NEW YORK — Lenny Dykstra speaks six languages.
The former All-Star lets this tidbit hang in the air for a few seconds, eyes twinkling mischievously, until he can’t hold in the smile any longer.
Out comes the truth: “I’m still mastering the English language.”
That’s more like it. That’s the Lenny Dykstra baseball fans knew and loved — or loathed.
The diving, dirt-stained player as rough as his nickname, “Nails.” Pretty much the last guy you’d expect to be staring out from a glossy magazine page, posed in an expensive suit and presented as the model for how ex-athletes can succeed in retirement.
“I kind of like it that way,” Dykstra says. “I like to pretend I got hit by a lot of pitches.”
But there he is, next to an article sprinkled with words like “convoluted,” “acquiesce,” and “sublimating.” He’s a stock picks guru. He’s the owner of Wayne Gretzky’s old house. And now he’s the founder of a magazine and business venture that promise to help pro athletes “keep living the dream.” Gracing the cover of last month’s inaugural issue of Players Club was Derek Jeter, a baseball star with the sort of wholesome image never attached to Dykstra.
Dykstra was on probation by Major League Baseball for gambling. He crashed his sports car into trees and was charged with drunk driving. He was one of the first major leaguers to be widely rumored to use steroids.
Even in his second career as a businessman, the rough edges haven’t been totally smoothed out. There was a messy lawsuit brought by a longtime friend and business partner over Dykstra’s lucrative car wash operation. He was sued again in February by an accounting firm.
And now he’s involved in another suit with the company that initially published Players Club. In a federal court filing, Doubledown Media describes Dykstra as a “mercurial, difficult client” and raises questions about his financial stability.
Sitting in the restaurant of a swanky New York hotel in January, laptop on and briefcase by his side, Dykstra veers between the roles of savvy businessman and dimwitted jock. His lone language is best described as surfer-dude-ese, spoken in a tone that tends to make him sound puzzled.
“Reading’s hard for me,” he says at one point. “I can’t concentrate for long in one place.”
But get him talking about baseball, and he can rattle off the odds of getting a hit with a 1-2 count versus a 2-1 count.
And when it comes to business?
In the span of a few years, Dykstra went from a guy who couldn’t tell a dividend from a divot to the author of a popular stock-picking column on TheStreet.com, the prominent financial Web site founded by TV host Jim Cramer.
“When I was playing baseball,” Dykstra says, “I didn’t even know what a stock was.”
Not until he “got smoked” in the market downturn of 2002. His $2 million investment shriveled to $400,000, Dykstra says.
What happened to the assurances that those blue-chip stocks were safe, he asked the “mutual fund bozo.”
“He’s trying to explain to me what happened, and I felt like a raisin,” Dykstra says. “I didn’t know what he was saying.”
Humiliated, he vowed never to feel that way again.
Since doing a lot reading wasn’t going to happen, he bought business DVDs and CDs and listened to them in the car. He subscribed to about 30 financial newsletters. Clicking on the favorites menu on his Web browser, Dykstra shows off the long list of sites he regularly checks out.
The inspiration behind his magazine is the pro athlete who feels like a raisin when financial terms are tossed around — and doesn’t want to anymore. Dykstra describes his column at the front of each issue as “everything that the players want to say or ask but they’re afraid to, because people think they’re like a wimp.”
The magazine isn’t available on newsstands or by standard subscription. It’s sent free to all athletes in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and the top levels of golf, tennis, auto racing and soccer.
Dykstra’s bet is that advertisers will pay top dollar for access to such a wealthy readership. Open up the debut issue of Players Club, and there on the first two pages is an ad for Mercedes-Benz.
Players Club mixes profiles of athletes who have thrived in the business world with buying guides to high-end merchandise. Dykstra also has a partnership with AIG, and he promotes its annuities in the magazine as a way for athletes to sustain their wealth.
Paunchy, walking slightly hunched, his cell phone ringing an Elton John song, the 45-year-old Dykstra adds “with a lot of mileage” when he talks about his age. He no longer looks much like the base-stealing, leadoff-hitting center fielder who played for the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies.
Those rough edges of Dykstra’s playing days were back in the news in December, when he was named in MLB’s investigation into performance-enhancing drugs. The Mitchell Report said Dykstra admitted to officials in the commissioner’s office around 2000 that he had used steroids. Dykstra denies that happened.
“I didn’t take steroids,” he says. “I put my time in the weight room.”
He insists he’s too busy to worry much about the report. That would have seemed unimaginable when Dykstra was arousing suspicions as a player — that someday he’d be a jet-setting entrepreneur with little time to spare.
“I would’ve laughed,” he says. “That wasn’t me.
“I played baseball, man. That was all I did.”
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