Synopsis
This story of courage and inspiration tells of Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Steve Howe's descent into cocaine addiction, baseball suspension, and rehabilitation efforts. An touching story that offers hope to others. 2 cassettes.
Review
This could have been an uplifting and inspiring story: a chronicle of the nightmare world of drug addiction which haunted one of the nation's most proniising and successful young athletes, and the instructive tale of how this fallen idol finally turned his life around and rescued the integrity of the national game. National League rookie of the year in 1980, a key performer for the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers in 1981, league all-star pitcher in 1982-Steve Howe once seemed to have it all going for him; then, his world suddenly crashed in around him. As with so many Americans in all walks of today's fast-paced life, the combination of easy money, stress, and availability of cocaine pushed Howe over the edge into the abyss of substance abuse and chemical dependency. He entered a drug rehab program two days before the 1983 All-Star break. Overnight he lost fame, weal" career, and almost his family and life itself. But in his darkest hours of rejection and loss our young athletic hero discovered life after drugs and existence after baseball. This is a story with a happy ending and a strong message. Baseball's best novels, and its best biographies, are often tales of failure besetting the most promising of talented young athletic gods, chronicles of their rapid and tragic collapse and often of their cathartic and instructive rebirth outside of sport as well. Indeed, this could have been an uplifting and inspiring story, in the best traditions of baseball's marvelous literary heritage. Yet the reader of Between the Lines is likely to be sorely disappointed. In point of fact, Howe has not escaped his addiction at all. In the book's earliest chapters, we learn that Howe's boyhood reflected both his early propensity for addictive behavior and his special talent for baseball. Baseball has been brushed aside by the nightmare of cocaine, but addictive behavior still rules the day. Has Steve Howe, a wiser man for all his trials, learned life's bitter pitfalls and has he now taken mature responsibility for the course of his tattered life? Or has he merely replaced one addiction (chemical dependency) for another (bomagain Christianity)? This reader, for one, did not so much feel inspired by Howe's Christian testimony as beleaguered by the most irrepressible of proselytizers: the recent fanatic religious convert. The dust-jacket notes insist that this is a book with a happy ending and a strong message: "Whatever lies ahead, God has already recorded the greatest save of all: my life." The strength of the message (or at least the heavy-handedness and didacticism of its delivery) is unquestioned; the happiness of the ending remains for each reader to judge himself. -- From Independent Publisher
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