the fall of nails

Every American boy from the 1980s remembers Lenny Dykstra.

Lenny was a baseball outfielder who split a heralded career between the Mets and the Phillies, winning a World Series with the former and single-handedly resurrecting the fortunes of the latter after years of mediocrity. Our dads and their friends would talk about Dykstra as a player cut from the same cloth as Pete Rose, hyperkinetic and selfless on the field, a human pinball. "Nails" talked as tough as he played, a Saturday morning cartoon character more than a man. At Little League practice, when we filled our cheeks with Big League Chew gum so that it looked like we were chewing tobacco, we did that to be like Nails.

Lenny Dykstra filed for bankruptcy today, and that is probably the last chapter in the story of his public life. Nails dropped off of my radar when he hung up his cleats in the mid-90s but suddenly reappeared last year. He was a wealthy tycoon now, who (unbeknownst to me) had been picking stocks for Jim Cramer for years but somehow was still the same jock meathead from the old days. Dykstra was suddenly an idiot-savant business success. Between last spring and now, that disguise has steadily unravelled.

It started with this New Yorker profile by Ben McGrath last spring, titled "Nails Never Fails". The profile tells the story of Lenny Dykstra the adventurer/entrepreneur, living a life of extravagant luxury buttressed by successful investments in day-trading and in a chain of Southern California car washes. Writers of subsequent profiles describe this piece as "credulous", but it never read that way to me. Dykstra comes off as a silent movie magic drunk in this piece, always narrowly missing the falling piano and somehow coming out even better for doing so.

"Dykstra hadn’t yet finished his fries, but he glanced at his watch and jumped. 'Oh, shit, I got to go,' he said. 'Dude, oh my God, take a ride with me.' He was halfway to the door before he said, to no one in particular, 'Put that on my bill.' Outside, a car was waiting, and Dykstra instructed the driver to take us to Time, Inc. 'It’s fun hanging with me, right?'."

McGrath reacts the way anyone who met the figure described in the article would: perplexed that someone who is stumbling through life as haphazardly as Dykstra is could possibly be such a huge financial success. He isn't credulous, he's confused. Later writers taking a dim view of McGrath had more information than he did.

At the center of the New Yorker profile is Dykstra's then-forthcoming niche glossy magazine for wealthy athletes, The Players Club. Gawker Network sports blog Deadspin kept up a steady drumbeat of skepticism about Lenny's new persona and his business venture throughout 2008, but Gawker's bloggers are gadflies by nature. The edifice really starts to come apart in March of this year, when GQ published the account of a photo editor who worked for The Players Club for two nail-biting months before going hat-in-hand back to his old job when the magazine folded. The title of the piece tells you everything you need to know about the tone: "YOU THINK YOUR JOB SUCKS? TRY WORKING FOR LENNY DYKSTRA".

The next month, Deadspin ran an I-told-you-so post that gleefully linked to a Mike Fish expose for ESPN.com that read like a capsule version of The Smartest Guys In The Room. "Either Lenny hates to pay his bills," says Fish, "or he's a financial train wreck." Fish uncovered millions in unpaid bills and taxes and a catalogue of pending lawsuits. The ESPN piece prompted HBO's Real Sports show to track Nails down to follow up on the glowing, uncritical piece they had run on him the year before. What they found was Dykstra at rock bottom, as hapless and confident as ever but now surrounded by the wreckage of his failure: an empty house, his wife gone. Ozymandias. That was a couple of weeks ago.

Nails is more like Pete Rose than ever today - an object lesson in the value of keeping separate our reverence for heroes and the feats they perform. In the New Yorker profile, Dykstra chews out a waiter that he feels was less than polite, then finishes by turning to McGrath and saying, "There’s some point in life when you have to grow up.” I suppose the little boy in me who loved Lenny Dykstra has grown up now.

Good luck, Nails.

Comments

[Tim Cullings]

I heard a similar story on Scott Ferrall's show the other night about a PR guy who left Sirius to go work for Dykstra and was out of his mind with excitement to go work for Nails. He came back to Sirius begging for his old job back after two months of not getting paid and shaking his head in disbelief that he fell for the hype.

[Reda Haq]

Compelling read despite my shockingly limited knowledge of sport/ who this guy is! .. loved the Ozymandias allusion :)

[Jon Schubin]

I agree with your assessment of The New Yorker profile. I didn't find it credulous; rather I saw the reporter as genuinely baffled at how this financial empire worked.

I've totally missed the collapse of Lenny's financial empire before the bankruptcy announcement yesterday, so catching up on the GQ and other pieces has been a real joy.