Dan G
10-26-2011, 07:50 AM
Really good, and sad article about one of my all-time favorite baseball players, written in the November 2011 issue of Maxim.
Article was written by Jeff Pearlman, who wrote a great book on the 1986 NY Mets, The Bad Guys Won.
http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/223/thebadguyswon.jpg
I knew Lenny had financial troubles, but I had no idea he had fallen as low as he has.
He won the World Series with the Mets, was a three-time All-Star with the Phillies, and then turned himself into a multimillionaire and financial guru. But it all fell apart in a pool of debt and drugs. How did the grittiest player in baseball end up bankrupt, friendless, and rotting in jail?
On a warm, nondescript Southern California night in January 2009, Dorothy Van Kalsbeek found herself driving out to the Camarillo Airport, hoping—against all logic—for the best, steeling herself for the worst. Nearly three years had passed since she accepted her present accounting job, and through the myriad emotional, mental, and financial trials, she had always believed her boss, her friend…would find a way out of this mess. Family members deemed him dead to them—yet Van Kalsbeek stuck. Former business associates sued him for millions—yet Van Kalsbeek stuck. Newspapers and magazines mocked him; former major league teammates ignored him; his wife left him—yet Van Kalsbeek stuck. Even as he lost the $17.5 million mansion and the $2 million Gulfstream jet and the $160,000 car; even as his business holdings vanished…Van Kalsbeek stuck. Hell, the woman hadn’t received a paycheck for her accounting services in more than a year.
“What can I tell you?” she says. “I believed in Lenny Dykstra.”
On this night, however, her faith was finally shaken. Dykstra, a former All-Star outfielder with the Mets and Phillies who, after his retirement, had been hailed by Jim Cramer of CNBC’s Mad Money as a financial wizard, had asked her to come to the airport for a chat. As she entered Dykstra’s lavish 5,000-square-foot second-floor office, Van Kalsbeek was struck not by her boss’ somber mood but by the item he placed at her feet: a black duffel bag, six feet in length. “It was enormous,” she says. “And it was stuffed.”
Inside it were hundreds upon hundreds of envelopes. Inside the envelopes were hundreds upon hundreds of bills. Unpaid bills. “Do me a favor,” said Dykstra, his spirits as low as his credit rating. “Go through these and tell me where I’m at.”
For the next three weeks the bag sat on her living room floor, unopened and untouched. “I was in denial, but I knew what was inside,” she says. Finally, confronting the inevitable, she sorted through it, bill by bill by bill. When she reported back to Dykstra, the news was grim.
“You have nowhere to go,” she said. “You’re broke and you owe millions.”
With that Dorothy Van Kalsbeek returned home. And cried.
As this story is being written, Lenny Dykstra—“Nails” to millions of baseball fans—is not Lenny Dykstra. He is inmate No. 2766176 inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Men’s Central Jail. On June 6, 2011, inmate No. 2766176 was arrested for 25 misdemeanor and felony counts of grand theft auto, filing false financial statements, and possession of cocaine, ecstasy, and the human growth hormone Somatropin. He pleaded not guilty to the charges. While his ubiquitous orange jumpsuit disguises him as merely another of the facility’s inmates, unlike 99 percent of them, who dine together and sleep in enormous halls packed tight with bunk beds, inmate No. 2766176 is confined to his cell for 23 hours a day. His space, an approximately 8'x6' block of stone, is equipped with a toilet and a sink. Meals are passed beneath a steel door. The tobacco, alcohol, and drugs he craves are not allowed; the laptop he addictively types on is miles away. Thanks to years of chewing, he has three or four teeth remaining in his mouth—brownish nubs jutting out from blackened gums. For companionship, he shouts to neighboring captives, none of whom he can see. Twice a week he receives a 15-minute phone call. Save for Van Kalsbeek, he has no one to reach out to.
The professional sporting landscape has forever been littered with the carcasses of punctured heroes. Yet save for the precipitous plummet of O. J. Simpson some 17 years ago, no jock in modern lore has traveled a rise-and-fall path quite as jarring—and oddly riveting—as Lenny Dykstra.
