Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 20, 1994 TAG: 9403200129
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SAM DONNELLON KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WINTER HAVEN, FLA. LENGTH: Long
Kevin and Kim Wickander are having a baby. Mike Hargrove has become a more doting father. Bob Ojeda is making jokes again, talking about tackling his problems "head-on" as a new member of the New York Yankees.
As the one-year anniversary of the boating tragedy on Little Lake Nellie approaches, the emotions of the principals again are being probed. The probing mostly is being done by the media, still in search of a good moral to the grisly story of March 22, 1993, when a fishing boat slammed into a dock near Clermont, Fla., and two Cleveland Indians pitchers, Tim Crews and Steve Olin, were killed. The probing also is being done by those left behind that night, many of whom claim finally to have found some light amid that darkness.
"I know now it's OK to feel good, to laugh, to smile," said Ojeda, the lone survivor of the three people in the boat that night. "Not for somebody else's sake, but for mine."
"If I was single and it had happened, I probably would have started drinking or blown my head off, something like that," said Wickander, Olin's best friend when they were teammates in the Indians' bullpen and, in many ways, his alter ego.
Olin was a submarining right-hander with brilliant confidence. Wickander, left-handed, throws hard, but whatever confidence he owned on a given day often came straight from Olin. Olin was straight as an arrow - God, family, the whole bit. Wickander sowed wild seeds until Olin finally sold him on marriage.
Olin was best man for the May 1992 wedding, an honor that held added meaning to Wickander. His death forced Wickander to find an alternative source of strength. At first, he failed that task miserably, leading the Indians to basically give him to the Reds last May. There were more bad days in Cincinnati, as Wickander "woke up in a daze" and most days stayed that way.
He appeared in 33 games for Cincinnati and posted a 6.75 earned run average. He is in the Reds' camp this spring as a non-roster invitee. He is a long shot to make the club.
"At times I was so depressed I just didn't feel like getting up or getting out of bed or going on the field," Wickander said. "I was just in a shocked state of mind the entire '93 season. I just couldn't snap out of it. At times it looked like I was going to, and all of a sudden something would remind me of Stevie and I would immediately go back in the tank."
He is out of the tank now, Wickander said. He is ready to prove that the '92 Wickander, the one with the 3.07 ERA in 44 games, the one pumped up by Olin, still exists. He believes that because he again is being pumped up, only this time by the woman he once was so reluctant to marry.
"We've dated since we were Crews," Wickander said of Kim, his wife. "But as far as dealing with trauma like that, I mean, we dug inside of ourselves and found something we never knew we had. We found a deeper love than we thought we had, a moral support. It was definitely a growing experience for us. We never had marital problems. We've been best friends forever. But somehow we grew much closer this last year.
"And after we finally caught our breath, we both looked at each other and said, `We want to have a baby.' "
`It was bigger than me'
At first, Mike Hargrove, the Cleveland manager, declined to even discuss the accident of a year ago, fearful that it again would grip his team like a virus, spoiling another spring, another season.
The past was the past, he said. The Indians, who in '92 had the American League's best bullpen, had stumbled off to a 27-41 start in 1993 without Olin, Crews and Ojeda, who survived the accident partly because he slouched in the boat as it sped toward the shoreline to pick up two additional passengers and some extra "provisions" at approximately 7:30 that night.
It was an all-day barbecue at Crews' new home on the lake, the Indians' only day off that spring. The men had been drinking. Crews' blood-alcohol level was revealed to be .14, above the legal limit of .10 for driving a boat in the state of Florida. But the Indians still get infuriated when intoxication is mentioned as the prime factor in the deaths. The 170-foot dock was inordinately long; Crews' neighbor Jetta Heinrich had built it to watch her children swim. It was a dark, moonless night. Crews never had taken out his boat in the dark before. These factors, more than the drinking, had led to the fatalities, state officials said.
"We were all the same way and the other two were pronounced OK," said Fernando Montes, the Indians' strength coach. He was on the boat when it first went out but lost out in a game of throwing fingers and was dispatched to the shore for extras: food, beer, fishing tackle. As he walked the half-mile or so back to the Crewses' home, Crews aired out his new boat for his friends, carving up the shallow waters of the 86-acre lake.
