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JIMMIE BAKER'S DARK DAYS ARE BEHIND HIM. NOW, HE WANTS TO SHED SOME LIGHT WITH HIS STORY.
By Mike Jensen, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Reprinted with permission from The Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 13, 2000.
When he talks to children about his life, Jimmie Baker takes a prosthetic arm out of a case and passes it around. "That's my $26,000 trophy for the choices I made," Baker tells them. "This is my left arm fo the rest of my life because of the choices I made."
The room tends to get real quiet after that. Nobody expected to see - or touch - the arm.
Baker goes on to tell his listeners that he went from being a pro basketball player who competed against the likes of Julius Erving and drove a Mercedes-Benz "to living on Venice Beach, sleeping in abandoned cars and stairwells, eating out of Dumpsters. Because of choices."
Baker, a high school star at Olney, also talks of how, during his years "underground," he used to get high on drugs so he could pretend that he had two usable arms. "Pretend that I was part of life," he said.
He recalls the day - Christmas Eve 1977 - when he was run down by a car in Hawaii and woke up in a hospital four days later to find out that he also had been shot in the thigh and stabbed in the back.
His left arm was permanantly paralyzed and eventually amputated in 1997.
His neck was fractured, and the doctors were talking about amputating a leg that had been broken in half.
"It wasn't an accident," said Baker, who could not identify who had attacked him that day. "They tried to kill me."
Several times after that, he said, he tried to finish the job himself.
These days, Baker, a certified addictions counselor and a summer-league basketball coach, said that sharing his story with those just starting out in life was something he had to do.
"To me, I have to make sense of all this craziness I went through," Baker said. "There had to be a reason. It's something I think I've been given to use to help focus people, to let them see how the choices you make today will dictate who you are tomorrow."
Baker doesn't bring the arm to Temple's McGonigle Hall, where he helps coach the Gladys Rodgers team in the Hank Gathers College League. Years removed from his darkest days, Baker said he forgot that he had only one arm. Sitting on the bench early last week, Baker, now in his 10th year as a summer-league coach, kept up a steady stream of basketball chatter for his players.
"Walk it up," he said. "Take your time, man. . . . Way to work. Way to work. . . . Let's use the clock fully. No rush. No rush. No rush. . . . Don't telegraph it. . . . Stay with your man. No switching. No switching."
Many of his players don't know the details of his playing career. Baker, 46, was a star big man at Olney High and a most valuable player of the Dapper Dan Classic, the premier national high school all-star game of its day, in 1971.
Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers said at the time that Baker was the best 17-year-old player he had ever seen.
Baker was recruited by 200 colleges and eventually signed on with Nevada-Las Vegas. The 6-foot-8 teenager was the only college freshman invited to try out for the 1972 U.S. Olympic team, and he went on to play for the Kentucky Colonels in the ABA.
"He's pretty modest, but everyone else around always said, 'You've got to respect him, because in his day, he was something to be reckoned with,'""said Julian Dunkley, who plays on the Gladys Rodgers team and at the University of Maine.
Gladys Rodgers coach John McGarry, who had been Baker's landlord, brought him in to help coach in 1991.
"That was the moment of freedom for me, when I came back into the mainstream," Baker said. "I came back into the world."
His players also generally don't know why their coach has only one arm.
"I always wondered about that," said Rahsaan Ames, a student at Shaw University in North Carolina. "I was going to ask him about that."
Baker has been married to a family physician for 10 years, is the proud father of two young children, and describes himself as a part-time Mr. Mom. He will talk about his arm, but he might start his story at the beginning.
"I was so shy and introverted," he said. "Growing up, I was real awkward, real skinny, real frightened. Coming out of a house that was... dysfunctional because of my father's alcoholism. I didn't have any sense of self, no self-esteem. When I got a sense of self, it was through basketball."
"Basketball made the height make sense. Originally, basketball, for lack of a better description, was my drug. That carried me. Then when the drugs took the place of the basketball, basketball became secondary."
