It is Sunday morning in Bloomington, Ill., and Steve Garvey is sitting in his hotel room, talking about baseball, particularly about his swing.
Stepping up to an imaginary plate, he settles into his batting stance. Hands together high at his chest, left foot aligned precisely with the inside corner of home plate, which he has tapped lightly with his phantom bat. A brief, perfect stillness, then whoosh, the Garvey swing. It is not spontaneous and pretty, but short, straight and vicious. It is not an act of the heart but of the mind, an effort calculated to maximize efficiency. And it is always the same.
Even here, at age 40, two years out of baseball, it is the same ritual performed over a 19-year career: 8,835 at-bats, 8,835 wordless sermons on the art of control.
Control. It is what Steve Garvey meant as a ballplayer. It is how he transformed himself from a wild-throwing infielder into a 10-time All Star who played in five World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, and the only first baseman ever to play an entire season without committing an error. It is how he played for more than nine years without missing a single game, 1,207 consecutive games, the longest streak in National League history. Control is what Steve Garvey meant off the field as well; it framed his urge to be not just a ballplayer but also a role model. He said ”Yes, sir”
and ”No, ma`am,” he didn`t drink or smoke, he made bedside visits to hospitalized kids.
That utter control is why Steve Garvey commanded attention when his life went haywire. In February, Garvey went public with an account of his complicated romantic life-a bizarre, cross-country tangle in which he got two women pregnant and married a third.
With any other ballplayer or celebrity, it might have been a one-day headline. But this was Steve Garvey, the man after whom a town had named a school. In an age of mere superstars, he had wanted to be a hero. He still does.
”People were interested because I was the all-American boy on a pedestal, with feet of clay,” he says of what he calls ”my situations.”
”Of course, the cynics and critics reveled in it. But the average fan has compassion for me. He says, `Hey, this happens to people; it happened to Steve; how does he handle it?` ”
Garvey handled it, of course, in characteristic fashion. He went on television in San Diego. He gave interviews to newspapers and magazines. He appeared on Larry King`s TV show and on ”A.M. Los Angeles.” At each stop, he calmly explained he thought the women involved had used birth control but that he planned to ”accept my responsibility” and provide financial and parental support for his unborn children. He was a man in control.
Garvey maintained that apparent equanimity throughout the summer, even as his ex-wife, Cyndy, made her way across the country on a book tour, acidly portraying Garvey as an unfeeling ”sociopath” on a scale with serial killer Ted Bundy.
In January, 1988, Garvey retired from baseball. A torn shoulder tendon had cut short his 1987 season. That injury healed, but his arthritic knees finally halted his iron man career. For the first time in his life, he was without direction. His sports marketing business-started with high hopes while he was a player-wasn`t exactly booming. So he roamed the country, making speeches and appearing in charity events, and his romantic life became hopelessly complicated.
He broke off with a woman he had lived with in San Diego for almost four years, his former secretary, Judith Ross. But he didn`t completely sever the relationship. While still seeing Ross occasionally, he also dated another San Diego woman, Cheryl Ann Moulton, a sales representative. In the early summer of 1988, he began a serious romance with a third woman, Rebecka Mendenhall, a Cable News Network producer in Atlanta.
He was looking for something, he says, but he didn`t seem to know quite what. By Thanksgiving, he says Becky pressed him to make a commitment. ”I was backed into a corner,” he recalls. ”I had to make a decision. I said, `Well, I love her . . . I don`t love her as much as I think you need to, but maybe if I can make a commitment, I will grow to love her enough to marry her.` And so, we were engaged on Thanksgiving. For all the wrong reasons, which is very atypical of me.”
By then, Garvey had already learned Cheryl Ann was pregnant and expecting in February, although he didn`t yet tell Becky about it. He spent the Christmas holidays with his fiance, then went back to San Diego and stayed with Judith, and, having second thoughts, decided to call off the wedding. Two weeks later, at a ski tournament in Utah, he saw Candace Thomas, a Los Angeles interior designer he had met the year before. He soon proposed to her, and all hell broke loose.
The revelations about the women transformed his prized reputation into a piercing embarrassment. The man one writer called ”a cinch for the Hall of Fame and maybe the halls of Congress” became the object of jokes in David Letterman monologues. In San Diego Garvey bumper stickers, bearing such one-liners as ”Steve Garvey is Not My Padre,” became a cottage industry.
Garvey, a devout Catholic, was deeply humiliated when, at a social gathering, Bishop Leo T. Maher of San Diego loudly rebuked him, calling him a ”sociopath” and urging him to resign from the board of the University of San Diego, a Catholic institution. Garvey did.
