Like diamond rings and football teams have torn this boy apart.
“I’ve been so alone, but you are my voice now. You are someone I want in my corner. You understand. You remember who I am.
“It’s just so great to get out of bed every day and feel the sun hit my face, and hear the rain hit the roof, and watch the dogs chase each other out back and feel so free in the air, and I don’t have a care in the world. So yeah, I can’t imagine my life without you, baby.”
That he could have lost his friend is the ultimate irony. “It was a little bittersweet that I wasn’t going to be able to continue my relationship with Mike,” Young says. “It was such an important relationship. But at the same time, I feel like I’ve come out of the other side so much stronger because of it.
“Because I’m going to have to find a way to live with this and deal with it and get stronger from it.”
Not only is this a big league ballplayer who has come out the other side stronger, it’s also a baseball superstar who has come out the other side with wisdom. Maybe his teammates are learning from him.
“I am not going to be able to change the whole world, but the thing I do is I go in with the intent of changing the world in a positive way, and I think, hopefully, my positive influence is enough to have a ripple effect on others, I hope.”
Young is aware that he’s doing more for the future of pro ball and for his game than any player alive. “You’ve got to be selfish enough to sacrifice whatever you have to sacrifice to get to the ultimate goal,” he says. “It’s all in the mindset, and if you change that mindset and make the necessary sacrifices to get there, you’re going to accomplish your goals.”
He believes that a lot of players still have a long way to go to get to that place. “That’s the biggest battle I have to fight against is with me not being able to do all I want, it’s fighting against that tendency, that desire to do more. I mean, you’re talking about a high-end athlete, and that’s what high-end athletes do.
“You set the bar high and you set the bar so high for everyone else that people don’t understand how that could possibly work. So you’ve got to fight that a lot of times and you’ve got to fight the misconceptions that people have about what you’re doing.”
This is only the beginning of his Hall of Fame résumé. Young will continue to be one of the most compelling baseball storytellers this side of Babe Ruth, for sure. “You know what?” he says, smiling. “He’s my idol. He was the guy who inspired me to write my first novel.
“He has influenced me so much, it’s so hard to even think about saying it to someone. But I appreciate him as a writer. I feel like my biggest influence is going to be him as a writer. He influenced me so much, and so did some of the sports writers like Jimmy Breslin, who really showed me what journalism can be.”
He’s writing a book, too. He says it’s a story of betrayal that mirrors the kind he’s had to learn to live with and move past.
The story starts in the late 70s, with his first girlfriend, a young aspiring actress named Kelly Morgart, who came to be known as the “Kelly Girl” for his book The Year That Punked Baseball.
But a few years later, Young’s mom moved in with him, and he wasn’t thrilled to see her. “We were both at the end of our rope,” he says. “I really was getting tired of living in a hotel room with my mom. And I told her, I don’t know what it is, it’s just not the same.”
A year later, he called his girlfriend, who didn’t believe he was going to break up with her. Then she saw it coming on a TV show.
But he was ready. “She went to the studio door at WNBC-TV in New York City and I saw her. She was so beautiful, and I was kind of amazed at how beautiful she was.
“I told her that I just couldn’t do this, and that she was a wonderful person and I loved her, but that it wasn’t right. And then I told her that I was going to go away and be alone for a while. That it wasn’t her fault. And that she had done nothing wrong. She was just the only person I’d ever really been in love with.
“And that, if this didn’t end, it wasn’t going to be any different. So she agreed, and I told her that it might be the best thing that ever happened to her.”
Even though they have remained close friends, they haven’t spoken for almost 40 years, and Young says it’s because he can’t forgive her.
“She knows that I’ve told people that she was the reason I did what I did, and that’s not true. That I made a decision to do this because I had gotten so addicted to the lifestyle.
“It was all I knew and all I knew how to do.”
One reason he gave for the breakup was that he couldn’t take the pressure, the jealousy, the lack of privacy, the endless demands of fame, etc. “I was a young adult. I was only 27 at the time. I had made good money in baseball,” he says, laughing. “But that wasn’t about making money. That was about getting some kind of release.
“I don’t know. We couldn’t live together, but we talked on the phone every day for the next five or six years. There were some years where she and her daughter spent Thanksgiving with me.
“It was just a really sad thing, but you have to take full responsibility for your own actions.”
Young is still talking about that time, 40 years ago, but if this is what happens when the most powerful athlete on the planet does it, you can imagine how much more hell some of the other baseball players must be in right now.
The first thing he tells a reporter is that he didn’t have sex with any of those women, and he’s not a victim. He’s got no excuse.
He believes this is going to kill him. “Because you have to stay in that mode in order to get there and stay there and get beyond that. I don’t think people are built like that. You’re not a machine. You don’t operate like that. I’m talking about the human brain.”
He’s talking about the human brain right now, because he’s got to get over it, but he’s also making himself vulnerable in his effort to help men all over the world who don’t have that excuse.
“It’s very tough to get yourself in a position to be vulnerable like that. You have to be in an environment where you’re not going to get cut off at the knees. That’s why I chose this. Because if I get cut off at the knees by what people think about me, if this comes to an end, I’m fucked. So this way, if that happens, the world will probably think I’m just not good enough to reach a certain level.
“I can feel that right now. I can feel it in the air and feel it on the web. So if the world feels like I’m not good enough, all they have to do is look at some of the stuff I’ve done. They can’t all be dummies.
“You know, at the end of the day, they’re going to have to figure out that I’m real.
“What they think is that I’m just some front man and that I’m trying to get by. I’m trying to get by? What, they think I got stuck with a bad game plan? But that’s not what they see, I guess. I mean, I wouldn’t be able to keep living like this if it was all about me and I was so self-absorbed.
“I’m going to get out of this life. I’m going to move on to my next life. I’m going to keep living in this world.”
But he’s not giving up. Even with the latest fallout, there have been a few good things happening this year, mostly because he’s doing all he can to stay focused. He is in his second book, and he’s
