Hamilton Needs Help

Josh Hamilton

Last July, when Texas Rangers fan Shannon Stone fell to his death after Josh Hamilton threw him a souvenir baseball, I said on the air that I was concerned about his future. Hamilton, as most everyone knows by now, has dealt with drug addiction and alcoholism for years. When Stone fell to his death I said that I hoped Hamilton wouldn’t relapse. Unfortunately, it appears as if that is exactly what has happened.

According to reports, Hamilton relapsed on Monday night at a local Dallas bar. The reports also indicated that teammate Ian Kinsler showed up at the establishment in an attempt to get Hamilton out of the situation.

The Rangers confirmed the relapse, releasing a statement that said they were "aware of a situation but have no further comment at this time."

The whole situation makes me sad. There are many people who deal with addiction every day. Some of them are able to overcome their problems. Some of them aren’t. But the one thing they all have in common is the fact that they are sick. Addiction is a sickness. It is a disease. It is not a choice, as some would have you believe.

I know of what I speak, at least when it comes to addiction. I watched my father go through it. I watched my father conquer it.

It was late in 1992, and my father was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time. I visited him for the holidays, and when I got off the plane, I was stunned at what I saw. You see, my father was always a big guy. The man that greeted me when I got off the plane was a good eighty pounds less than the man I had last seen the year before. My immediate reaction was to congratulate him on losing the weight. Within a couple of days I figured out how he had done it.

You see, my father would disappear for hours at a time, and when he returned, he was clearly high. I will never forget going to dinner with him, and him saying to me that he was so “zooted” out of his mind. I then found out that my father was using crack.

When I returned home from my trip I was so distraught about the situation that I had called some members of my family and told them what had happened. I was accused of lying, because no one could believe that my father, as straight-laced a guy as there was for most of my life, would fall down that far. The fact that the people I told did not believe me led to some very tense times in my life. There were family members I did not speak to for a while because they would not believe me. That is, until they confronted my father, who admitted he had a problem.

That was in 1992. My father spent the next couple of years on and off the wagon, moving from place to place (fist Mesa, Arizona and then Kansas). The addiction cost him his job and led him to file for bankruptcy.

But he turned his life around. He stopped using drugs, and for the last fifteen years of his life he was clean and sober. I don’t know how he did it. I never asked him (to be honest I was afraid to). But I know that he did it, and to this day I am proud of him for doing so.

I don’t know what triggered his addiction. I do know that there were certain traumatic events in his life that led him to relapse. Relapsing was his way of dealing with whatever pain he was going through at the time. I never condoned it, but I understood it.

Thank goodness he conquered his demons. There were other traumatic events in his life that occurred between 1995 and 2010 (when he passed away from a staph infection), but he never fell back into doing drugs.

When I first heard that Hamilton relapsed, I took to twitter to express how sad I was that he had fell off the wagon. One of my followers (who shall remain nameless) tweeted back to me, and was pretty insensitive about the whole thing. The guy made a joke about Game Six of the World Series and how that could make anyone drink if they were a Rangers fan. Naturally, I told him how much I disagreed with him.

We’ll probably never know what caused Hamilton to walk into that bar on Monday night. But try this on for size. For the last number of months, Hamilton was dealing with the fact that a kind act that he did led someone to fall to his death. On top of that, the man fell right in front of his young son.

I’ve obviously never had something like that happen to me, but I can see and understand how it would weigh on someone’s mind. I could understand how guilty Hamilton must have felt. Somewhere along the way he probably thought it was his fault that Shannon Stone died. Try dealing with that kind of guilt.

Again, I am not condoning what Hamilton did by going to that Dallas bar on Monday night. If he felt he was about to go back to alcohol, he should have reached out to someone. He should have turned to one of the many people he has in his support system. But he didn’t.

I am fond of telling people that they cannot live their lives in the rear view mirror. I am a firm believer in looking forward, not looking back. Hamilton cannot change what has happened in the past. But he can do something about his future.

He can get himself the help he needs. How he does it is up to him. Every addict that is able to overcome their issues does it differently. Some can do it by themselves. Some need rehab. It doesn’t matter how Hamilton does it, as long as he does it.

His very life is at stake here.