He was, not all that long ago, the poster child for the uniquely American ideal that dreams, buttressed by grit and determination, can actually come true. Raised in the working-class Anaheim, California suburb of Garden Grove, Dykstra—the second of three boys—was the prototypical short, scrappy kid who snarled and cursed and refused to be denied, an approach to the game that later won him the nickname Nails. From the earliest of ages, little Lenny told anyone who would listen that one day he would play major league baseball. Nobody listened. “He was always under*estimated,” says Brian Dykstra, his older brother. “People didn’t take Lenny seriously, because he didn’t look all that imposing.
But he was a pain in the ass who never took no for an answer.”
The Dykstra kids were raised by their mother, Marilyn, and stepfather, Dennis Dykstra, a blue-collar phone company employee. (Their real dad, Terry Leswick, abandoned the family when Lenny was four.) Dennis encouraged competitiveness, and Lenny spent his boyhood excelling in every imaginable sport. Yet baseball was his calling. The Dykstras lived in the shadow of Anaheim Stadium, and on the afternoons of Angels games the boys would ride bikes to the ballpark, slide beneath a gate, and romp around the outfield. “It was heaven,” says Brian. “We’d dive after balls, pretend we were real Angels. Then the ushers would kick us out. But for 15 minutes it was living a dream.”
Over his four years as an outfielder/pitcher for Garden Grove High, Dykstra emerged as Orange County’s best prep ballplayer. He batted .550 and entered the June 1981 amateur draft absolutely certain his hometown Angels would select him in the first round. Instead, they took shortstop Dick Schofield. The first round passed. The second round passed. Finally, with the 315th pick in the 13th round, the lowly New York Mets took a shot.
Dykstra was livid. “‘Fuck the Angels,” says Brian. “That was his attitude from that day forward.” The pain never left.
The Mets offered Dykstra a $25,000 bonus, good money for a 13th-round pick. He said no. They offered $27,500. No, again. $30,000—still no. “I’m the best fucking player in the draft,” he told Roger Jongwaard, a Mets scout. “I should be paid like it.” Finally, New York offered $35,000—take it or leave it. He took it. Hence, it was in the Podunk minor league town of Shelby, North Carolina that the curious legend of Lenny Dykstra began.
“He was the hardest-playing athlete I’d ever seen,” says a minor league teammate, who requested anonymity. “But he was very disrespectful, and he didn’t give a shit if he had to run over you to gain an edge. It was all about Lenny, Lenny, Lenny.”
Dykstra was a cartoon character brought to life. The anonymous teammate recalls he would sit on his bed and stuff his hollowed-out bats with cork (a precursor to his alleged PED usage in the ’90s). He’d bring home the fattest, ugliest women, have sex with them, kick them out, and return an hour later with another. Upon being drafted he bought a white Porsche 911 and rarely thought twice about driving 130 mph. Though he was bad at poker and worse at golf, he never turned down a bet. “I used to kick his rear up and down the golf course, but Lenny refused to play without having a bet out there,” says Marlin McPhail, a minor league teammate. “There was no reason for him to bet me, because he couldn’t possibly win. But he needed to have a stake on everything.”
On May 3, 1985, Dykstra made his big league debut, as the Mets center fielder. Although he had dreamed of being an Angel, New York was the perfect place for the scrappy 22-year-old with a thirst for attention and a love of the fast life. First baseman Keith Hernandez forced Dykstra to smoke cigarettes. Pitchers Doug Sisk and Jesse Orosco welcomed him into their back-of-the-plane beer-fueled poker games. Dykstra’s rep was secured when, while preparing to play golf at the prestigious Nassau Country Club in the summer of 1986, he walked past a gaggle of priests in the clubhouse, lifted a leg, and farted. “He fit in as well as anyone,” says Sisk. “Lenny was gritty and disgusting. So were we.”
When New York won the 1986 World Series, coming back to overcome Boston in a classic seven-game thriller, Dykstra established himself as a Big Apple favorite. Though he lacked the talent and résumé of the legendary Pete Rose, Dykstra was often compared to Charlie Hustle for his balls-to-the-wall approach. (In modern speak he’d be the equivalent of Boston’s Dustin Pedroia.)
Yet he also hovered close to the dark side. The Mets were a team of heavy drinkers and cocaine users, and Dykstra indulged in both, friends say. “Lenny had no limits,” says Ed Hearn, a catcher with the club. “None.”
