7

Stubborn, But in Love

Ellis met Hjordis in 1985. Loved her. Trusted her. Butted heads with her, early and often, because both of them were stubborn. Still, he shared as much as he could. But not the no-hitter. Ellis didn't talk about the game for years. The first time Ellis told her about his no-no, the long-retired pitcher did something she almost never saw him do. Not when Hjordis' mother died. Not even when Ellis' daughter from his first marriage, Shangaleza, died in 2002 at age 31 from a heart attack brought on by complications from Type 1 diabetes and kidney dialysis.

"He cried," she said. "It was pretty painful for him. I think it was something he kinda sorta wished would go away. But he came around to realizing that it wouldn't."

Ellis was right. It didn't. But slowly, man and myth began to diverge. Ellis' lifelong emotional drawbridge had been lowering, denial giving way to self-awareness. After his first sober game with the Pelicans, he went straight to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. "I'm afraid," he told attendees. During his Shrine of the Eternals induction speech in 1999, Ellis dropped his head. His voice cracked. "Life is not a bundle of joy," he said. "Especially if you care about people. You can get hurt because a lot of people take that for a weakness."

In 2000, Ellis moved to Apple Valley, Calif. He still counseled prisoners. He also lived on a golf course, rode around in a cart with his buddies, liked nothing more than to holler at his wife over the back fence of his house. "Jordie! Bring me a sandwich!" He pulled weeds, flooded the sidewalk with his sprinkler, rearranged the rocks in his front yard six times a day. At a nearby lake, he went fishing with his grandson. He watched cooking shows, made a mean peach cobbler. One Thanksgiving, he arranged the hard-boiled eggs on his signature potato salad to read "D-O-C-K," just like the vanity plate on his old pimpmobile. The salad was a runny mess, a family joke; the man could not have been prouder.

Ellis had dogs. Lapdogs. Two of them. Mercedes and Renardo. He walked them every day, gleefully racking up neighborhood grievance fines because the dogs barked at everyone, golfers and landscapers and delivery guys. The little yappers were loud. Like their owner. Trey couldn't believe it. "When we were kids, we used to always try to get a dog," he said. "We got one once. Kept it for maybe a week. When my dad would be walking down the hallway, the dog wouldn't move. So pretty much, my dad would drop-kick it and say, 'Get the f--- out of the way! This is my house!' He just hated dogs. Then all of the sudden he moves, and one dog turns into two. And I was like, 'Damn, what the hell happened?'"

"Dock was happy," Hjordis said.

The call came as a shock. Thanksgiving 2007. Hjordis already was worried. She had been out, visiting relatives. So had Dock. The two were supposed to meet up. Only Dock was missing, not answering calls.

In the early evening, Hjordis' phone rang, a call from Dock's sister's house: "Dock is ill. We might have to take him to the hospital."

"What do you mean?"

"He's incoherent. Seeing things. He passed out. We couldn't wake him."

The next day, Ellis was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, a generally irreversible disease that can cause a host of health problems -- including brain dysfunction -- and often results in organ failure and death. The illness, Hjordis said, hit her husband "like a Mack truck." Early on, she still went to work counseling substance abusers, trying to earn enough money to cover mounting medical bills and a pharmacy's worth of prescriptions. Most afternoons, however, she found herself racing home, each and every time her husband dropped the phone. Ellis needed round-the-clock supervision. Rambo and Jones kept a weekend vigil, driving up from Los Angeles. Mostly, they saw their friend sleep. And wither, dropping from 235 pounds to 150.

Ellis slipped in and out of ambulances, hospitals and consciousness -- one minute aware, happily chatting, the next minute unsure of who you were or why you were sitting in his living room. "They would release him from the hospital, and we would get home at 4," Jasmine recalled. "By 4:30, Dock would be in the kitchen, pouring out every seasoning he had on the counter. Then we would call 911 again."

In May 2008, Ellis was placed on a liver transplant list. His age and rapidly declining health made him an unlikely recipient. He was dying. Like his father.

Back came the old emotional walls. When the wife of former major league player and friend Willie Crawford visited him in the hospital, Ellis blew up. When Stargell's widow, Margaret, wanted to fly out for a visit, he said no. Margaret was hurt. The cold shoulder took her by surprise. Years earlier, Ellis had been like a brother during Stargell's extended illness, more than once traveling cross-country on short notice to offer emotional support. But now? "[Dock] was trying to protect [Margaret]," Hjordis said. "He knew what she had already gone through."

At one point, Ellis sneaked into his garage. Went through his papers and personal effects. Meticulously removed every photograph of himself with his wife, sisters and mother. Even now, Hjordis can't figure out how her husband pulled it off. But she thinks she knows why. "We all came to the determination that he thought he was protecting us," she said. "An out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing."

Out of sight. Out of mind. A final attempt at blotting out. Except from his hospital bed, Ellis asked Hjordis for a favor: Could he come home? For just one day? To see his mother? Naomi Ellis had dementia. She lived in a nursing home. The morning of their visit, Hjordis got her husband dressed. Drove him to the facility. He was weak. Could hardly lift his head. Until he saw his mother, coming around a corner.

Ellis stood up. His eyes got wide. He looked like a child, lost in a department store, reunited with his parents at long last. "My mommy," he said. "I got to see my mommy!"

Ellis began to sob. "Now," he said, "everything is going to be OK."

The final weeks, Hjordis said, were horrific. Ellis went on 24-hour dialysis. He ate and breathed through tubes. He suffered two heart attacks and a stroke. He lost his ability to walk. His greatest joy was a medicinal inhaler. He went into a coma. Came out. Went back in. Ultimately, his family made a wrenching decision. Ellis was taken off life support.

Jones, Ellis' lifelong friend from childhood, doesn't remember that. Doesn't much want to. He remembers Election Day, driving Ellis to a polling place, watching returns on television, the joy on his sick friend's face when Barack Obama was elected. Trey remembers bedside conversations, his father telling stories, a sense of togetherness. Of feeling loved.

Shandy, the recovering addict, has been sober for 9½ years. He has a good job. He lives by the ocean. A framed photograph of Ellis hangs on a wall just outside his bedroom. Shandy looks at the picture every day. "I can still hear his voice," he said. "When you were talking to Dock, you didn't feel like you were being diagnosed or studied. You felt like you were having a conversation. It was real. Dock was real on every level."

Hjordis remembers her husband on the phone, talking to Tolan, giddy because his old senior league manager wanted to know his ring size. The Pelicans were sending out championship rings, almost two decades late. Ellis had lost his World Series and AL pennant rings, one in the bathroom of an Arizona highway rest stop. He never bothered to replace them. This was different. This too was real. "When the ring got to the hospital, Dock was so frail that he couldn't put it on his finger," Hjordis said. "It would just fall on the floor. But he was so excited."

Near the end, Ellis came out of a coma. Suddenly alert, he asked his family and friends to hold hands. To pray. Everyone was shocked. Not because Ellis was conscious but because he never prayed. "He was telling us, in his own way, to love life," Hjordis said. "To love one another. Don't waste the time you have left here on Earth bent up and angry about things you can't change."

Hjordis gets choked up. She misses her best friend. Lord, does she miss him. "One good thing came out of this," she said. In those final months, she saw her husband live fully, unguarded, as the person he always wanted to be. No longer afraid. No longer pushing the world away. A man, not a myth. "It probably sounds crazy or weird or stupid," she said, "but Dock's illness allowed the real Dock to be exposed before he left this Earth."