Sports

On Feb. 3, 2012 reports surfaced that Texas Rangers MVP superstar outfielder Josh Hamilton had suffered another relapse. Anytime a professional athlete is reported to have taken a major step back in his career, fans assume the player suffered an injury or his stats have taken a sudden dive, but this is not the case with Hamilton. This is no pulled quad or a home run drought, but a matter of life and death, a matter of drugs and alcohol.

Aside from being one of the best baseball players in the world, there is something much deeper and much more important behind what meets the eye with Hamilton, who has won a Most Valuable Player award and is also a Home Run Derby champion. For any other player, those are lifetime milestones, but Hamilton knows that anything life gives him is a bonus, because honestly, Josh should be dead – and he knows it.

Hamilton during his early stages of drug and alcohol use

Josh Hamilton’s amazing up and down story began in 1999. All his life Josh was a baseball prodigy. When he was five, he played with eight year olds. When he was eight, he played with teenagers, and so forth. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays selected him with the first pick in the 1999 MLB draft, also handing the 18 year old a record $3.6 million dollar signing bonus. The Devil Rays and pretty much all of baseball assumed Hamilton was a sure thing for many years to come. Teenage Josh Hamilton was confident, strong, tough-minded, but also kind of a mama’s boy.

Still just a kid, Hamilton lived with his parents at home and on the road. They quit their jobs to follow their son on his journey to the big leagues. This drew criticism from the harsh public media, for obvious reasons. Number one overall pick, millions of dollars, now a professional athlete –but Josh was still maturing inside and out and preferred to stay close to his family as he did all his life back in Raleigh, North Carolina. Josh’s mother, Linda, cooked her son’s meals and father Tony would go over each game with his son in the evenings. (more…)