Montes was waiting with Crews family friend Perry Brigmond when the boat took its final, fatal turn and headed back to the house. Who knows if Crews forgot the dock was there or just underestimated its length on the dark night? Who knows why he and Olin were sitting up while Ojeda slouched?
Even Ojeda, after one year of torturing himself, had to let that one go.
"It doesn't bother me to admit it was bigger than me," he said.
Ojeda's posttrauma trek has received much publicity. He felt guilty at first, he said, guilty to be alive. That led to a trip to Sweden, a trip that had him sneaking out on his wife and small daughter, holing up in a Stockholm hotel for several days, tracing the fault lines in his life.
That, in turn, led him to a Baltimore psychiatry center.
"I was running and running," he said. "But I kept taking myself with me."
Ojeda eventually took himself back to the Indians and wound up going 2-1 with a 4.40 ERA in nine games. After a few more months of therapy in the off-season, Ojeda, realizing he needed to distance himself, signed as a free agent with the Yankees. He said "there was no way" he could go back to the Indians.
"If I hadn't come back to baseball," Ojeda said, "I would have just disappeared. Baseball was sort of a lifeline for me to hold on to."
Montes had many of the same feelings. They all had at one time or another. If not for throwing out two fingers, Montes would have been in the boat.
"For a long time, I was numb," Montes said. "That whole thing took a chunk out of me for the whole year. But now I feel fine. I don't get nightmares and things like that."
Walking down a path at the Indians' Chain O' Lakes complex, he paused and looked to the skies.
"Well, I still get some," he said. "But not the ones that get me out of a dead sleep or scare the bleep out of me."
Rebuilding
The dock has been completely rebuilt on Little Lake Nellie, every splinter, every fragment finally cleared away or buried into the shallow muck below. There is a clear view of it in daylight from the Crewses' cedar home.
The three Crews children - Tricia, 10, Shawn, 6, and Travis, 4 - see the rebuilt dock when they look out their windows each morning. Patti Olin, at home with her 1 1/2 year-old twins, Garrett and Kaylee, and 4-year-old daughter, Alexa, speaks of "a new appreciation for single parents." Hargrove, who drove to the Crews home that very night with Indians general manager John Hart, said he never will forget the sight of "three kids sleeping on the floor, and two others crying."
"I thought, `Where is that security and comfort and strength now?' " Hargrove said this spring, his voice cracking just a bit.
At the time, several Indians pledged to pitch in and provide that, but lives interfered. Patti Olin went home to Portland, Ore., and slowly began to lead a single parent's life. Laurie Crews remained at the dream home on Little Lake Nellie, and by July had begun dating a man nine years her junior.
That hasn't sat well with her in-laws. Or with Patti Olin, Ojeda, some of her own friends and many of her husband's friends in baseball. Laurie Crews had been different from the start, resisting advice to move, to have her children seek counseling or to seek counseling herself.
"Missing Tim is never going to go away," she told the Florida Times-Union. "And I'm not going to say there weren't days when I didn't sit in the shower crying. But life's always throwing curves at you. So you either tough it out and survive or you just waste away."
She is not wasting away. She took some of the insurance money she received and bought a new boat, similar to the one on which her husband perished. She continued to stock her 22-horse stable, teaching her two oldest children to ride. She met the boyfriend, 24-year-old Sean Griffith, when he came to put up new fencing on the property shortly after the tragedy. At Halloween, Laurie Crews and Griffith threw a Halloween party for 50, complete with hayrides and laughter. Every day, she and Jetta Heinrich, the neighbor who owns the infamous dock, meet at the bus stop and wait for their children to arrive from school.
While many of the toughened baseball community spent its season on the brink, Laurie Crews moved forward quickly. Too quickly for Patti Olin, with whom she no longer speaks. Too quickly for Ojeda, too.
"I thought the hardest thing I'd have to cope with after the accident was Tim being gone," Laurie said. "But it's been how people have treated me."
Said Montes, who has remained her friend: "Most people deal with tragedy in their own way. I think it's incorrect for anybody to judge how she runs her life. That's her business. Laurie is a special woman. I've never had the pleasure of meeting anyone as strong as her. The cards that have been dealt to her . . . most people would have folded."
