The beloved HBO sitcom Eastbound and Down tells the story of Kenny Powers, an obnoxious yet somehow endearing Southern man who falls from grace after his baseball career goes up in flames.
When the show debuted, its star and co-creator Danny McBride told NPR that Powers was more or less inspired by John Rocker, a real-life former MLB pitcher whose reputation nose-dived after a controversial 1999 Sports Illustrated interview. (Fun fact: McBride and Rocker were born in the same hospital in Statesboro, GA.)
Rocker was heavily criticized in his day, and rightly so—but despite his troubled past, some people couldn’t help but adore him.
Ten years after his retirement, VICE met John Rocker in Cooperstown, NY, the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Rocker said he’d “seen a few episodes” of Eastbound. When asked how he feels about comparisons between him and Kenny Powers, he said, “It’s fine. At least they make it funny.” He seemed to prefer producer Will Ferrell’s SNL impressions of him.
Rocker was 24 when he was pulled up to the major leagues.
“I can remember the first day I was on the big league field,” he said with a look of nostalgia. He explained that he had committed to this dream every day for a decade—since he was practically 14 years old.
“My philosophy was, I have to do something every day to play in the big leagues,” he said, whether it was working out, stretching, practicing, reading a book or magazine about baseball, watching a game, or maintaining some other efficient habit. When he finally made it, he thought, “They can’t ever take this away from me.”
At the peak of his career, however, John did that fateful Sports Illustrated interview. His racist, homophobic, and xenophobic remarks about New York City and its residents would go on to haunt him for decades.
“The media portrays me in a negative light,” he told VICE. “There’s not a story much sexier than bigotry. Why are they so adamantly stuck to it?”
He denied that his comments had anything to do with his retiring from the big leagues. Instead, he said, it was a shoulder injury. “They diagnosed the pinched nerve on my neck, but nobody had anything to fix it. It would take me 30 minutes of stretching and 15 minutes of throwing to get loose to throw one inning and throw 86 miles an hour.”
“What started to be an arthroscopic deal turned out to be a four-and-a-half-hour surgery,” he continued. Two of his rotator cuff muscles were 85% torn and his labrum was torn off the bone, among many other issues. “My shoulder was just destroyed,” he said. “You couldn’t pitch like that.”
Where is John Rocker today? When he appeared on Survivor, he was the third person voted off. He’s tried his hand as a standup comic and even spent some time as a conservative political columnist. He continues to reject the idea that he’s a racist or bigot.
At the time of the VICE documentary, John said he was focusing on charity work, “trying to help vets get off the street, get a warm meal in their stomach, get a job, get an education if that’s what they want, and hopefully usher them back out in society as meaningful, productive members.”
“John has a tender heart,” said Ernest Easley, a pastor familiar with Rocker’s volunteering. “And he probably is going to be angry that I’ve said that.”
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