It's a funny thing. In these days of the InterWeb and the SportsCenter and all the rest of it, you would think big stories wouldn't get buried. But if I ever knew this dramatic 1992 story about Ken Griffey, I'd forgotten it ...
In January 1988, Junior swallowed 277 aspirin, by his own count, and wound up in intensive care in Providence Hospital in Mount Airy, Ohio.He thought about killing himself a couple of times, he said, "with my father's gun or something."
"The aspirin thing was the only time I acted," he said. "It was such a dumb thing."
A good friend of mine absolutely reviles Griffey, because Junior treated him so terribly in an interview situation. Griffey was rude to me once, too. In the limited time I spent around him in the Mariners' clubhouse, I got the impression he was, like so many other professional athletes -- particularly, I suspect, when they're sons of professional athletes -- an arrested adolescent.
But arrested adolescents are people, too. And I'm left to wonder how many different memories I would have if Junior hadn't been such a terrible failure at suicide. Thankfully.