Page 1 of Fake Love

MARCH 8, 2022

Maddox

Traded.

Throughout my career, I had an irrational fear of that word. Of what it would mean if I heard the word and my name in the same sentence.

In the five years that I’ve been playing in the minor and major leagues, that word has been traumatizing for me.

If I had to guess, it might stem from having men on the same team as me one day and then the next, they’re playing across the country.

Or it could have stemmed from me wanting to play nowhere else but my hometown team for all of my career and be within a ten-mile drive from my mom.

Whatever it stems from, the word has terrified me for years. It’s as if it has a death grip on me.

Since I’ve been called up to the big times, every time I hear the word, I jump a little. That happened a lot during my first season when I was just a rookie, a nobody.

Even when my first season was over, I would sweat profusely thinking that I was going to be sent to another city.

There was always a thought floating around my head that my team didn’t want me, even with the Rookie of the Year title in my back pocket.

That fear has stayed with me even after I signed a multi-million-dollar contract.

A ninety-five-million-dollar contract to be exact.

The second that my name was on the dotted line and dried, my fear for the word disappeared. It was only going to disappear for eight years, but for the time being, it was gone.

I was at the top of my game, in the city that owned my heart, and the fear of being traded was nowhere in sight.

And it was like that for almost three years.

Then I got a call from my mom’s neighbor, a call that shattered everything in me. A call that put the fear of the word ‘traded’ to shame.

It was the worst news of my life and within days of hearing it, I started to throw everything I had built away.

I started to do things that never in my life did I think I was ever going to do.

Actions that had words like traded and suspensions being thrown around, but in those moments, I didn’t care. I was going to lose everything, anyway, why not lose the sport that has been in my blood since I could walk out too.

I didn’t care when I started to throw everything down the drain. I didn’t care when I got my first ten game suspension. I sure as hell didn’t care when my last drug test came back dirty and I received a ninety game suspension and a hefty fine.

I didn’t care until I was face down on a couch inside a strip club.

I didn’t care until I had the club owner knock some sense into me with his words.

I didn’t care until it was almost too late.

Now all my fears were coming true and there was nothing that I could do about it. Because it was my decisions that got me here. Decisions that I’m now paying for.

I’ve been suspended.

I’ve been traded.

I’m away from my mother when she needs me most.

All because I couldn’t keep my nose away from the small baggy filled white powder.

The suspensions, I knew were coming. I saw them from a mile away. I knew my tests were going to come back dirty, so I didn’t fight it.

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