Griffey Prepares For Liftoff M’S Star Tastes Success, Adulation; Now He Wants A Championship Ring

Ken Griffey Jr. was holding court from his locker, explaining to a dozen media types why he has never felt comfortable talking about himself, when a veteran beat writer walked by.

“See the gray at his temples?” Griffey said, pointing the writer out. “He likes to tell people his daughter gave him that gray hair - but it was me.”

The line got a laugh, but as with so much of Griffey’s humor, it was laced with truth.

After his ninth major-league season pushed his star deeper into the baseball psyche, Griffey remains reluctant to discuss his career, his game, himself.

Since he joined the Seattle Mariners in 1989 at age 19, two things have remained consistent. He loves to tease the press - and he begins every baseball season chasing a ring.

In his years as a Mariner, he has played with and against dozens of men who have been to the World Series, and questioned each. What has he learned? The simplest truth in the game.

“They all say the same thing,” Griffey said. “There’s nothing like the World Series. There’s nothing like getting that ring, it’s something no one ever takes from you. I know - my dad has three of them.”

In Griffey’s life, those three elements have long been keys: his father, the game and the pursuit of the ring. He has been called, over the years, selfish, immature, uncontrolled.

His standard response has been a shrug of his shoulders and a question: Who isn’t, at times, each of those.

This season, perhaps the best of his career, Griffey won new admirers and created new critics. A man with his talent - and his mouth - earns both. What many people forget is that Griffey has always said what was on his mind.

In the summer of his rookie year, Griffey was often the first player dressed and out of the clubhouse after games, and then-batting coach Gene Clines finally asked him about it.

“I’ll never forget that,” Clines said. “He said he had never played on a losing team, that he’d never played with anyone who was just in the game for a paycheck. He said, ‘There’s guys on this team like that. I don’t want to associate with losers.’

“It said a lot about Junior. It said a lot about that team. He wasn’t wrong - most second-division teams had players like that, but he’d never been around them.

“Junior hasn’t changed. His team has,” Clines said.

Griffey has been criticized for saying he feels taken for granted, that more is expected of him. He has felt that - and said it - for more than a decade. Taken out of high school as the No. 1 pick in the nation in 1987, Griffey was under a microscope from the beginning in part because of his name and his major-league heritage.

“In school, I always sat in the back row. I hated being singled out,” he said. “If you’re Ken Griffey Jr., sometimes it seems you have to do things twice as good as anybody else. That’s not fair. I’m human, too.”

Griffey said that in March 1988. He was 18 years old.

“I saw Roger Maris go through one year of incredible media scrutiny,” Tony Kubek said. “From what I saw, Griffey went through that a lot of times - for years, he was the only story out of Seattle. So after every game, that’s where the media went, right to him. Roger never liked what was happening to him, but I think he understood it. Griffey was what - 19? He’s probably gotten a little better at it, but no one can deal with that day after day.”

Over the years, Griffey has remained a “fresh” interview, a man who can listen to the same questions and produce new answers. When he’s in the mood.

Piece together the stories Griffey has told over the years, he comes across as entirely human.

In 1992 - with his father in spring training with him as a player - Griffey talked about a time in 1987 when life simply got too hard for a Cincinnati teenager.

“It seemed like everyone was yelling at me in baseball, then I’d get home and everyone was yelling at me there,” he said. “I got depressed. I got angry. I didn’t want to live.”

Griffey, 17, swallowed nearly 300 aspirin and wound up in intensive care in an Ohio hospital.

“It was such a dumb thing,” he said.

Griffey’s father was furious about the story, but Griffey stood by what he’d said.

“Maybe it will help somebody out there,” he said.

From the beginning, Griffey’s approach to baseball and life has endeared him to some, angered others, even in his own clubhouse.

In his second season, then-manager Jim Lefebvre said of Griffey: “He’s put the Mariners on the map in baseball. Until he came, there were fans in this game who couldn’t have told you which league Seattle was in.”

And when the Mariners tried to take advantage of Junior’s newfound fame, their young star quickly found a downside.

“My second year, the front office asked me to sign 600 balls for season-ticket holders, then 900 balls,” Griffey said. “The problem was they didn’t ask anyone else on the team to sign them.”

The result was, some teammates resented what they viewed as Griffey stealing their spotlight.

“It was like we’d get to New York, Chicago, Anaheim, and he was the only player on the team,” Harold Reynolds said. “There’d be 15-20 writers talking to him, and the only time one of them would talk to you would be to ask you about Griffey. It was weird.”

Over the years, Griffey watched players come to Seattle, become friends, and leave - seldom of their own accord. Jeffrey Leonard, Alvin Davis, Kevin Mitchell, all veterans Junior sought out. And each was traded or released.

Small wonder, then, that Griffey asserted his influence once he had it, and fought to keep then free-agents Jay Buhner and Edgar Martinez and Randy Johnson.

“People said I was trying to run the franchise,” Griffey said. “But look what we did in 1995 and this year. We don’t win without Edgar. We don’t win without Jay. We don’t win without Randy. And all I’ve ever wanted to do here is win.”

The ring. Today, beginning the second postseason of his career, Griffey can see that ring, feel it.

And if Griffey’s teammates shared the effort it took to get to October, no one doubts that Griffey was his team’s - and probably the American League’s - most valuable player.

Griffey has changed over the years. In his first four years in professional baseball he bought, by his own count, 26 cars. Some he hardly ever drove.

Today, he is married and he and Melissa have two children, Trey and Taryn.

“Family comes first, it always has,” Griffey said. “It did when I was a kid, it does now that I’m a father and a husband.”

Griffey twirls a black bat in his hands, smiles.

“But my father has three rings he’s going to leave us someday,” he said. “And so far, I don’t have any. I got work to do. I remember sitting on a big couch back in 1980, I think it was, and watching Dad play in the All-Star game. I sat up and called ‘home run’ and he hit one.

“Then, in 1992, I hit one out in the All-Star game. See, everything I’ve done in this game, he did first. I’ve done a few things now that he didn’t, but he’s got those rings. I don’t. But I’m going to get one.”

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