By Nick Tricome
August 2 was a night of celebration at Citizens Bank
Park.
Brad Lidge officially
retired as a Phillie the night before, then it was Curt Schilling's time to be
inducted into the Phillies' Wall of Fame.
It was a chance to
reflect on Schilling's tenure in Philadelphia and his role on the 1993 team
that won the NL pennant, especially.
But little did anyone
in the stadium know, amidst all the joy in the air, that the past couple years
have been tough for the former pitcher.
After retiring from
baseball, Schilling founded a game development studio that he fittingly named
38 Studios.
The development
studio settled in Providence, Rhode Island, thanks to $75 million in bonds
issued by the state.
The idea was that
Schilling's studio would create jobs and make great games, but it all ended in
disaster.
38 Studios went
bankrupt in June of last year and it ended up costing Schilling and Rhode Island
taxpayers tons of money, according to the Boston Globe's Stan Grossfeld. The
studio going under also cost 300 people their jobs.
Taxpayers lost an
estimated $100 million, Grossfeld writes, and Schilling lost $50 million of his
own money.
Curt and his family
lost almost everything after 38 Studios went bankrupt. Even the famous bloody
sock from the 2004 World Series is gone, as it was auctioned off for close to
$93,000.
“All
that stuff bothered me,” Schilling told Grossfeld. “I sold all that stuff to
pay the banks back for the note, instead of filing bankruptcy and keeping it
all, I sold it all. It sucks.’’
Although
it's now over a year after the fall of 38 Studios, it's still something that
gets to Schilling.
“It’s
still raw for me,” Schilling said. “It’s a tough thing to talk about. There was
so much it could’ve been."
Schilling told
Grossfeld that it was really his first failure and went as far to say that it
was close to the most devastating time in his life, outside of family issues.
“Outside
of, like, personal family — losing my dad — it was the most devastating thing
I’ve ever gone through,” he says, “and it’s still something I’m trying to
bounce back from.”
“It
was so hard, because I had pushed and pushed and pushed. I had 300 families [of
company employees] I had to take care of, including my own, and it failed.”
“And
I’ve lost a lot in my life but I’ve never failed at anything. I was going to
[win] but I couldn’t get it done.”
Grossfeld
writes that Schilling hit such a low and was under so much stress that his wife
Shonda still worries about him to this day.
“I don’t know how somebody would not kill himself, honestly,
over what he has had to endure,” she told Grossfeld.
“It
was probably the first time he ever failed at anything,” she said. “I never saw
him so beaten.”
During
the recollection of his recent past, Schilling also revealed to Grossfeld that
he suffered a heart attack back in 2011, something that managed to stay out of
the spotlight until now.
Schilling
said that he was in New York with his wife, while she was running in the New
York City Marathon, when he started having chest pains.
The
two of them flew back to Boston and went straight to a hospital after the
marathon, as Grossfeld reports, where he had surgery and changed his lifestyle thereafter.
Grossfeld
writes that Schilling doesn’t pin complete blame on the stress caused by 38 Studios’
demise, but acknowledges that it probably was a factor that led to his close
call.
“My
doctor made it clear that I was very, very, lucky,” Schilling told Grossfeld in
a text message.
It
could be a while before Schilling completely bounces back from the trouble he
has run into over the past couple years, but things seem to be getting better.
Schilling
is a baseball analyst for ESPN and found a good distraction in his life by
coaching softball.
“This
is a great distraction for him,” Schilling’s wife Shonda told Grossfeld. “It
has given him purpose.”
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