Beyond Belief by Josh Hamilton, Tim Keown

like a knife jabbing at me. In workouts and on the field, it kept me from going full speed. These events — the accident, my parents’ leaving, my back hurting — created an environment where one bad decision could lead to many more.
    With my parents gone, I started spending huge amounts of time at the tattoo parlor. I had already gotten six tattoos there, but the shop didn’t evolve into my hangout until my parents left. There wasn’t much to recommend the place, just a bland storefront next to a shady massage parlor, part of the Tampa area’s endless strip-mall landscape.
    This, somehow, became my home away from home. I sat in the chair and got tattoo after tattoo. Some days I’d get three or four. Some days I’d sit in that chair all day long, feeling the needles mark up my body.
    I was troubled; my back kept me off the field, and none of the Devil Rays’ doctors could understand what was wrong. They put me through a battery of tests — MRI, CAT scan — and gave me cortisone shots in the area of pain. No test showed anything, and none of the shots helped, which made me more frustrated. I knew what I was feeling, even if the tests didn’t agree. The team started to believe I was losing interest, that maybe I didn’t want to play.
    I settled into a routine. My mornings were spent at the spring training complex, getting treatment for my back and trying to figure out what was wrong. The afternoons were spent in the tattoo parlor.
    My life had been blessed. I was nineteen, a few months from turning twenty, and I was close enough to the big leagues to spark discussion — and apparently disagreement — within the Devil Rays’ organization. From the outside, it looked like a perfect life, my path paved with gold.
    The Devil Rays didn’t pressure me to produce. If anything, I thought my career could have been accelerated faster than it was. I agreed with Rothschild, of course, because I felt like a big-leaguer and wanted to be a big-leaguer. It seemed like a natural progression. The pressure I felt came from me; I’ve always expected more of myself than others have.
    So what was wrong? Why didn’t my life feel as good on the inside as it looked from the outside? To me, the problem was incredibly simple: My back hurt, and nobody knew why. Ever since the accident I couldn’t shake the stabbing pain I felt whenever I changed directions quickly or attempted to make an explosive movement.
    To that point in my life, I’d never been alone. To that point in my life, I’d never been without baseball. To that point in my life, I’d never been without my parents.
    I could sense the doubts from the team about my back, and I began to wonder, too. The pain was there, it was real, but nobody could find anything wrong with me. Doubt started to work its way into my mind, too. Was I imagining it? Did I really want to play baseball?
    My mind started to mess with me. My back hurt, but was it real? Were the doctors and coaches who looked at me sideways right?
    So maybe it was inevitable that I would find a place outside baseball to hang out. And maybe it was inevitable that once I found a place where I felt I belonged — even if it was a tattoo parlor — I stayed there. It was nonthreatening and comfortable, and nowhere else in my life could I find a place that was both.
    The guys in the shop became my friends, I guess, but it seems like I slid into their lives through osmosis. A guy named Kevin did most of the work on me. He would work and I would sit back and we’d talk about pretty much nothing all day long. I didn’t have much in common with the guys who worked there. They weren’t baseball fans, although they came to know who I was and what I did for a living. They were what you’d expect from guys working at a tattoo parlor, I guess: young and kind of aimless. Kevin had a young son, about three or four at the time, and the little boy was around the margins of life at the shop.
    For me, the chair was an escape. I could