Dwarfing it all has been The War, a seven-year feud between Garvey and his ex-wife, Cyndy. They had once been ”Ken and Barbie,” the perfect couple. But they became combatants in a dispute so vicious that, as Garvey has it, Cyndy has become a skilled psychological terrorist, threatening to kill him on at least two occasions. Garvey`s lawyer, in turn, recently put Cyndy in jail
(a maximum-security women`s prison) for a night for violating a child visitation order.
Their two teen-age daughters, once the centerpiece of their marriage, have become both hostage and booty.
Garvey has rarely seen his daughters this year except in divorce court and in court-ordered sessions with a psychologist. So deep is the alienation between Garvey and his daughters-Krisha, 14, and Whitney, 13-that in one session with the psychologist, the therapist had to block the door to keep the girls in the same room with their father.
”We`re talking about all these years battling, battling just to see my daughters,” Garvey says, ”battling to talk to them on the phone, and not being able to talk to them for weeks at a time. . . . I cry from time to time. All the trips I`ve made to Los Angeles, sometimes going up there and they`re not there. . . .”
And that, to hear Garvey tell it, is only the beginning. The confusion and disarray of Garvey`s life is especially jarring when considered next to the compulsive order and the dreamlike perfection of his life as it had seemed to be. That life was neatly and innocently summarized in the two-line legend on one of his baseball cards: ”Steve was once Dodgers` spring training bat boy. He had a junior high school named after him in 1977.”
That card said everything about destiny and a dream come true; Garvey was, in that better time, all he ever wanted to be-a Dodger, and a hero.
An unusual courtship
When the new Mrs. Garvey looks at her husband, she sees nothing but the hero, and it shows. Candace Garvey is a jarringly pretty woman, 30 years old with soft blond hair, and two daughters of her own. She is effusive (saying things such as ”he`s the man of my dreams”) and optimistic, as she would have to be, given the circumstances of her marriage to Garvey.
Theirs was a most unusual courtship. They got together in January at Garvey`s charity ski tournament in Deer Valley, Utah. Afterward, Garvey went with Candace to Los Angeles, where he met her daughters. He then flew to Washington, where, as co-chairman of the Committee for the Presidency, he was to introduce George Bush and Dan Quayle at one of the inaugural balls. After first deciding it would be best not to accompany Garvey, Candace later flew to join him in D.C.
After the inauguration, the happy couple went to Florida for the Super Bowl. On Jan. 22, Super Bowl Sunday, he asked her to marry him. He got down on one knee, popped the question and then said there was one more thing he had to tell her before she gave her answer: Another woman was carrying his child. Candace accepted anyway, and they set a date.
The morning after, Garvey also told Candace about his complicated love life, about Cheryl Ann, about Judith and about Becky. And he told her about Cyndy and their long, bitter enmity.
Then the telephone rang. It was Garvey`s father, Joe. He`d just received a call from Becky Mendenhall, who said she urgently needed to talk with Steve. Garvey called Atlanta and spoke to Becky`s mother. ”I just knew, don`t ask me how, that when he came back, he was going to say that Becky was pregnant,”
Candace recalls.
Garvey spoke to Becky that night and assured her, as he had assured Cheryl Ann, he would do the right thing and support their child. He also told her about Candace. Three weeks later, Becky filed suit against Garvey, seeking child support and damages she claims resulted from his breach of promise-such as the cost of her unused wedding dress.
Candace allows that these developments were ”a little scary,” but she was unshaken. She and Garvey were married on Feb. 18. She says she is willing to adopt the children Garvey fathered, an offer neither mother involved seems inclined to accept.
Steve and Candace live with her daughters, Shaunna and Taylor, in Garvey`s Del Mar, Calif., home-an expensive new townhouse that Candace has transformed into a kind of Steve Garvey wing of a sports museum.
Public displays
Although his first marriage ended in 1981, Garvey says, the hostility between him and his ex-wife has never diminished. After spending a brief time in New York without finding a job, Cyndy returned to L.A., where she discovered Steve had had an affair in the waning days of their marriage. As she writes in her book, she went to his office, which was provided by the Multiple Sclerosis Society (of which Garvey was national campaign chairman), and confronted his secretary and lover, Judith Ross. ”So you`re his whore!” she said, pushing Judith out the door, ”a paid-for charity whore!” Cyndy then picked up a baseball bat and proceeded to wreck the place.
There have been many public scenes, Garvey says, sometimes in front of their daughters. A year after their separation, Garvey and his parents, Millie and Joe, attended one of the girls` T-ball games. Cyndy was there too. Millie and Joe were taking pictures of their granddaughters, and when they were finished, Millie walked toward her car to put the cameras away.
