chuckles.
He's in Arizona to teach young men in the Royals camp the finer points of hitting: how to keep their weight back, how to explode with their hips, how to focus on the pitcher's release point. But he'll teach other things, too. That stardom isn't guaranteed, even after you've found it. And that no ballplayer is invincible, no matter how talented he is.
As we begin a new season after a spring in which three ballplayers were charged with DUIs — and that after a 2011 in which six ballplayers were charged with spring DUIs, not to mention the continuing saga of Josh Hamilton — perhaps we all need to hear Willie Aikens' story.
You see, this man was born to be a ballplayer. His mother named him Willie Mays Aikens just weeks after Willie Mays' famous over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series. And baseball was really the only thing Aikens ever had going for him. He grew up in rural South Carolina with no running water, with an alcoholic mother and with a violent, beautiful baseball swing that could launch baseballs farther than anyone else.
He lived the ultimate dream of Americana, beating the odds of poverty through playing the game he loved.
"It was just a dream that came true, to make the major leagues, the great accomplishment of my life,"
Aikens says. The Royals' spring training facility appears in the distance. "You play a sport, a hobby you enjoy, and they pay you to do it. What better way to live your life?"
He pauses for a moment and shakes his head. "And I took it away from myself. Nobody else."
His is the rarest of heartbreak: Through our national pastime, he got everything a boy could want. And then life took it away. A few months behind bars after a 1983 drug probe snagged Aikens and three other Royals. And again a decade later, when Aikens was arrested on cocaine and weapons charges in 1994 and given a federal sentence of more than 20 years.
Few get a second shot at their first love, fewer still when that first love is baseball. Yet here he is, walking past the fancy sports cars in the players lot, walking past the parking spots for Hall of Famer George Brett and manager Ned Yost, walking past the young men who stretch in a practice field and take swings off pitching machines, ballplayers all with a chance to make millions playing this boys game.
Aikens opens the door to the coaches clubhouse and finds his locker. There's his jersey, No. 24, same as his playing days. A free pair of Oakley sunglasses and set of All-Star Game luggage. A nameplate that says "AIKENS." He doesn't know what to do with all this stuff, but that doesn't matter. All this stuff? It shows he belongs again.
"I'm just glad to be here," he says. "Just to be in baseball period. Once you get out of baseball, it's so hard to get back into baseball. You can't take it for granted. It's a blessing."
--
I had met Willie Mays Aikens a few weeks before at his church in Kansas City. And what better place to meet a man whose life today is all about redemption? Grace Temple is a tiny church in the same transitional urban neighborhood of Kansas City the gleaming Negro Leagues Baseball Museum calls home.
Boarded-up apartments lined the same street as the church. Inside, there were only 14 pews and, on this bright Sunday morning, 45 people filling them.
At the front of the church, the pastor's wife was chanting: "Strengthen them, Master God…let them be leaders, Lord God…out on the street, Master God…somebody's selling drugs, Father God…"
Aikens bent his creaky knees. They hurt. He bowed his head on the pew and covered it with his hands. All around him stood the people Aikens surrounds himself with now. Not the strung-out dope addicts of his former life. No, they are the older woman with an oxygen tank whom Aikens hugged as he walked into the church, or the toddler standing on a pew whom Aikens kept making faces at, or the man from the neighborhood who at this moment started telling the congregation an awful, awful story, about when he saw a man get killed.
It was just two days before, the young man said. He was walking his dog. He thought he heard fireworks.
Then he saw a man lying in the street in a pool of blood.
"I asked God, ‘Why you have me witness this?' " the man said.
Aikens shook his head and, as the man sat down, clapped for him. Then Aikens turned to me: "I was living a destructive life," he whispered. "God took me out of my situation to change my life. If I wasn't taken out of that situation, I was going to destroy myself." He shrugged. Then he said, "I'd probably be dead."
In a way, Aikens thinks his life parallels the Biblical character Job, who suffered through everything a man could suffer through: His possessions were taken from him, his children were killed, his health deteriorated, all in the name of Satan testing Job's righteousness. And Aikens? Well, he had 14 years of his life taken from him, and his riches, his family, his fame. But there's one very big difference between Aikens and Job: Job was a righteous man. Aikens was not.
Sure, you could blame his troubles on not having much growing up, on his alcoholic mother who was in and out of jail, on his shame when the rich kids got bussed past his tiny, creaky home with an outhouse out back. But the facts are these: Willie Aikens had beaten that poverty. He was a professional baseball player and he was rich. But damn, he loved cocaine, and he loved the life that came with it.
Now Aikens knows all the bad that happened to him was his fault. And it took those years in prison to get to that point, where he doesn't blame the undercover cop who bought drugs off him, where he even calls his time in prison a blessing.
Inside the church, Aikens stood to give his testimonial. He introduced me to his congregation.
"While people was giving their testimonies right now, you know what he asked me?" Aikens said, nodding toward me. "He asked, ‘Willie, you ever stand up and give your testimony?'" The congregation laughed. "He just don't know, huh?"
Aikens smirked.
"The way God has been working in my life the way He has," Aikens says, "how could I not?"
--
Walk into Willie Aikens' split-level condominium in the Kansas City suburbs. Follow Aikens as he walks down the stairs and into the den. Laugh with him as his dog, a Chow-German Shepherd mix named Mickey, rams his head between your legs.
