AMERICA AT LARGE: As first-time authors go, Davis Wells is hardly the first athlete to maintain he was "misquoted" in his own book. He isn't even the first to be fined over the contents (are you listening, Roy Keane?). But let's be clear about this: Jim Bouton he is not.
The problem with "tell-all" books on any subject is that they seldom tell all anyway, and Bouton says he never tried. "I had my own guidelines," Bouton recalled last week. "Ball Four was not a tell-all book, it was a tell-some book. I never quoted any player telling racial jokes. I never named names in the sex stories."
In 1970, Bouton, a former pitcher for the New York Yankees, burst into print with a seminal biography entitled Ball Four. It might be a stretch to say that baseball has never been the same, but it is fair to argue that the publishing industry hasn't. In the intervening 33 years, hundreds, if not thousands, of professional athletes on both sides of the Atlantic have attempted to emulate Bouton's success. So far none has come close.
Bouton has been in some demand as a literary critic this spring following the controversial publication of the roly-poly Wells' new magnum opus Perfect I'm Not! Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches and Baseball. Wells, like Bouton, pitches for the Yankees. Unlike Bouton, he was still under contract to the team when his book hit the stands, which is where his problems began.
But Bouton was breaking new ground in his revealing glimpse of life behind the scenes in the national pastime. And he had the services of the erudite Leonard Schechter, who was listed as the "editor" of Ball Four, but was in fact responsible for its witty prose.
Where Bouton had Schechter, Wells' collaborator was a fellow named Chris Kreski, who honed his editorial skills writing dialogue for Beavis and Butt-Head. In the pages of Perfect, Wells claimed, among other things, to have been "half-drunk" when he pitched a perfect game against the Minnesota Twins back in 1998, although he has since clarified the suggestion to mean that he was somewhat hung over. He also asserted that "up to 40 per cent" of major leaguers dabble in steroids, but has subsequently acknowledged that the figure may have been an exaggeration.
Wells also suggested that New York team-mates and fellow pitchers Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina are, well, butt-heads. The corpulent pitcher soon found himself at the centre of a hastily-called, closed-door clubhouse meeting convened in order that he might better explain what he meant to say.
Followers of baseball lore may recall that in the summer of 2000, Clemens hit Mets catcher Mike Piazza in the head (well, in the batting helmet) with a 95 m.p.h. fastball. Piazza survived, but in Game Two of the World Series that October, he broke his bat hitting a ball back to the mound. Instead of fielding the baseball, Clemens picked up a jagged piece of the barrel and threw it at Piazza.
"Trust me," wrote Wells, "if I were Mike Piazza, that broken bat would still be shoved up Roger's ass."
The first pre-publication galleys began to circulate through spring training camps a couple of weeks ago, and the rotund pitcher-author has been steadily backtracking ever since. Three days ago the Yankee organisation fined Wells $100,000, ostensibly for violating a personal conduct clause in his contract.
Wells has since apologised to his team-mates, denied several of his more sensational claims to the media, and essentially left his ghost-writing buddy Beavis to twist in the wind.
"If you're going to write something that'll get you alienated from your team-mates, and then alienate the media and fans by taking it all back," points out Bouton, correctly, "then you've got nobody on your side."
Few were on Bouton's side back in 1970. He had left the Yankees to pitch for the Houston Astros by the time his book appeared, but he effectively became persona non grata at Yankee Stadium. The baseball commissioner at the time, Bowie Kuhn, summoned him to a meeting and attempted to force him to sign a statement blaming Schechter for the "inaccurate" contents of the book. (Bouton refused.) He quickly became a pariah among fellow players ("Fuck you, Shakespeare!" Pete Rose once shouted at him from the batter's box), but, remembers Bouton, some of the most bitter attacks came from Schechter's sportswriting brethren, who were collectively outraged that he and Bouton had transcended the unwritten but tacit boundaries of what could be acceptably shared with one's readership.
The furor sparked by Wells' book would appear to be far disproportionate to its lasting impact on the literary horizon, but his baseball brethren have been lining up to take their cuts at him anyway. Clemens, whose own interpretation of the truth has been known to defy reality, shrugged off Wells' assertions (as well as his apology), revealing that his pet name for his team-mate is "Eli" (because, says Clemens, 'e lies all the time).
It's one thing to lie to your team-mates, but quite another to lie to your ghost-writer. Chris Kreski had no way of knowing whether Wells was or wasn't "half drunk" when he says he was, but he certainly could have done a better job of checking more verifiable facts before committing them to print.
In the pages of Perfect I'm Not, for instance, Wells recounts the rollicking tale of having been on the pitcher's mound on the night the Mets' then-manager Bobby Valentine was famously ejected from a game by the umpire, only to sneak back into the dugout wearing a disguise.
"I can say he's a liar," Valentine pointed out to the New York Times last week, "because he wasn't on the mound when I was thrown out of the game."
