Mo in the mirror

Sporting News, The, Feb 23, 1998 by Steve Marantz

Mo Vaughn's world turned upside down. His Ford pickup rammed an abandoned car in a breakdown lane of I-95 between Providence and Boston. The truck flipped, concrete bit into metal and Vaughn found himself suspended by a sturdy seat belt, staring up at his shoes. Gingerly, he released himself, crawled out the passenger window and surveyed the mayhem. Vaughn saw his truck had lost its hood, and the cab was crushed. The car he hit was demolished. He took a deep breath. No blood. No broken bones. He had survived a brush with death or infirmity. Now he would have to survive scrutiny into his bachelor lifestyle, drinking habits, ponderous weight and ability to lead the Red Sox.

As camp opens this week at Fort Myers, Fla., Vaughn, 30, will be even more of a focal point than usual. He is swinging his thick bat by the grace of God and a seat belt.

"Somebody is watching over my son," Vaughn's father, Leroy, says.

But Red Sox Nation wonders if its amiable first baseman is watching over himself. In his contract year, he and the dub are at a moment of reckoning. How much is he worth and for how long? In Vaughn's upside-down world, those questions are not easily answered.

Vaughn's second life began January 9, the night he frightened New England out of its wits and sent up a flag as red as the lettering on his uniform. It wasn't only that while returning at 2 a.m. from a strip joint in Providence he crashed, failed on-scene sobriety tests and was arrested for drunken driving. It was more the emergence of a pattern. In 1995, he brawled at a Boston nightclub and missed a couple of games. Last summer, an Ohio man said Vaughn assaulted him outside a Cleveland strip joint although prosecutors did not bring charges. Regular gossip-column sightings at the Foxy Lady, a swank Providence strip club, with accounts of $100 bills being stuffed into G strings, fill in the gaps.

Local talk radio is buzzing with speculation about Vaughn, while beat writers, accustomed to seeing Vaughn sip scotch from a plastic cup after games, are wondering.

Vaughn declined to be interviewed, but his agent, Tom Reich, flatly denies a problem. "While Mo clearly likes interacting with his peers, etc., to the question does Mo have a problem, my answer is, unequivocally, no," Reich says.

Leroy Vaughn is cryptic. "Nobody knows the facts," he says. "Until we know the facts, it's between The Man Upstairs and Mo." Leroy adds, "Sometimes you get an omen, and you have to deal with it."

Meanwhile, Vaughn's friends are concerned. Rico Petrocelli, a former Red Sox infielder, managed Vaughn at Class AAA Pawtucket in 1991. He is not currently employed by the Red Sox, nor does he have a business relationship with Vaughn.

"Knowing Mo, because I like him a lot, the night life is my biggest concern," Petrocelli says. "What he has done is a pattern. He has every right to go out and drink alcohol, but he has to stay away from these problems.

"He's got a responsibility to the Red Sox and his own family and the kids he works with. Responsibility means ... if there is any kind of problem and pattern, he needs to take care of it. Get help. That is my feeling. I'm not saying there is a problem, but if there is, he has to take care of it."

Little about the nocturnal habits of baseball players is new since the time of Babe Ruth, a legendary carouser linked to Vaughn through Red Sox genealogy, outgoing personality, expansive belly and the fraternity of southpaw sluggers.

Indeed, biographer Robert W. Creamer's description of Ruth at midcareer is quaintly suggestive of Vaughn: "Early in 1925 he left New York for Hot Springs for his traditional prespring training camp. He was fat. In January he weighed 256. In Hot Springs he played a little golf, jogged a little, took hot steam baths. But he also drank and ran around town with women and stayed up all night and ate like a hog. He was always on the go."

If only Vaughn's life were as simple. He parallels Ruth, and then he is somebody more modem and complex. Until his drunken-driving arrest, he was the most popular black athlete in Boston's checkered racial history, admired by fans of all colors. His popularity was built on community and clubhouse leadership.

Vaughn is an urban preacher who exhorts youth to follow the straight and narrow. He was a youth advocate before he became a star, and he maintained his ad hoc ministry after winning the 1995 MVP and landing a three-year, $18 million contract. He runs a youth-development program in Boston's poorest neighborhood and appears at clinics, fund-raisers and charity events in white as well as minority neighborhoods.

In uniform, Vaughn is the club's ombudsman. A year ago, he was an angry critic of general manager Dan Duquette for allowing icon Roger Clemens to depart to the Blue Jays. His opinions usually reflect his low frustration level with what heretofore has been the club's refusal to spend at a competitive level. Most fans appreciate his dogged advocacy for a contending dub. Now Vaughn is damaged in both areas. It's going to be hard to deliver his "stay clean" message when a youth in the audience shouts, "Look in the mirror, Mo."