“Devil's got me now, gone and got me now”

The Kendalls 

I have a new baseball hero, Josh Hamilton. Hamilton has never played in the major leagues and did not play any baseball for four years.

 He was an addict. He flunked his drug tests so often that he quit bothering to take them.   He started his road to recovery 17 months ago, and the Cincinnati Reds are now giving him a chance to make the team.

 Josh Hamilton has battled something bigger than sports; he has battled his inner demons.

 The Washington Post did a wonderful story about Hamilton. He was the very first player chosen in the 1999 baseball amateur draft by Tampa Bay. Shortly thereafter, he was in a car wreck. While in recovery, he became addicted to drugs and tattoo parlors at the same time.

 He has kicked drugs.  Getting rid of the tattoos has been a lot harder.

 While Hamilton was out of baseball, he blew through most of a multi-million dollar bonus and was eventually reduced to cleaning up at a small town baseball diamond.   Yet despite all of that, he is still only 25 years old and still has some of the amazing talent that made him the first player selected by a major league baseball team. He found Jesus, found treatment, goes to meetings and has a lot of people rooting for him.

 I am one of them.  

Hamilton’s fight is a one day at a time. Addictions are always near, waiting to come back. Josh will need to keep battling for the rest of his life. 

 I don’t know Josh, but please pray that he makes it. Something tells me that he will.   

 Josh was not my first Cincinnati Reds hero. During my childhood, it was Pete Rose.

 Rose didn’t drink or smoke; gambling was his demon. I knew he gambled. Virtually everyone in Cincinnati knew. If you read the Dodd report that the baseball commissioner published in 1989, you could see that the evidence was overwhelming.

 Pete has never been able to face his demons. He whines, takes pot shots and makes excuses. If he had apologized in 1989 and then gone through the steps to recovery like Josh Hamilton, he would have walked into the Hall of Fame years ago.

 Instead, Pete lived a lie. He kept lying and denying that he bet on the Reds, and many of us believed him.

 I almost got into a fistfight with an elected official who argued that Pete didn’t belong in the Hall of Fame. I was willing to put up my dukes for Pete. No one else had made 4,256 hits and probably never will

 Then he did something stupid and despicable. He finally admitted that he bet on the Reds, but his motives were obviously wrong. He did it to hype a book that he had “written”. He wasn’t sorry; he was trying to make a quick buck.

 Charlie Hustle was trying to hustle us. It didn’t work. The book flopped, and Rose’s greased path to the Hall of Fame was put on hold, probably forever.

 In spite of his book fiasco, Pete has still not taken steps to atone for what he has done or sought reconciliation with people that he hurt. His outer demon is gambling, but his real demon is the inability to take responsibility for his actions—not in the way that Josh Hamilton did, at least.

 Josh did not have a “posse” of excuse makers like Rose. Pete’s entourage apologized for his lack of an apology.

 In fact, they may be the ones keeping Pete from getting help. If the people around Rose really cared for him, they would have shown him some tough love 20 years ago.    

 Pete was the great hero of my childhood. He played the game they way it ought to be played.

 He just screwed up in the game of life.

 The downside of having an addictive personality caught Rose a long time ago.  He needs to fight those demons and make amends to those he hurt.

 Much in the way that Josh Hamilton has.

I hope Josh is on the Reds roster on opening day. He can give Pete Rose, and the rest of us, a lesson on how to play the game of life.

 Don McNay is Chairman of McNay Settlement Group and the author of The Unbridled World of Ernie Fletcher. You can write to him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or read other things he has written at www.donmcnay.com.  His award-winning column is syndicated on the CNHI News Service.