PORTER WAS HUMAN, BUT IT STILL HURTS

We wanted to believe. We always want to believe in the power of people. We
want to believe that men can hit all those home runs without injections of
juice. We want to believe that hard criminals can turn their lives around.
We want to believe that, with willpower and hope, anything is possible.

We wanted to believe Darrell Porter when he said he quit cocaine.

And that's why Monday's news landed like a kick to the stomach. Drug tests
revealed that Porter died last week of toxic effects of cocaine.
Investigators found clues that painted an awful final scene, one where
Porter, in a state of excited delirium set off by cocaine, drove his car
off the road at La Benite Park in Sugar Creek, smashed into a tree stump,
got out of his car, went to the Missouri River, dunked his left leg, went
back to the car and died in the heat.

It was such a senseless way for a good man to die.

And Porter was a good man. He touched so many people through baseball,
through the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, through his writing. The end
doesn't diminish any of that. But the end does tell the saddest story, the
one of a man who found God, worked with children, loved to fish, cherished
his family but still could not summon the power to beat cocaine.

III

People always underestimate cocaine. Scientists have done experiments with
laboratory animals and found that they would press a metal bar 10,000 times
for one shot of cocaine. Ten thousand times. More than once, I saw David
Thompson speak to children about his cocaine habit.

"Do you know me?" he asked. The kids shook their heads.

"Do you know Michael Jordan?" he asked next, and they all raised their
hands, jumped up and down, stuck out their tongues, pretended to dunk.

"Well," he said, "before I took drugs, I was Michael Jordan's hero."

He was. People who saw David Thompson play basketball at North Carolina
State say he was the best who ever lived. Cocaine hollowed him. His
unsatisfying pro basketball career ended bizarrely with him falling down
the stairs at Studio 54.

And when those kids asked him why -- "Why didn't you just quit cocaine?" --
his shoulder slumped, and he looked at the ground, and he said, "I wasn't
strong enough to quit. Few people are strong enough to quit."

That's all we are left with when looking at Darrell Porter. His story has
been told and retold the past week. He was a gifted athlete, recruited to
play quarterback at Oklahoma. Instead, he played baseball, and at times he
played it as well as anybody. He took out second basemen on double-play
grounders. He crashed into catchers on close plays at the plate. He played
through the most intense kinds of pain. He had a great eye. He was a World
Series MVP once.

At night, he partied. "I guess I was schizoid," he wrote in his book Snap
Me Perfect! The Darrell Porter Story. "Baseball was one world and partying
was another."

He partied as if the world would end. One night, on a car ride from Denver,
he did seven grams of cocaine. On another, he brutally beat up a man and,
even minutes later, could not remember why. One entire winter, he mostly
sat in his house, clutching a shotgun, convinced that baseball commissioner
Bowie Kuhn was going to burst in to get him.

"This was the end result of the beautiful cocaine high?" he wrote in his
book. "To be dead inside? To be unable to feel either joy or sorrow, to
feel only hopeless fear? I hated drugs. Hated them! They had promised me
happiness, ecstasy, but instead they plunged me into a living hell."

He quit. At least that's what he told everyone. Maybe that's what he
believed, too. He confessed his sins. He found religion. He quit playing
baseball and instead watched his children play. He talked to people about
changing their lives. He even worked to become a baseball announcer,
another new life chapter at age 50.

But, all along, Porter could not shake cocaine. Maybe he quit for a long
while before his demons clutched him again. That happens with cocaine.
Maybe he lived a double life for many years, as he did when he played
baseball. That happens, too. We'll never really know.

We can only know that cocaine got him in the end.

"Cocaine," David Thompson told those kids, "usually wins."

III

This last week, many people have written or called so they could tell their
Darrell Porter story. He did touch many people. One remembers a huge
collision at first base against the White Sox and another remembers a
handshake at the mall and another remembers being inspired when Porter spoke.

They all wanted so much to believe in Darrell Porter. Not just the
ballplayer. They wanted to believe in a tough Missouri man who stared down
his demons and turned around his life.

Monday's news took that away. Darrell Porter did not beat cocaine. Cocaine
beat him. Cocaine usually wins. Darrell Porter, in the end, was human.
That's all. It's just that we wanted him to be so much more than that.