She hasn't, Laurie Crews said, because of her children.
"The grieving process is something we all had to go through," she said. "I talked to them about their dad dying, where he's gone. It's not fun, but I don't sugarcoat things for my kids. Anything they wanted to know, I explained to them the best way I knew how."
Crews, 27 miles north of the Indians' spring home of Winter Haven, has no plans to visit the team this spring. Back in Portland, Patti Olin said she misses spring training, has "tentative plans to visit her friends in baseball" and might attend the opening of the Indians' new stadium in April.
She confirmed that she no longer speaks with Laurie Crews.
"When people are ready to come around, they'll come around," Crews said. "You can't force them."
`Life goes on'
Hargrove finally dissembled the lockers of Crews and Olin in July. He never quite chased away their ghosts. Ojeda came back to pitch for the Indians in August, an apparition that brought all the sadness back just as "Grover" - Hargrove's nickname - finally appeared to be moving his team from the murk. In a strange league with an unfamiliar team, Wickander's grief manifested itself in most of his appearances; he threw flat heat and made bad pitches on a fairly consistent basis.
The season ended with Ojeda in an Indians uniform for the last time.
"I don't remember 90 percent of last season," he said this spring.
Indians management wished it didn't, either. The final act came last November, when Cliff Young, a left-handed relief pitcher promoted by the Indians during the season, was killed in an automobile accident.
"We ended last season with three widows and eight children," Hart said. "As a people person, that was hard for me to overcome, hard for me to get the rhyme or reason. I don't know if you ever do.
"But it does heal. Just from the fact that here's another camp, life goes on. . . . As a child, you're cut from a team or turned down on a date or your parents divorce. There are all types of things that happen that hurt, and then you grow from them. This one is one that is a little deeper cut, and so it takes more time to close up and heal. And it leaves a bigger scar."
Hargrove asked himself whether the wound ever would close. Then he scolded himself for asking. His troubles were just about baseball. This was about life.
"Until anybody is put in a situation like that, you don't know if you are who you think you are, or who you are trying to project to be," he said. "I feel very good about who I am. Who I thought I was came pretty close to who I am."
Players say Grover can be tough, sometimes sardonic. He also can be sentimental and compassionate. Wickander recalls that after being coldly told he was traded in the manager's office, he was tapped on the shoulder at his locker by a man with tears in his eyes. "If you ever need anything . . .," said Hargrove, who had managed Wickander and Olin in the minors. "You know you're like a son to me."
This spring, Hargrove didn't need to be told that Wickander and his wife were having a baby. He knew the due date, Aug. 10. Children always have meant a lot to this manager, anyway; he and his wife of 23 years, Sharon, have five children. The accident renewed his resolve to give them his all.
"Usually you wake up to the fact that you shouldn't take things for granted," Hargrove said. "Then, two weeks later, you're taking things for granted again. There are a lot of things in my life that I have not taken for granted for an entire year now, family time being the biggest.
"We want to make sure our children grow up with a strong sense of family. My wife and I have always had that as our conscious goal, but you still tend to take that love and that comfort and that security for granted.
"I hope that night taught me to never do that again."
A day before and a few towns over, Kevin Wickander also had tried to extract a moral from his season on the brink. It runs along a similar theme, as he ridicules his and his wife's reluctance in the past to have a child.
"We were always talking about, `OK, when our careers get under way,' " Wickander said.
It's a cruel irony. He is having a child just at the time his baseball career might be over.
"Steve, I remember, would have a bad day at the yard and I'd ask him the next day, `What did you do after the game?' " Wickander said.
"He'd say, `Oh, I played with my kids.' "
If it's a boy, Wickander would like to name the child Olin. The circle then would be complete, he said. Or at least that dark night finally would give way to some daylight.
"I used to worry about things, you know?" Wickander said. "Things I don't have any control over. Well, no more. I'm going to go out and bust my butt to make this team. But if I don't, I'm not going to look back.
"That's Stevie. I think he added 10 years to my life that day. I lost a friend, but I gained something inside me that, until you go through something like that, you can't possibly find."
by CNB