A Story Still Untold: 'Doc & Darryl' Misses the Point by Mark Anthony Neal

Doc + Straw + Iron MikeA Story Still Untold: Doc & Darryl Misses the Pointby Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Few casual fans of baseball will remember Cleon Jones, who from 1969-1975, was arguably the best everyday position player for the New York Mets. Jones’s batting average of .340 in 1969 was the best season average for almost 30 years.  Jones was also the team’s most recognizable African-American player in that era, save Hall of Famer Willie Mays, who with his significantly diminished skills, played his last two seasons with The Mets before retiring in 1973. The oft-injured Jones was exiled from the team to the Chicago White Sox in the Spring of 1975, after he was arrested for indecent exposure in Florida (the charges were dropped), and forced to publicly apologize by then New York Mets Chairman M. Donald Grant, in what amounted to a symbolic flogging, that would have never happened to any of the team’s White ballplayers.
It was this then fairly recent racial history that 19-year-old Dwight “Doc” Gooden and  21-year-old Darryl Strawberry walked into when they joined the Mets in April of 1984 and  May of 1983 respectively, and immediately became the biggest Black baseball stars that the team had ever produced.  Strawberry and Gooden’s spectacular  ascent and equally spectacular crashes are the subject of a new ESPN 30 for 30 documentary Doc & Darryl, directed by 30 for 30 veteran Michael Bonfiglio and Judd Apatow, most known for his adult frat boy films.
The stories of the two black boys from Tampa and Crenshaw (Los Angeles), who became as famous for what they did inside the white white lines, as they did with white lines, is well documented. The centerpiece of Doc & Darryl is a sit-down in the Maspeth diner made famous in Goodfellas, where Gooden and Strawberry talk honestly about their complicity in their downfalls.   The dramatic setting begs for an honesty about the forces that produced the tragic circumstances that produced the sit-down in the first place.
Yet, beginning with the film’s grounding of Gooden and Strawberry lives in the so-called dysfunction of alcoholic, abusive and, of course, absent Black fathers, that serve as inspiration for both players’ out-of-the-hood ambitions and the assumed context for their inability to survive their own success, the film quickly devolves into addiction porn.  Celebrity “addict whisperer” Bob Forrest spends so much time on screen, that he should have just been the third guest at that Maspeth diner table.
This particular framing of Gooden and Strawberry is fair-game; both readily admit to their addictions and the careers they squandered, pitfalls that some of their Black generational peers, Ken Griffey, Jr. and Barry Bonds (PEDs notwithstanding in this latter example), who both had early access to baseball’s professional ranks because of their all-star caliber fathers, managed to escape.  Yet that is only part of the story, the film fails in its ability to accurately portray what it meant for the team’s Young Money, coming of age in New York City during the 1980s, in comparison to Griffey and Bonds, who began their careers in Seattle and Pittsburgh.
The New York Mets have been historically been a conservative operation, as was the case when the team was bought by a group led by publisher Nelson Doubleday and Bernie Madoff’s future bud Fred Wilpon in 1980, and their choice of bow-tie wearing Frank Cashen as the new general manager.  While Cashen knew quite a bit about baseball -- he helped the Baltimore Orioles become a perennial power in the 1970s -- he obviously knew very little about young black men.  Strawberry jokes in the film about Cashen suggesting that he shoot a commercial for the American Dairy Association -- at a time when the player  was bingeing on six-packs before games -- to serve as a role-model for young men, unbeknownst to Cashen, were more interested in bumping Run-DMC.
While Cashen might be excused for the gaps in his knowledge about young Black men, Doc & Darryl reproduces those gaps in its ability to provide any real context for the reality of race, as it might have been experienced by the two subjects, save the run-of-the-mill racism Strawberry faced playing in front of minor league crowds in Tennessee.  Indeed, other than Gooden and Strawberry, the only other Black voices featured in the film are Gooden’s mother (who spends half of her moment on screen lining a hymn), and Ron Dock, one of George Steinbrenner's hired guns who essentially babysat the duo when they played for the Yankees in the 1990s.