”And all of a sudden, I`m walking down this incline, and I was knocked down,” Millie recalls. She says she looked up and saw her former daughter-in- law, bent over her in a rage. ”She had two small juice cans in her hand, and she was beating on me. Kicking on me and beating on me.” (Cyndy denies that she attacked her mother-in-law.)
On the advice of both their attorneys, Cyndy and Steve agreed to see a family psychologist in an effort to work out visitation rights. But those sessions turned into fight venues. They moved from one psychologist to another, Cyndy raging, Steve`s silence fueling her anger. Garvey says that Cyndy even threatened to kill him in one session. (Cyndy says it was an idle threat: ”You know how you get mad at somebody and say, `I could just kill you!` . . . But to Steve Garvey, that`s a direct threat.”)
Finally, Steve and Cyndy worked out a visitation agreement. He would see the girls once a week, every other weekend and for six weeks during the summer. Things seemed to be improving. Cyndy was working on her book and in therapy. Garvey was seeing his daughters.
Then, Garvey`s love life exploded in his face, and The War resumed.
Top-gun lawyer
The discovery that Garvey was engaged to Rebecka Mendenhall infuriated Cyndy, and once again visitation with the girls became a matter of dispute. So Garvey fought back. His lawyer, Dennis Wasser, is one of the toughest divorce attorneys in the business, specializing in high-profile cases. (He represented Jane Fonda in her divorce from Assemblyman Tom Hayden.)
Wasser successfully petitioned Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Frances Rothschild to find Cyndy in contempt of court for defying the visitation agreement, seeking five days in jail. Cyndy`s lawyers got her released after one night pending a Nov. 3 hearing, which could result in an additional 126-day jail sentence and two years probation.
In court during the summer, the Garvey vs. Garvey war took on the aspect of tragicomedy, a battle that would be almost amusing were it not so charged with anguish. There was that morning in June, when Cyndy, Steve and the girls had an appointment with the mediator in the hope of finding a visitation solution they could present to the judge in a session that afternoon. But Cyndy never arrived, and a new court date was set for July 31.
This time, Cyndy was there, and it was a session at least worthy of
”Divorce Court.” Garvey`s lawyer made an issue of Cyndy`s verbal abuse of his client and of Garvey`s wife Candace. Garvey testified that even as he was on the stand, Cyndy, staring at him in the courtroom, mouthed the words ”I`ll get you!” Candace, who is dyslexic, reported that during one break, Cyndy taunted her by holding up a newspaper and saying, ”Do you want me to read this to you?” Cyndy became so excited that the bailiff had to admonish her twice.
Although Cyndy didn`t intend to take the stand herself, she wanted Whitney and Krisha to testify that they didn`t want to be with their father. But Judge Rothschild, uncomfortable with this approach, urged one last effort at a mediated visitation agreement, and the two sides were successful. It was agreed that Garvey would see his daughters, without Candace, for a week at the end of August.
When the moment came to pick up the girls, however, they were not there. Garvey roamed the campus of Marymount High School, which the girls attend, and saw no sign of Whitney or Krisha or their mother. Cyndy`s attorney says it was an unfortunate case of a missed rendezvous; Garvey`s attorney filed another contempt complaint.
None of this was part of the dream. His storybook marriage had become a grim melodrama. His finances are strained. Garvey Marketing had to be pared down and moved to smaller offices, and this year, it expects to break even at best.
Garvey now has his own radio talk show in San Diego, which could pay him up to $250,000 a year; that sounds like a lot, except that he is scheduled to pay Cyndy $125,000 next year as part of their divorce settlement. He currently pays $4,500 a month in child and spousal support, plus educational expenses, and his legal bills are mounting. He inherited some heavy debts that Candace brought to the marriage, and so, on weekends, he has begun to accept more paying speaking engagements and baseball-signing shows.
As for his political career, Garvey says, that is still open: ”I really think there is a certain destiny in my life to lead people. And people are able to relate to those who have been in crisis, and how they`ve handled crisis.” That may be wishful thinking. At the Republican convention last summer, there were whispers that Garvey might run for the Senate in 1992. No whispers are heard now.
One thing Garvey says he is sure of, however, is his new wife: ”She is the woman of my dreams.” And he is sure that he will be spending a good deal of time in court. Even if the contempt motions and visitation disputes with Cyndy are resolved, no truce between them has endured for long.
And so he will sit on the bench outside divorce court, a place that has become all too familiar to him, and sign autographs. It is strange how people don`t think twice about approaching him, even in divorce court. And it is strange how readily he obliges.
But then, that is something Garvey is sure of, too. It is what heroes are supposed to do.