"Get back, Mickey!" To Aikens, this dog is the funniest thing in the world. Mickey leaps toward Aikens and puts his paws on his chest. Aikens is laughing so hard he's crying. "Oh God! He like to get up on his hind legs, man! Look at this! Look at him! He crack me up, man."
Aikens is a happy man now, although that happiness is tinged with regrets. He's married and his wife gave birth to a baby girl last year, but shortly after the birth his wife had a stroke. He's reconnected with his two older daughters, although they still have anger toward him.
And since he's happy, he doesn't come downstairs much anymore. He did today only because I asked. Too many bad memories. Downstairs is a place that traps him in his past, a place where Aikens spent the better part of three years freebasing cocaine, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, having sex with any female who was up for it — "the desires of the flesh," he calls it now.
It all began in 1979, his second year in the big leagues after being drafted second overall by the California Angels. That year he was the team's designated hitter, slugging 21 home runs and filling in for future Hall of Famer Rod Carew at first base when Carew was injured. It also was the first time he tried cocaine.
Fast forward to 1983. Cocaine had become a regular thing, but he didn't think it affected him on the field, as he hit .302 and mashed 23 homers in his fourth year for the Royals. Then Aikens and three other Royals — Willie Wilson, Vida Blue and Jerry Martin — were arrested and pled guilty to misdemeanor cocaine charges, becoming the first active major leaguers to serve jail time for drugs. He served three months in jail, and after a brief stint with the Toronto Blue Jays, Aikens was released and out of the big leagues.
It's not like he'd lost his talent. Nor his desire. In 1986 he had a monster season in the Mexican League, hitting .454 with 46 home runs. But no big-league teams offered him a chance. Aikens felt he'd been blackballed because of his drug conviction. A Japanese team offered him a $300,000 contract, but Aikens couldn't get a work visa. The drug conviction was his scarlet letter.
So he decided: Screw it. The Mexican League didn't give drug tests. He'd live it up down there. He played there five more seasons then retired to Kansas City in the early 1990s. He still had money, enough money to drop several hundred thousand dollars on drugs and have some left over. These were his lowest years.
He'd smoke cocaine for a couple days straight. By then his body was saturated with the stuff, so Aikens would put on a rubber sweatsuit, sprint his stairs, and sweat the cocaine out of his system, just so he could go get high again.
One day a woman came by his home, looking for directions. Aikens hit it off with her. She asked him to get her some drugs. He did, four times, with the purchases totaling a bit more than 50 grams of crack cocaine — which just happened to be the level for mandatory minimum sentencing. She was an undercover cop.
"The thing that's so disappointing is that you were a young man who pulled yourself to prominence in professional sports, and you trashed it," U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple told Aikens as he was sentencing him to 20 years in 1994. "How sad. You had the skills to go down in history, and now your history will be overshadowed by this."
So he went to prison, Inmate No. 01732-031 at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He had nothing to do but think about changing himself. So he did. He stayed away from the drugs, the drinking, the gambling — all easy enough to find behind bars. He went through two drug rehab programs. He began to develop a relationship with his two daughters. And he started reading the Bible and going to the prison chapel.
"If I'm not taken out of the situation I was in (with drug addiction), I would have killed myself," Aikens says. "God was watching out for me, man. I had no plans to get out. I was forced out of that situation. And some people, when they're forced out of situations like mine, they're able to make a change in their life and do right thing.
"It's all about making your choices."
--
Willie Mays Aikens, in a Royals jersey with his old No. 24 on the back, grabs a fungo bat and saunters onto a practice field at the Royals' spring training facility. It's a perfect Arizona morning, weeks before the new season begins, and Aikens is smiling wide, chewing gum, fist-bumping the minor-league players he'll soon be teaching how to hit.
"It's always good to see these young guys," Aikens says. "They're excited about making it to the major leagues."
It's been 32 years since Aikens singled in the winning run in the first World Series game ever played in Kansas City. It's also been 27 years since Aikens last played in the big leagues, 21 since he last played in the Mexican League, and 17 years since he's used drugs. After getting out of prison — he served 14 of his 20 years — Aikens went to a halfway house. Former teammate Hal McRae got him a job with a construction company. And former teammate George Brett invited him to speak to his own son's high school about the dangers of drugs.
That led to a meeting with the Royals. And the Royals front office loved what Aikens said about hitting.
And they loved the message he could give young ballplayers.
And so here he is, a second go-round with the game he loves.
"These guys are faced with options every day, what's right, what's wrong, and their careers are on the line," Brett told me earlier that morning. "If I was Bud Selig, I would ask the Kansas City Royals if they could steal Willie Aikens from time to time and have him speak to every minor-league team."
It's the first day of minor-league camp, and Aikens stands in a sea of more than 100 young ballplayers. Just before Opening Day, Aikens' book, "Safe At Home," will be released. A couple weeks after that he'll be tossing out the first pitch at a Royals game, in the same stadium where he used to star. Now, Aikens saunters around the practice field, joking with the players he remembers from the year before. Maybe a handful of these young men will make the major leagues someday. If any achieve the baseball success of
Willie Aikens, it'll be a dream come true.
I look around the spring training complex. Nearby, Billy Butler is taking grounders. Brett is hovering over a group of catchers practicing throws to second. A group of pitchers works on bunt coverage. Birds are chirping. It's a beautiful scene.
I look back to the practice field. But big No. 24 has disappeared into the crowd of players. Maybe the ability to fit back in is the best part of second chances.
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