<Archive Obituary> Rod Scurry (November 5th 1992)
Bill Schenley
Photo:
http://pittsburgh.pirates.mlb.com/pit/images/fan_forum/top_three/96x72_ss_scurry.jpg
FROM: The Associated Press (November 5th 1992) ~
Rod Scurry, the former pitcher whose major league career was
shortened by drug abuse, died Thursday, a week after he
collapsed as deputies were trying to handcuff him. He was
36.
The deputies were called to Scurry's home Oct. 29 by
neighbors who reported he was acting strangely. The deputies
said they found him outside complaining that snakes were
biting and crawling on him.
When they tried to put handcuffs and leg restaints on him,
the deputies said, Scurry put up a struggle, then collapsed.
He had been hospitalized on a life-support system since the
incident. Autopsy results were pending.
Scurry was the Pittsburgh Pirates' No. 1 draft pick in 1974,
the same year he led the Hug High School baseball team in
Reno to a state championship.
During eight years in the majors, he pitched for the
Pirates, New York Yankees and Seattle Mariners.
A day after the Mariners released him in 1988, he was
arrested on charges of buying cocaine at a Reno crack house.
He was given a one-year suspended sentence and placed on 18
months' probation.
Baseball officials ordered Scurry in 1986 to undergo random
drug tests for the rest of his career because of previous
use.
"I think addiction overrides everything else, no matter how
stiff the penalties are," he said at the time. "You don't
care about anything, nothing matters."
---
1983 Topps (#537) baseball card:
http://www.angelfire.com/va3/steelerchief/images/RSCURRY.JPG
---
FROM: The Associated Press (November 18th 1992) ~
By Steve Wilstein, Sports Writer
In the living room of the Scurry home, the good memories of
a boy in love with baseball clash starkly with the image of
the troubled man who let cocaine destroy his pitching career
and, ultimately, his life.
For one peaceful moment, slumped in the overstuffed sofas
and arm chairs of his parent's home, there is no talk about
the problems that Rod Scurry tried to hide and that this
very private, close family sought to keep secret.
Nothing about his recent split with his wife, Laura, which
might have triggered a last deadly coke binge after several
years of staying clean. She left him and their two children,
a 6-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl, for what she called
a trial separation one week before he collapsed outside his
home in a ranting, hallucinatory episode that forced
sheriff's deputies to subdue him.
There is no talk about IRS claims of nearly $ 500,000 in
back taxes against him, which his wife believes led to a
cocaine relapse at least three months ago that hurt their
marriage. The tax problem wasn't his fault and he might not
have had to pay the money - an accounting firm in Texas put
Scurry and numerous other ballplayers into millions of
dollars of allegedly bogus tax shelters - but delays in the
case worried him.
"He had a hard time with pressure and I think that's why he
started doing what he was doing," Laura Scurry says later in
the manicure parlor she manages. "It was the pressure of
waiting and not knowing. The drugs made him quiet, shy and
scared. When he wasn't on them he was normal and fun and
happy. I couldn't live with him anymore while he was doing
the drugs."
At this moment, though, several days after the funeral, his
parents, sister and one of his three brothers are gathered
to reflect on the virtues of his life more than the
circumstances of his death at age 36 on Nov. 5. The strain
is obvious in their pallid faces and occasionally cracking
voices, but they want to offer a private view of someone
perceived publicly as a cocaine addict and remembered as a
key figure who broke open the Pittsburgh Pirates drug
scandal in 1985.
The family laughs at recollections of him as a child in the
early 1960s throwing balls at mattresses stacked against the
backyard fence so he wouldn't knock it down, a pint-sized
left-hander working on curves and fastballs as if he were
Sandy Koufax. They recall him pretending to do homework in
high school when, in fact, he was studying index cards he'd
organized in his own scouting report on every opponent he'd
face.
