Lenny Dykstra. The very name is onomatopoeic, describing as it does a short, tough, plug-ugly guy with a chew of tobacco in his mouth and a Napoleon complex as big as the swing of his bat.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Dykstra embodied the swaggering, cocksure chutzpah of the 1986 Mets. Strawberry and Gooden may have had the talent, but for those guys in 1985 and 1986, before the seductive allure of money and drugs had ruined them, playing baseball was no different from getting up in the morning. It's just what they did. It's what they were made to do. Dykstra was different. He wasn't built for the game, but through sheer dint of hard work (until he apparently succumbed to the siren song of steroids), he was one of the most exciting players in the game. To this day, every time I hear the song Centerfield, I think of Lenny Dykstra.
It's understandable that I would have been a Dykstra fan. I know all too well what it's like to a short person trying to make it in a tall world and having to talk louder and try harder. But for all that he made the game entertaining, the steroids and the fights he got into later in his career were an ominous sign that once his career was over, Dykstra might succumb to the downward spiral that affects so many professional athletes once their careers are over.
But those of us who thought Dykstra was just a dumb jock of limited innate ability and even less intelligence who put all his energies into playing over his head were dead wrong.
He may sound like a burnout when he talks, but today Nails is a successful businessman, respected investment prognosticator with an investment newsletter people pay a thousand bucks a year to read, subject of a recent profile on Real Sports on HBO, soon to be publisher of an investment magazine for professional athletes that he hopes will represent the perfect confluence of capitalism and doing a service for his brothers in professional sports who may not have his financial savvy, and the subject of this charming profile in, of all places, The New Yorker magazine:
Mets fans of a certain age will recall a popular poster from 1986, bearing the word “Nails” in bold letters across the top, and featuring a shirtless Dykstra, wearing eye black and holding a bat against his shoulder. The nickname referred to his tenacity and also to his peculiar Southern California lexicon. (“MTV is nails,” he explained in his autobiography, also called “Nails,” which was published in 1987, when he was twenty-four. “Winning is nails.”) He was wiry then; he used to complain that Lenny might as well have been his middle name, given how often it was preceded by the word “little”: Little Lenny Dykstra. He is lumpy now. Referring to his suit, which was pin-striped, he said, “It gets a little tighter, you know?” His hands tremble, his back hurts, and his speech, like that of an insomniac or a stroke victim, lags slightly behind his mind. He winks without obvious intent. In his playing days, he had a term for people like this: fossils. Nothing about his physical presence any longer suggests nails, and sometimes, as if in joking recognition of this softening, he answers the phone by saying, “Thumbtacks.”
[snip]
For many ballplayers, the growing-up point does not arrive until after retirement, when all the freebies vanish and equipment managers and hotel maids can no longer be relied upon for regular laundry service. Dykstra last played in the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach (“the best car”) and a Gulfstream (“the best jet”). The occasion for our lunch, however, was a new venture: Dykstra is launching a magazine, intended specifically for pro athletes, called The Players Club. An unfortunate number of his former teammates have ended up broke, or divorced, or worse. The week before we met, the ex-Yankee Jim Leyritz, himself twice divorced and underemployed, had hit a woman while driving home from a bar. He never grew up.
[snip]
Dykstra did not attend college, and, like many accomplished autodidacts, he is ever alert for signs of condescension, but he relishes his newfound opportunity to meet executives in a boardroom rather than on the charity golf circuit, and studies their habits carefully, to the point of noting their preferred e-mail font sizes. He is open about the fact that many businessmen—“graybeards”—have a hard time taking him seriously. “It’s like I got hit with an idiot stick—took ten lashes on the way in,” he said of a recent meeting. The steady pursuit and accumulation of class markers and status symbols is a handy defense against such anxieties, and during a rare break between calls he led me to a different computer, in the front seat, to show off a photograph that he was using as his wallpaper. “This is my bird, here—that’s a GII,” he said. “I wasn’t going to buy a plane till I bought a Gulfstream, ’cause Gulfstream’s the best in the world—and there’s not a close second, by the way. That’s something that was important to me. Like, all my hard work? Gulfstream makes me feel like it was worth something.”
So maybe he's still trying to prove his dick is as big as that of the big boys. But if that's what he's doing, at least he's doing it in a way that has not only made him wealthy, but might help some of today's athletes from meeting the same fate that befell some of his compatriots. And if the idea of little Nails, the kid with the chaw of tobacco in his cheek who always seemed more like your pain in the ass kid brother who wanted to play street baseball with the big kids than like any kind of profesisonal, turning into this macher in business isn't endearing enough, perhaps this is:
“Wives are key, dude. They are key. It’s a tough life. Your husband is gone and it’s always about him, and then—can you imagine?—he’s done, and all that happens, and you got no money?” (The fact that he and Terri have been married for twenty-three years, through stardom and retirement, seems to surprise even Dykstra. “Terri’s a special person, and I’m a very, very lucky guy,” he said. “It took me a long time to realize that. You know what I mean?”)
Look at the shattered lives of some of his 1986 Mets teammates -- Darryl Strawberry with a shaky hold on sobriety after battling drugs, booze, prison time for tax evasion, and colon cancer; Dwight Gooden, newly out of prison after repeated battles with substance abuse; Wally Backman, who was fired from a job he hadn't even started yet as manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks after the team found out about an old arrest for DUI and the fact that he was just about bankrupt. Given that Dykstra always had that short guy thing about having to out-macho the big boys, you'd think he would have fallen twice as far, twice as hard, just to show that he could. Dykstra is charmingly aware of his own intellectual limitations, admitting that he doesnt "read so good", but he managed to learn about high finance via books on tape and found out that this is something at which he excels, whether through some kind of innate ability or the same kind of sheer guts he used to show on the field.
The Mets' 2008 season starts next week, and for every question that the presence of Johan Santana may answer, there are innumerable new ones. Can José Reyes' ego be kept in check so that he thinks of the team as much as his own stats? Can Mike Pelfrey finally get his act together to be a credible fifth starter? Who the hell is going to play the outfield? And is this organization going to wake up and realize that either this team has to get younger or do something about its strength and conditioning program? But in an age of eight-figure-a-year incomes, this year's Mets could do worse than to look back at the gritty little guy with the big chaw of tobacco in his cheek, and realize that when push comes to shove, ever-vigilant moxie trumps lazy talent every time.
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