Baker said he didn't always feel like a star in his hometown, even when he was. He earned high school all-American honors his senior year.
"I grew up at Broad and Olney. My mother was a schoolteacher. My father worked for the federal government. We were middle class," Baker said. "I was always steered academically, from day one. I was going to college. My parents just steered me. But that was looked at like I was soft, because I wasn't from the 'hood'. I was that Germantown guy, almost like being a suburban guy."
Baker was 17 and a freshman at UNLV when he was introduced to cocaine by a player, he said, who is now in the Basketball Hall of Fame. He eventually moved on to heroin.
"I didn't turn 18 until halfway through my freshman year" at UNLV, Baker said. "I wasn't a smiler. I didn't know how to engage. It wasn't because I was a sophisticated young man. A lot of people took my demeanor as a sign of maturity. It was the opposite. I think I was the sitting duck for a lot of things."
Not that he was a victim, he said. He just talks of Las Vegas as being a fast town, and he didn't have the skills to make sense of it all. As one of the first UNLV basketball stars - Jerry Tarkanian didn't take over as coach until Baker's junior year - Baker was an instant celebrity, mingling with pit bosses from the strip and all sorts of people who wanted to be seen with him.
He wanted to prove he could keep up. But after averaging 22.3 points a game in his first varsity season as a sophomore - freshmen were ineligible for varsity play then - his average fell to 13.8 points per game in his junior year.
"I was so naive," Baker said. "I believed I was handling [the heroin]. I was running it out of my body, sweating it out. That was my logic to myself. When I first became addicted, my eyes were burning. I was throwing up. One of the guys said, 'You're strung out. You've got the habit.' He said to take some [heroin], and it all cleared up. That's how I learned I was strung out."
Baker, who said he had a basketball booster as a sugar daddy while at the school - "To me, it was a business," he said - still regrets not investing money in a deal proposed to him for land behind Caesars Palace.
Baker transferred to Hawaii for his last season. He said he was able to stop using illegal drugs that year and had a better season. But he began drinking heavily.
After he made some honorable-mention all-American lists, he was picked in the second round of the NBA draft by the 76ers and the first round in the ABA draft by the Kentucky Colonels. He signed with Kentucky and became a teammate of Artis Gilmore's. But he also realized he had become an alcoholic.
"I had the shakes," Baker said. "I didn't realize these were withdrawal symptoms. I had become addicted [to alcohol]. Before the game, I had to have a couple of beers."
He had a three-year, no-cut contract, which meant he still got paid for a couple of years after he blew out his knee that rookie season. He said he didn't bother to rehabilitate it properly.
"In my mind, this basketball thing was not going to run out," Baker said. "I had it in my mind that I was going to sit on somebody's bench for 10 years."
He went back to Hawaii to work out. But his first week back, he was offered some heroin. "I was off to the races again," he said.
He hung with a rough crowd at Waikiki Beach and got in a fight with the leader of the crowd, he said, busting the guy's jaw and breaking some ribs. He had a marketing job with a local car dealer but said he started taking things from the dealership and was let go. He said he also made some dangerous enemies but was not dealing drugs.
"I was told I wouldn't live to see my 23d birthday," Baker said.
His birthday was on Christmas Day. The day before, he said, "I hijacked a kid. I had a butcher knife. I forced myself into this car. I told him to take me to the police station. I walked in with this kid. I said my life was being threatened, now give me some help."
Baker said he wanted them to arrest him for holding the knife to the young man's neck. He said the police told him the young man wasn't pressing charges. They turned him back out.
That same night, he said, was when he was run down, then shot and stabbed. The doctors told his parents they were "85 percent sure I was going to die."
A few days later, after he had been treated, concerns over his safety at the hospital led Baker to be smuggled out with a sheet over his head by a private nurse hired by his family. They flew him back to Philadelphia.
