In ‘The Royal’ a life is rebuilt despite everything

COOOPERSTOWN, NY — The greatest player in Kansas City Royals history slammed his hand on a conference table in the Baseball Hall of Fame last Friday. George Brett pretended to be an FBI agent showing his badge.

You weren’t like that in Cooperstown. NY, more. You were with the Royals sometime in the early 80’s, and you could be in serious trouble.

“He’s bringing up my name, he’s bringing up Jamie Quirk’s name — and he’s bringing up your name,” Brett said, pointing to his old teammate, Willie Mays Aikens, on the other side of the table.

“And he brings up the name of Vida Blue, and the name of Jerry Martin and the name of Willie Wilson. And he says, ‘You know, we had a meeting earlier about calling bookmakers and gambling. Let’s say George and Jamie call someone we have an eavesdropper on…’”

Brett was shocked and quickly understood: he stopped betting on football matches. But the FBI didn’t care much for him and Quirk. The detectives tried to let the others know that they had started using their cocaine.

“Had we stopped at that point, we would never have had a drug business,” Aikens said. “They tried to warn us, man.”

“And you kept doing it,” Brett said.

“And we kept doing it,” Aikens replied.

Aikens continued to do it for ten years. Like Blue, Martin and Wilson, he served a short jail term after the 1983 season, but that wasn’t the worst of it. That’s not why Samuel Goldwyn Films has turned Aikens’ life story into a movie, “The Royal,” which will be released on July 15. It will be available for streaming and in limited theaters, and it premiered at the Hall of Roem last Friday.

For Aikens, 67, it was his first trip to Cooperstown, where Brett is committed to a career that ended with 3,154 hits in 1993. By then, Aikens was deep in his cocaine addiction, which left him in a six-year career in Mexico after eight seasons. the majors as a slugging first baseman with the California Angels, the Royals, and the Toronto Blue Jays until 1985.

In 1994, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for selling 2.2 grams of crack cocaine four times to a female undercover cop. Aikens has said he was interested in the woman and complied when she asked him to boil the cocaine into crack.

That decision made Aikens — the first player to have two multihome games in the same World Series, in 1980, when the Philadelphia Royals lost — a public face of the wide disparity in convictions for crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenders. A 1986 federal law punished people much more severely for crack; it wasn’t until 2010 that Congress reduced the sentencing difference between crack and powder cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1.

Aikens was incarcerated for 14 years and is now out of prison for as long as he was in it. “The Royal” mainly describes his transition back into society – reconciling with his wife and family, becoming a father again, working on a road crew digging manholes and, with Brett’s help, a job as a minor league coach for the Royals. to secure.

“How many people in this world go through their lives on Earth and get a movie?” said Aikens, who now serves as a special assistant to the Royals as part of their leadership development team. “Not many people. I hope the film will help save some lives.”

The actor Amin Joseph, who plays a crack dealer on the FX series “Snowfall”, portrays Aikens. Joseph, 42, grew up in Harlem and said he remembers the crack bottles that were on playgrounds. He was drawn to playing a different kind of figure influenced by drugs.

“There are real people in our communities who are dealing with this and are still healing, and as Willie often says, not all of them were major league baseball players with the luxury of having friends in powerful places to give them a second chance. to give,” Joseph said. “A lot of these people have lost, forgotten, the underbelly of what we consider society, the people we judge.”

Aikens’ background gave him the opportunity to return to baseball, but things didn’t always go smoothly. He first had to face his past and show that he could share his experiences.

Aikens was an unlikely public speaker who had struggled with stuttering for much of his life. Brett had first encouraged him to tell his story in front of Brett’s son’s high school athletes, a scene loosely depicted in the film. It became a revelation.

“When I picked him up at the shelter and I heard him talk, I got tears in my eyes. I actually did,” Brett said. “I was so proud of him.”

Aikens — who testified before Congress in 2009 and pushed for sentencing reform for drug offenders — has told his story many times since then to Royals prospects and to students at the team’s Urban Youth Academy. The message has remained all too relevant in baseball; while cocaine was a scourge of the 1980s, the death of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs in 2019 revealed the toll of the opioid epidemic in the sport.

Four Angels teammates revealed in court this year that, like Skaggs, they had been given oxycodone pills from Eric Kay, a former Angels communications director who was found guilty of two charges for his role in Skaggs’ death. Prosecutors argued that Skaggs had died from a pill or pills he was given by Kay that were disguised to look like oxycodone but were actually fentanyl, a much stronger opioid.

“This drug that they have now is mixed with Oxycodone and such drugs, and it’s a blind killer,” Aikens said, referring to fentanyl. “When I was on drugs, you could sit there for hours or days and just snort cocaine or smoke. But with this drug now, fentanyl, you can take this one pill and it can just turn it off. It doesn’t even give you a chance.”

Almost in spite of himself, Aikens survived to get another chance. Now he’s taken his story to a theater in Cooperstown – and soon far beyond.