Josh Hamilton made a decision early Wednesday morning before he arrived at Tropicana Field. He is trying to quit using smokeless tobacco.
“Today is the first day,” Hamilton said before the Rangers’ series finale with the Rays. “The Holy Spirit ... I kept waking up last night thinking about different things and what might be causing me to stumble in my relationship with the Lord. I felt like chewing tobacco was one. So I got up this morning and threw it all away. So when it is time to take a dip, I pray instead.”
Whatever works. Tobacco kills, so I don’t care if he sings the first two verses and of “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” and does a little jig each time he has a tobacco craving. Quitting that stuff is an absolute good.
And you think it shouldn’t be too tough for him given that the dude kicked coke, heroin and booze. But I’ve spoken to a couple of addicts before, each of whom said it was actually harder for them to stop smoking. Their explanation: drugs wreck your body so quickly and can bring you so close to death that -- despite how addictive drugs can be -- the crappy risk/reward ratio of doing them becomes clear way more quickly than smoking’s does. For the former, there is some fairly immediate “oh crap, I’m gonna die” moment. For the latter it’s a physical and psychological addiction paired with the mere intellectual realization that, yes, in some years this will kill them.
However that works in Hamilton’s head, good luck to him.