When the Mets traded Dykstra to Philadelphia midway through the 1989 season, Shea Stadium loyalists were incensed. How*ever, his seven and a half years with Philadelphia told the story of a man burdened by demons. Though Dykstra was a three-time All-Star and helped Philly reach the 1993 World Series, he served as an ode to poor judgment. In 1991 he was placed on probation for his gambling problems, and then nearly died when—driving drunk—he crashed his car into a tree. And throughout his seasons in Philadelphia he—apparently, though he denied it—loaded his body up on steroids and growth hormones, emerging as the embodiment of the blatantly juiced athlete. “It was a joke, seeing how big he got,” says Hearn. When, in 1998, his body finally broke down—he’d been sidelined two seasons with injuries—he announced his retirement at age 35.
“Everyone in baseball thought the same thing about Dykstra—that he’d vanish and never be heard from again,” says Brian Johnson, a longtime major league catcher. “There was no reason to think he’d amount to much of anything.”
Ever since Lenny Dykstra was a young boy, people looked him over—the dirty uniforms, the foul mouth, the recklessness—and reached the same conclusion: This guy puts the D in dumb.
So what if he had been an A and B student in high school? So what if he could read most people in a second’s time? So what if, despite his love for the fast life, he had actually saved much of the money he’d made during his 12-year career? Lenny Dykstra was a buffoon—no ifs, ands, or buts.
“That perception,” says his brother Brian, “pissed Lenny off in a major way. He always felt he had to prove himself.”
Hence, in 1993, with his career coming to an end and his will to succeed as strong as ever, Lenny Dykstra looked around Southern California and sought a way to apply his competitiveness and drive to a different arena. Enter: executive car washes.
To Dykstra the idea seemed laughably simple. In 1994 the American economy was booming, and the beginning of the tech bubble was turning much of Orange County into a fountain of big money, big houses, and, best of all, fancy automobiles. Yet most of the car washes were dumpy, grade-C setups. Not Lenny’s. Within nine years his three SoCal-based car wash/quick lube establishments (a.k.a. “Lenny Dykstra’s Car Wash”) were grossing millions. Yes, a treatment at Dykstra’s cost three or four bucks more than at competing businesses. But unlike their owner, the Dykstra establishments were all class. He loaded up the buildings with baseball memorabilia and saltwater fish tanks; he insisted free coffee always be available. “The columns at the gas station were painted every day,” says Van Kalsbeek. “He had the pumps waxed every day, and if anything got scratched it was immediately replaced. You could show up any morning and you’d think it was the grand opening.”
Around the same time he was immersing himself in the car washes, Dykstra observed that his once-robust stock portfolio had taken a dramatic downturn. Upon retiring from the Phillies, he had divided $2 million into three different investment accounts. By 2002 that sum had dwindled to $400,000. Never one to sit down with a newspaper or book, Dykstra committed himself to learning how to invest: following the markets like a seasoned broker, purchasing his first laptop and addictively stalking the Internet.
By 2006 Dykstra opened his own trade account and was hired as a stock-market columnist for TheStreet.com, a site cofounded by Jim Cramer. In 2008 Cramer raved about Dykstra’s stock-picking skills to HBO’s Real Sports. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d tell you that everything you hear from Lenny is an act, because there’s no way you’d ever feel like he’s as smart as he really is,” Cramer said. “He’s one of the great ones in this business.” Shortly thereafter, The New Yorker’s Ben McGrath wrote a glowing six-page profile titled “Nails Never Fails: Baseball’s Most Improbable Post-Career Success Story.” By 2006 he owned three car washes, a shopping plaza, and a gas station, was building a retail center, and was as famous for his financial wizardry as he had been for his diamond glory.
It all seemed too good to be true.
Was Lenny Dykstra right, or was Lenny Dykstra paranoid?
That’s the $100 million question, the one that, five years later, remains unanswered.
Back when the car washes were rolling and business was booming and life couldn’t possibly be much better, Lenny Dykstra made certain all his relatives had jobs. Both brothers, Brian and Kevin, worked at the car washes, as did Wayne Neilsen, his mother’s brother. Lenny treated his family members to Las Vegas vacations, pricey meals, and all-night parties. “Family was really important to Lenny,” says Brian, who was a manager of the Corona-based facility. “He wanted to have people around him whom he trusted.”
