McCain: Known plenty of misery
(AP Photo/Tony Ding)
McLain’s postseason slump
Denny McLain has known plenty of misery, says Wayne Coffey in the New York Daily News. Forty years ago, when he was just 24, the former Detroit Tigers pitcher became Major League Baseball’s first 30-game winner since Dizzy Dean. Success quickly went to his head. “When you are told every day how great you are, you tend to believe what you hear,” he says. “You begin to think you are bigger than you are.” Shortly after winning his second Cy Young Award, McLain was suspended for gambling, bookmaking, gun possession, and dousing two sportswriters with buckets of water. There was worse to come. After suffering an injury and leaving the majors in 1973, he was jailed for a total of nine years for racketeering, extortion, cocaine possession, embezzlement, and mail fraud. Twice he filed for bankruptcy; in 1979, his home in Lakeland, Fla., burned to the ground. Then, in 1992, his daughter Kristin was killed by a drunken driver. “It never goes away,” he says of his pain from that loss. “Never. That’s my one regret. Everything else is a pimple on a goat’s ass.” After intensive therapy in prison, McLain came to see that his recklessness and grandiose behavior were a mask for low self-esteem. Today he lives quietly in the Detroit suburbs, dotes on his grandchildren, and has made peace with himself. “I am who I am. I’m not going to change after 64 years. I get up every day and do Denny.”