They tell stories about the prodigious homers he hit as an
18-year-old, one of them measured at more than 500 feet, and
his precocious talent for throwing a curve at such an angle
it could break between a batter's legs. He'd strike out 14
batters on a bad day, 18 or 19 on a good one. He always knew
he would be a big leaguer, they say, if not as a pitcher
then as a hitter. He worked hard to get there, running to
school at 5:30 a.m. even on freezing winter mornings to
throw in the gym, trying to stay tough physically and
mentally.
And yet when the time came, when the Pirates made him their
No. 1 draft pick in 1974 straight out of Hug High School, he
didn't want to go.
"He was drafted on a Tuesday, graduated on Thursday and had
to go to Florida that Sunday night," Scurry's father,
Preston, says. "I'll never forget that expression on his
face when he turned around and looked at his brother Rick.
It was a feeling of family devotion. He just hated to leave
home."
"It was horrible," Scurry's mother, Betty, adds. "He wanted
to play ball but he did not want to leave home. After he
signed, he said, 'I'm not going. I can't leave home.' I
said, 'Rod, Pittsburgh owns you now, you have to go."'
Every spring, from the time he was 18 until he was past 30,
the same scene was repeated, Scurry delaying his departure
as long as possible.
"It was just as hard on us as it was on him," says Rick,
four years younger than Rod. "Every time we went to the
airport or when he was driving, everybody cried. It never
changed."
Lonely and homesick, Scurry called his folks up to three
times a day as he struggled through the minors from 1974 to
1979. His curveball was one of the best, his fastball was
good, but control and consistency were a problem. So, too,
was self-confidence. He stayed as quiet as he had been in
high school, where he was voted the shyest boy in his class
like his brothers before and after him, and he retreated to
his room after games rather than pal around with teammates.
"That's a lonely life when you live on the road out of a
suitcase a week or two at a time and you get back home to a
lonely apartment," Preston says in slow, grave drawl, his
face wrinkled and whiter than the cold desert sand nearby.
He spent a lot of time on the road, himself, selling
wholesale stereo equipment while his sons were growing up,
going to Las Vegas one week a month and taking day trips
here and there.
"So you've got two things to do - sit there by yourself or
go out and raise Cain. And you're in the public spotlight,
being compared to guys like Koufax. It's a fast-paced life
and tough on a boy just out of high school put in with grown
men who know he's looking to take their job. And you've got
guys there who he looked up to that were doing things and
giving him a bad influence."
The Pirates were patient, bringing him along slowly. Even
when he got to Pittsburgh, manager Chuck Tanner used him in
situations where there wouldn't be as much pressure,
bringing him in with, say, a 5-2 lead rather than with the
game on the line. Tanner liked the boy, who had grown a
fierce mustache and begun to tame his pitches, and made him
the set-up man for Kent Tekulve.
In 1982, Scurry's best season, he saved 14 games, had a 4-5
record and posted a 1.74 earned run average, lowest in the
majors of anyone with at least 20 appearances. He pitched in
76 games, but his 103 innings weren't enough to qualify for
the ERA title.
He seemed on the verge of great success the following year,
27 years old, making hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet
that only made him more fragile and vulnerable.
"He didn't flaunt his social status or ability," says
Preston. "The public may have thought he was cocky,
arrogant, but that was not the case at all."
When he heard boos as his ERA blew up to 5.56 and his record
to 4-9, he tried to block it out with booze and drugs.
"I didn't know where to turn," he said at the time, "so I
turned to cocaine."
Scurry and one of his best friends on the Pirates, Dale
Berra, Yogi's son, began to hang out more with a couple of
fellows they'd known since the minors: Dale Shiffman, a
freelance photographer and cocaine dabbler, and Kevin Koch,
"The Parrot" who clowned for the crowd at Pirates games like
San Diego's Chicken.
At first Scurry would snort a gram or two of coke a week,
then the dosages increased dramatically over the next few
years.
"I guess he would do 6, 7, 8, 9 grams a night, anywhere from
$ 500 to $ 1,000 a night," Shiffman says now from his home
in Cincinnati. "I just saw him get so sloppy sometimes,
where he was actually snorting coke in bars and restaurants
and coming out of the bathroom. I told him, 'Hey, man,
you've really got to cool it.
