Denny McLain won 31 games for the Detroit Tigers in the summer of 1968.

Big, powerful righthander, one of the greatest single-season feats in the history of the game.

            I caught up with McLain in April of 1985. He was sitting in a prison cell in Sanford, Florida, and he was crying.

            “I don’t know, man,” said McLain, winner of the Cy Young Award in ’68, when he and Mickey Lolich and Al Kaline led the Tigers to a World Champtionship. “I don’t know if I can do the time.”

            McLain had been arrested in Florida for alleged racketeering - loan-sharking, extortion, that kind of thing. He'd grown up in Chicago and by the age of nine, he said, was running numbers for the local mob.

            I did my best to help.

            “Denny,” I said. “I’m going to pray for you.  Really, I am.”

            “Thanks, man.”

             He wiped away the tears and then, the greatest right-hander in the history of the Detroit Tigers laughed and said: “There’s an overhead steam pipe, back there on the cellblock. I was thinking about hanging myself from that pipe – but with my luck, the sonofabitch would come crashing down and I’d end up paralyzed forever in a wheelchair!”

            I asked him if there was anything he wanted.

            He shook his head.

.           “Well, there’s one thing.  Could I have your ballpoint pen?  I’m writing a lot of stuff, back there in my cell.  Trying to write about the pain, you know?  Could I have your pen?”

            “Sure, Denny.”

                                                            - the end -