In 2006, however, something in Dykstra snapped. He turned increasingly paranoid and, some say, delusional. He became convinced that Kevin and Wayne were stealing from him (charges both men vehemently deny) and fired both. Employees came and went like the wind. Having undergone treatment for alcoholism in 1999, Dykstra insisted to people that he was clean. According to many who know him, however, this was a lie. “He was definitely using drugs—that was no secret,” says Brian. “I’m not sure exactly what stuff was entering his body when. But he wasn’t clean. I mean, I even know who was getting him his pills.”
In March 2006, Dykstra hired Van Kalsbeek as his new accountant. A 49-year-old mother of three, she had spent most of her adult life self-employed, helping people learn accounting software. She knew little of Dykstra other than that he was a supposed financial savant with a Midas touch. “And he was,” she says. “Lenny was very good at making money.”
With one giant problem: Lenny was even better at spending money. “He wanted to know, on a daily basis, how much money the car washes were bringing in,” says Van Kalsbeek. “But he didn’t pay attention to the amount he was spending, and Lenny only wanted the best. If he was installing marble floors, and there were two samples, and both samples looked exactly the same, without fail he’d pick the more expensive one. Just because it was more expensive.”
Finally Dykstra decided he wanted out. In 2006 he sold his North Corona car wash for $11 million, then a year later peddled the two remaining car washes to seven partners for $43 million. “Lenny had debts, so about $20 million went to paying off loans,” Van Kalsbeek says. “But he still made millions.”
In other words, Dykstra was set. He had more than $4 million invested; owned a breathtaking 9,000-square-foot home on the first fairway of the exclusive Sherwood Country Club (estimated value: $5.4 million); had a fancy car (a $160,000 Maybach), a loving wife (Terri , whom he met in Jackson, Mississippi during his days in the minors), and two kids—Cutter, 22, and Luke, 16. “Anyone else in the world would have been thrilled,” says Brian Dykstra. “But Lenny doesn’t know what it is to say, ‘I have enough.’ ”
That’s because, as far as Dykstra was concerned, he didn’t have enough. Although the house he and Terri shared was large enough to board an extended family of elephants, it paled in comparison to the mansion located some 500 yards away—the one owned by Wayne Gretzky. The one that was, in 2007, on the market for $17.5 million.
In August 2007, Dykstra became the owner of the 12,000-plus-square-foot Gretzky estate, complete with a tennis court, three outside guesthouses, and an enormous pool. His monthly payments would be $120,000. “Money,” Van Kalsbeek says, “that he didn’t really have.” Shortly thereafter, Dykstra spent $2 million on a Gulfstream jet and unloaded another $500,000 on upgrades to have the inside of the plane look identical to the interior of his Maybach—drapes and all. “It was breathtaking,” says Van Kalsbeek. “But really unwise. The whole jet thing was a bad idea. Lenny’s justification was that he flew so much for business, it was a worthy expense. But it wasn’t. It was just crazy.”
Van Kalsbeek says she warned her boss that he was spending too much. Dykstra, however, didn’t see it that way. He was in possession of an idea, after all, that would make him, in his words, “a billionaire.” In 2008, at a time when nobody in his right mind would start up a print magazine, Dykstra started a print magazine titled The Players Club. Dykstra’s vision was to produce a monthly publication catering specifically to the wants and needs of professional athletes. It would feature investment strategies, high-priced toys, home and automobile tips, luxury vacations—everything geared toward the rich and famous.
And here’s the odd thing: Like the car washes, it was a brilliant concept.
“The idea itself was great,” says Kevin Coughlin, the magazine’s director of photography. “You were guaranteed a circulation of millionaires because it would go straight into the locker rooms of Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NFL, the NHL, tennis, golf… I mean, it had the potential to be huge. Bigger than huge.”
But Dykstra faced two major problems: Although the magazine’s tag line was “Keep Living the Dream,” Dykstra was running out of money to live the dream. And he hadn’t the remotest idea how to run a magazine.