"It got to the point where Rod used to call me and I would
end up lying to him or avoiding his phone calls because I
knew he had a big problem. The media portrayed me as a major
dealer, which was a bunch of nonsense. I just got a couple
of the ballplayers some cocaine.
"I don't really feel responsible for what happened to them.
A lot of the ballplayers said these drug dealers twisted our
arms and made us do it. That's bunk. These were big boys.
The real story is they would just hound you, call you 3, 4,
5 in the morning and I'd see them out until 6 o'clock in the
morning before a 1 o'clock day game."
At the start of the 1984 season, Scurry called home from his
hotel room in San Diego.
"He was talking to us and he blacked out," Preston recalls
with a wince of pain. "I called Don Robinson and had him go
check Rod's room."
Robinson and Berra found Scurry hallucinating about
invisible snakes crawling on him in his hotel room - he had
a lifelong fear of snakes just like most of his family - and
they reported him to Tanner.
Scurry was put immediately on the disabled list and sent off
to Gateway Rehabilitation near Pittsburgh for 30 days.
"My husband and I went back to see him and I was very
disappointed in the rehab center because I felt they were
treating him as a big major league star and not as a drug
addict," Betty says, reminded by her daughter Lisa that the
place even had a mound for Scurry to practice. "When my
husband and I got there we were greeted like we were coming
to a big party. I cried all the way home because I felt they
weren't doing the job. Rick and I went back and we went to
the sessions with him, but I was very disappointed in it.'
Rick could sense that his brother thought, "I put these 30
days in and it's done," and he knew that was the wrong
attitude. And it was then that he could feel them start to
grow apart after being so close all his life.
"Drugs and alcohol were separating me and him," Rick says.
"We both knew that we wanted to get back to this path we had
been on. We still loved each other, but neither one of us
knew how to get there."
Scurry came back after a tearful news conference with
Tanner, becoming one of the first players to acknowledge
cocaine use. He spoke about how he hated himself for two
years, how he had become a con artist to hide his addiction,
but he was conning himself if he thought his problems were
over.
In 1985 he was still doing coke, getting it from other
people when Shiffman cut him off. When the FBI began
investigating the scene, Scurry testified against his old
friend.
"Right before the whole mess came down," Shiffman says, "Rod
warned me, 'Hey, look man, you better split because there's
a lot of trouble coming your way. And by the way, do you
have any coke?' I said, 'Hey, Rod, I'm out of business,
man."'
Shiffman soon was in federal prison for two years,
undergoing a religious conversion that led to a stable,
drug-free life with a good job, solid marriage and three
children. Rather than hold a grudge against Scurry, Shiffman
felt gratitude, feeling prison was the best thing that ever
happened to him.
Scurry, meanwhile, was on his way to the end of his career
in Pittsburgh, then off to the New York Yankees for a year
in 1986 where he developed a close relationship with Billy
Martin, no stranger to bars. Released by the Yankees after a
drunken driving charge in Feb. 1987 that was later dropped,
Scurry spent that season with the San Francisco Giants'
Triple-A Phoenix club. Another season, another team, he
spent 1988 as a middle reliever with the Seattle Mariners.
Released again Dec. 21, he was arrested the next morning
after buying two rocks of crack cocaine at a Reno house
under surveillance.
His career shattered, Scurry tried to pull his life together
back home in Reno. He owned a car wash, liked to do auto
detailing, go fishing and hunting, generally stayed straight
and tried to make his marriage work. He never returned a
call from Shiffman about a year and a half ago.
"I guess he was scared to death," Shiffman says. "I had just
hoped to have a chance to share with him what changed my
life and help him if I could, and it just didn't work out
that way. I heard he had been in trouble with the crack
cocaine a few years back and that he had a wife and kids,
but I had assumed he was still pretty much involved with
drugs. I just wanted to let him know, 'Hey, no hard feelings
buddy, it turned out for the best."'