Baker's mother, Drucilla, remembered that his stretcher took up seven airplane seats. But she didn't want to talk much about that whole time, because, even almost 25 years later, she still was nervous about "repercussions" for her son. But she did talk about the fear she felt when he didn't call home on Christmas.
"I remember making this big dinner for my family, but l couldn't eat, and I didn't eat," Drucilla Baker said. "I knew my child might not even have anything to eat. You don't know how many days I fasted and prayed. This was the only thing that brought me real peace."
She also talked of a dream she had at the time.
"I don't know where I was, but it was near a railroad track," she said. "I saw a person coming across. This person was limping. As he got closer, I saw he was wearing an old T-shirt. I said, 'Oh my God, that's Jimmie.' He left [for Hawaii] with nice luggage and clothes. When he came back, he had a T-shirt and shorts. He had nothing else."
Because of the fractured neck he suffered in the auto incident, Baker wasn't able to hold his head up for six months, and he is still uncertain of all the details of the attack.
In reality, he kept his head down for much longer. There was another decade or so of drug and alcohol abuse. For a time, he lived with an uncle in Frankford.
"I had a taxicab driver pick me up, take me to cop drugs," Baker said. "That's how I existed. I got real high and had the illusion I had both arms. I had a couple of suicide attempts. It was hell. . . . Everybody who was around me was stone-faced, saying to be so grateful that you're alive, all these types of things, and I was so angry. They wanted to pray. I'd say get the hell away, to myself. I saw myself being so marginal a person. I couldn't even pretend that I was a ballplayer. That went on for about eight or nine years."
Baker went to California and spent nine homeless months living by the beach. He was in and out of rehab places, but nothing clicked, he said, until he entered the Livengrin Foundation's detoxification and rehabilitation program in Bensalem.
"I went there arrogant," Baker said. "It happened there for me. I got in a therapy group. I had become sophisticated enough in therapy that I knew to say things to keep people at bay. But this was a tough group. I started talking about the arm, talking about my childhood. Talking, talking, talking. The more I talked, the stronger I got, and the farther I was removed from wanting to get high."
For the first time, Baker said, he was able to suppress his pride and ask for help instead of slipping up.
Now, years removed from that life, he is a counselor and head of his own nonprofit company, Alternative Decisions. For several years, he has given inspirational talks at schools and camps. He was at Graterford Prison for a talk last month.
Baker had worked full time as an addictions counselor, but he stopped when chronic pain from his hard living kept him from keeping a regular schedule.
Now he talks about opening a series of drop-in "safe house" centers, sanctuaries for children in the city. He wants to have computers and other activities. He said he had looked at a place in Olney, near where he grew up, but there were zoning issues.
"I think a lot of people say a lot of things in terms of how much they care about other people and want to help other people," said Baker's wife, Barrie. "But Jimmie says love is an action word. If you're not doing anything, it doesn't count. He's talking to these kids about choices. But it's one thing to tell kids what they should do. The action is actually giving them a place to do it."
George Mosee, Philadelphia's deputy district attorney for narcotics, said he had seen Baker giving his talk several times and called it "about as dramatic a demonstration of what can happen if you get on the wrong side as I've ever seen."
"I knew all about Jimmie Baker," Mosee said. "When he talks, he doesn't pull any punches."
Phillip Harris, an eighth-grade social-studies teacher at World Communications Charter School in South Philadelphia, listened to Baker talk at an assembly at the school.
"A lot of guys would have given up their arm to trade places with this man," Harris said. "Now Baker tells them, 'I can't put my arms around my wife to hug her.'"
Malik Aziz, executive director of Ex-Offenders of Pennsylvania, has made many presentations with Baker.
"He sees the needs and the frustrations of the young people in the city," Aziz said. "He sees the pain and the suffering. And he knows that his story is one that needs to be told."
Mike Jensen's e-mail address is mjensen@phillynews.com
Copyright 2000 PHILADELPHIA NEWSPAPERS INC. May not be reprinted without permission.
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