For 14 years, Willie Mays Aikens had longed for this weekend to arrive. Convicted in 1994 on four counts of crack cocaine distribution and one count of using of a firearm during drug trafficking, Aikens, a World Series star for the Kansas City Royals, said May 5, 2012, was once his release date from federal prison.
“To look at my life the last four years, and everything I’ve accomplished,” Aikens said by phone last week, “where would I be if I had stayed incarcerated?”
Aikens, 57, would surely not be a coach for the Royals at their minor league complex in Surprise, Ariz. He said he doubted he would have a relationship with his two older daughters because he had run out of money to support them by the time he was released from prison in 2008.
He would also not have testified before Congress in 2009, urging reform in the wide minimum-sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenders. And he almost surely would not have released his memoir, “Willie Mays Aikens: Safe at Home,” written by Gregory Jordan and published this spring by Triumph Books.
“I told Greg I wanted to be honest about everything,” Aikens said, and the result is a raw and unsparing look at a promising career that spun wildly out of control.
Aikens used cocaine all through the 1980 World Series, when he became the first player with two multihomer games in the same series as the Royals lost to Philadelphia. From then on, Jordan writes, cocaine became inseparable from Aikens’s sense of happiness.
It also cost him his career. He was briefly jailed and suspended in 1984, and played his last major league game for Toronto in 1985, when his old Royals teammates won a championship without him. Aikens drifted to the Mexican league, where his addiction escalated.
The trouble culminated in his selling 2.2 ounces of crack cocaine to an undercover agent. Aikens received the maximum sentence. He believed he had been set up, and said he took two years to let go of his bitterness.
“If I hadn’t been going in my house and getting high, it wouldn’t have mattered if the undercover officer came to my house or not,” Aikens said. “I came to the point where I needed to change. I had to accept responsibility for what I had done, stop blaming other people and start to grow.”
Through faith, Aikens said, he has learned to forgive himself for his crimes and the damage they did to his family relationships. He is thankful to no longer be tempted by drugs or alcohol, he said, and hopes the book will help others avoid his mistakes.
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