Whether it was the pressure from the IRS or the breakdown of
his marriage, Scurry reacted by going back to cocaine. Home
alone in Reno with his children, Laura gone, he called his
mother in nearby Sparks at 12:30 a.m. on Oct. 29 to talk
about his marital problems. He was upset but coherent and
lucid. Forty minutes later, the phone rang again. This time
Betty Scurry heard her grandson Rodney asking her to please
come over.
Rod had gone out wearing sweat shorts and nothing else in
the chilly night, begging neighbors for help with the
invisible snakes crawling on him and biting him. They called
the sheriff's office, and four deputies came, first trying
to quiet him, then taking him down when he struggled and got
angry. After they handcuffed him and bound his feet, they
found he had stopped breathing and become unconscious, and
they began CPR until paramedics arrived and took him to a
hospital via helicopter.
"He had a faint heartbeat and faint breathing," Lisa Scurry
remembers, "but the doctor said even though they were doing
CPR doesn't mean he was getting oxygen to the brain."
Sheriff's Sgt. Don Means, in charge of the inquiry into the
case, arrived at the scene shortly after Scurry was flown
out. His son Scott had played Little League ball for the
team Scurry sponsored, proudly wore the red "Rod Scurry's
Twins" cap and satin jacket, and looked up to him as a hero
who came down at times to talk to the kids and throw some
batting practice. Means knew the Scurry family from
attending countless games - Little League, American Legion,
soccer and basketball.
"When I saw Betty and Lisa at the house, my heart sank,"
Means says, sitting in his office, holding a picture of
Scott in that Scurry's Twins uniform. "It was a terrible
feeling to see them under those circumstances because I'd
seen them in such happy times.
"Then when I went into the house, doing the crime scene, I
saw that he had a red jacket exactly like my son's that said
'Rod Scurry's Twins.' That kind of finished me off for that
night emotionally."
Scurry's body was scraped badly from the struggle, but the
family never believed he was the victim of excessive force.
They accept the preliminary judgment of doctors that he
lapsed into cardiopulmonary arrest from a reaction to the
cocaine, cutting off his brain's oxygen supply and putting
him into a coma until he died a week later when he was taken
off a life-support system.
Two days before he died, Shiffman called the Scurry home,
hoping to help again, not realizing it was too late.
And now it is left to the family to go on, tension still
evident between Laura and her in-laws, the children caught
in the middle, the IRS case unresolved.
"Rod Scurry was a good guy from a good family who had a lot
of things going for him," Means says. "That's the true
tragedy of this. This stuff, cocaine, ate him up."
Scurry's name is not among the green Hall-of-Fame banners
hanging in the gym at Hug High School.
"He was one of our best athletes, but we didn't want to send
a mixed message to kids that he was someone to be admired
and should be placed in an exalted position because of his
drug use," says Athletic Director Pat Cunning. "Maybe people
will feel differently now that he's dead."
Scurry's coach his senior year, Mike Copenhaver, who
measured that 500-foot homer and saw all those strikeouts as
the team went to the state championship game, wants to see
Scurry's name among the green banners. He recalls Scurry as
so dominant that an opposing team once left the dugout on a
cold night and waited up the hill inside a warm bus while
the last two men struck out. Everyone knew they couldn't hit
him.
Sgt. Means also would like Scurry in the school's Hall of
Fame, though for a different reason.
"I think they're doing a disservice to the high school by
not putting him up there," he says. "What other way can you
tell kids this isn't a good thing to do? This guy was on top
of the world and this is how he ended up."
---
1983 Fleer (#322) baseball card:
http://www.angelfire.com/nc3/blackgold/RScurry.jpg
Hyfler/Rosner
"Bill Schenley" <stra...@ma.rr.com> wrote in message > ---
> FROM: The Associated Press (November 18th 1992) ~
> By Steve Wilstein, Sports Writer
>
> In the living room of the Scurry home, the good memories
> of
> a boy in love with baseball clash starkly with the image
> of
> the troubled man who let cocaine destroy his pitching
> career
> and, ultimately, his life.
>
<snipped>
What an incredibly sad story. Beautifully written. Thanks
for posting.