It took an embarrassing incident last December at a charity golf outing for the Harbor Club Children's Christmas Fund near Atlanta to finally make me face up to my alcoholism. And there were times when I locked myself in my bedroom to feel safe. I'd ask my youngest son, Danny, to please stay at home with me. It got to the point where I was worrying so much about everything-what was happening to my memory, how awful my body felt, how I hadn't been a good husband or a good father-that I was even afraid to be alone in the house. My oldest son, Mickey Jr., who had come to pick me up, thought I was dying, and so did I.
And she said, "I'll give you some oxygen." When the plane landed, there were emergency paramedics to bring me off on a stretcher. I tapped the stewardess on the shoulder and said, "Do you have a doctor in here?" She turned around, looked at my face and said, "Oh, my god, sir, go sit down!" I began hyperventilating. And I'm thinking, What if I have a heart attack? The more I thought about it, the more I started flaking out. By the time I got on the plane to fly back home to Dallas, I was really dehydrated. I'd been at the Mickey Mantle-Whitey Ford Fantasy Camp in Florida, drinking with the guys for two weeks, and then I had to go to upstate New York for a weekend card show. From what I can recall, I had the first anxiety attack in April 1987. The older I got, and the more alcohol I drank, the more I had these weird hangovers-bad anxiety attacks. And then someone's always asking, "What was your favorite pitch to hit?" But I can't remember what my favorite pitch was or where I liked to hit it. What did I look like throwing a ball? Did I take a hop or a skip or a jump or something? I can't even remember. You know, I was watching somebody take infield practice the other day, and I saw him catch a ball and throw it, and I was trying to think. To help me overcome my shyness and make me feel more comfortable before all those personal appearances, I'd warm up with three or four vodkas before leaving the hotel, go straight to the cocktail party and have three or four more drinks, and then I'd start feeling, Whew, all right. In the past five years I used alcohol as a crutch. I'd try to get somebody to go to dinner with me, and I'd start drinking vodka martinis. In those instances I was almost totally out of it by early evening. I found "friends" at bars, and I filled my emptiness with alcohol.
It was when I had no commitments, nothing to do or nowhere to be that I lapsed into those long drinking sessions. I always took pride in my dependability when I was doing public-relations work, endorsements and personal appearances. He came over to me in shock and said, "Man, that was a $15-a-shot port I sent over here." And I said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I was drinking Absolut vodka on the rocks, and as the guy watched, I poured the port right into my Absolut. Late one afternoon, after I'd finished a round of golf, a guy sent over an expensive glass of port. But over the years I just drank so much of it that I didn't care anymore.
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