The first Players Club, featuring Derek Jeter on the cover, came out on April 1, 2008. Yet while his staff viewed the magazine as an editorial opportunity, Dykstra seemed to see it, first and foremost, as a chance to prove how successful he was. Each issue began with an Ode to Lenny column (ghost*written for the grammatically challenged Dykstra by a staffer), and Dykstra insisted the publication be based out of an office at 245 Park Avenue in Manhattan—the same building that housed Major League Baseball. “The rent was about $17,000 per month,” says Van Kalsbeek. “Way too high. But he loved the status.”
By this point Dykstra’s behavior was more erratic than ever. He used the Gretzky house and the plane to secure multiple loans and began crossing the line from merely unethical to, well, criminal. Dykstra borrowed credit cards and money from seemingly everyone—his employees, Van Kalsbeek, his mother—always with unfulfilled promises of great reward. “I never actually loaned Lenny a credit card,” says Chris Frankie, a senior editor at the magazine. “But I still wound up with credit card charges related to Lenny.”
Dykstra had high expectations for the magazine and placed unrealistic demands on his employees. Based out of California, he would call his New York staff at all hours of the night, screaming, babbling, yelling. With the help, Van Kalsbeek says, of Adderall, he could stay up for days on end, never sleeping, never resting.
A victim of poor leadership, a poor economy, and mediocre ad sales, The Players Club died in the winter of 2008, after a mere seven issues, and by the time Van Kalsbeek brought home the black duffel bag a year later, Dykstra was in ruins. His wife had filed for divorce, and Lenny—a nondrinker since 1999—again regularly imbibed. That, coupled with his alleged drug use, rendered him a stumbling, mumbling Xerox of his former self. “He’s not the same guy,” says Brian. “Not even close.”
Dykstra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, listing less than $50,000 in assets against $10 million to $50 million in liabilities. In the fall of 2009, the case was converted to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy to liquidate the estate and pay creditors. The mansion—gone. The Maybach—gone. The jet—gone. His 1986 World Series ring—gone, auctioned off for $56,762. More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed against Dykstra, most still pending. He spent one week in jail earlier this year on embezzlement charges, then fell into the insane orbit of Charlie Sheen, whom the former ballplayer befriended during alcohol rehab back in the day. (Rumors that Sheen bailed his fellow warlock out of jail proved false, however.) He has since been accused of —but not charged with—stiffing a female escort with a bad check, sexually assaulting a housekeeper, and charged with exposing himself to women he met through Craigslist job listings. (Dykstra denies the charges.) “But at least he wasn’t going to jail [for a lengthy stay],” says Brian. “Somehow he managed to avoid that.”
Not quite. As he sits in his cell, Dykstra’s bail is set at $455,000—a staggering amount for a man accused of drug possession and automobile theft. (The latest alleged mis*deed is a particularly odd one: According to prosecutors, Dykstra and two other men ran a scheme to lease high-end automobiles from dealerships using phony information and claiming credit through a fictitious business.) But with Lenny Dykstra, nothing is as simple as it seems.
“He never admits he’s wrong,” says Van Kalsbeek, who despite Dykstra’s record remains strangely loyal. “Lenny can be a wonderful man, but that’s a big flaw. He’s in jail right now, but I’m sure he’s not looking inward or feeling responsible. That’s not in his nature.” Van Kalsbeek pauses.
“That’s not,” she says, “the way Lenny Dykstra operates.”
http://www.maxim.com/amg/SPORTS/Articles/The+Fall+of+Lenny+Dykstra
I'll never forget the day I met Lenny Dykstra. I was at Phillies vs. Blue Jays spring training game in Dunedin, Florida. After the game, I waited outside the visitors clubhouse to try and get some autographs of Phillies players as they were heading toward their bus. There was a mob of people all standing outside the chain-linked fence with the same intentions as myself. Several players were nice enough to stop and sign. After several minutes, Dykstra emerges holding soda cans in each hand. I call out to him, "Mr. Dykstra, will you sign an autograph?" He stops, looks in my direction and raises his hands to show the cans and says, "can't, my hands are full." I immediately reply back, "I'll hold them for you." He stops again and laughs, then turns toward me says, "I'm only signing for you." He then walks toward me, places his two cans on the ground and I slide my card and Sharpie to him in between the fence.
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