In the era before ESPN became a Black barbershop, admittedly the sports press corp in the 1980s was as White as a Donald Trump rally; Doc & Darryl uncritically replicates this very White gaze, that was part-and-parcel of how the duo were covered at a time when Michael Jordan was a shooting guard who took too many shots and Lebron James was an infant. Save veteran journalist Bob Klapisch, most of the press corp assembled as experts, simply re-registered the very gripes they offered about Strawberry and Gooden wasting their talents, oblivious then, as now, to the high expectations placed on both -- Strawberry was supposed to be the next Ted Williams.
In a film that is based on the experiences of two of the youngest and most famous Black New York sports stars -- Reggie Jackson was a grown man when he owned New York in the late 1970s -- there is no mention of the world that many young Black people confronted, such as the police killings of Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpurs, or the White mobs that led to the deaths of Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins -- all of which occurred when Strawberry and Gooden were at the peak of their fame.  As Donald Earl Collins writes “White Americans treated Black lives cheaper than manure in ’85.” Perhaps if the voices in the film had been more diverse such framing might have been presented.
In a press screening for the film, Apatow admitted that they had asked Chris Rock to appear in the film, but his schedule didn’t allow (putting out that Oscar fire); Jon Stewart appears instead, though one wonders what New York Times sports writer William C. Rhoden or Public Enemy’s Chuck D were doing -- hell even Mike Tyson, whose own experience in the 1980s largely mirrored that of Strawberry and Gooden  At the very least, a Black contemporary of Gooden and Strawberry would have echoed the sentiment, that Gooden stopped being a dominant pitcher when he got that jheri curl.
More telling was one of the voices that was included.  Retired New York Mets first baseman and Jerry Seinfeld bud Keith Hernandez, has long carried himself as Strawberry and Gooden’s older brother -- as the film shows, he was hitting the clubs with them.  But like Mark Fuhrman’s role in the stellar 30 for 30 mini-series OJ: Made in America, Hernandez is provided a position prominence and prestige that is problematic. While Hernandez pontificates about Strawberry and Gooden’s drug use, most viewers are unaware that Hernandez was involved in a cocaine scandal that rocked Major League baseball in the early 1980s, that included all-stars such like Dave Parker and Dale Berra, son of Yogi Berra.  Indeed Hernandez, testified in federal court that he used cocaine for three years; rumors of his use of cocaine was likely the reason the St. Louis Cardinals traded him to the New York Mets in 1983. Hernandez was in no position to talk about Strawberry and Gooden’s failings.
In the film’s most poignant moment, Gooden confronts Strawberry about his long-held belief that it was Strawberry who outed him as a cocaine user to teammate Ray Knight.  As the story goes, then baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth made  Knight aware of  rumors that “one of your Black stars” is using cocaine -- the exchange, itself a metaphor for the functions of White social networks.  When Knight confronted Strawberry, Gooden always believed that it was “Straw” who told Knight that it was “Doc,” though at the Maspeth diner, Strawberry emphatically asserts that he simply said, per Eddie Murphy, “it wasn’t me.”  The exchange highlights the extent that the duo’s celebrity served as a form of surveillance -- would anybody have really cared if it was Tim Teufel doing lines? -- but also to the extent that despite their shared legacies, Gooden and Strawberry might not have been that close.
Doc & Darryl  feels like something that was “fun” for Apatow + Bonfiglio to do, but for many Black Americans who watched in awe at Strawberry and Gooden’s  rise,  which coincided with that of other Black male icons from the era like Mike Tyson, Michael Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Michael Jordan, and Magic Johnson, many with roots to the New York  Metropolitan area, their descent was as predictable as the police shooting deaths that happen with alarming regularity.
That is the story that remains to be told.
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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press, 2016).  He is the host of the weekly video podcast Left of Black and curator of NewBlackMan (In Exile).  Neal is Professor of African + African-American Studies and Professor of English at Duke University.