Willie Mays Aikens Has His Story Told in ‘The Royal’

Cooperstown, NY — The greatest player in Kansas City Royals history slammed his palm on the Baseball Hall of Fame conference table last Friday. George Brett was pretending to be an FBI agent showing off his badge.

Just like that, you weren’t in Cooperstown anymore. You were somewhere in the Royals in the early 1980s, but you may have a serious problem.

“He will name me, Jamie Kirk, and he will name you,” Brett points to his old teammate Willie Mays Akins across the table. I said while pointing.

“And he named Vida Blue, Jerry Martin, and Willie Wilson,” he says, “you know, we call the bookmaker and the game. We had a previous meeting about betting. Let’s say George and Jamie are calling the guy we eavesdropped on …'”

Brett was upset and quickly understood. He stopped betting on football games. But the FBI didn’t care much about him and Quirk. Researchers were trying to inform others that they were using cocaine.

“If I had stopped here and there, I wouldn’t have had a drug case,” Akens said. “They tried to warn us, man.”

“And you kept doing that,” Brett said.

“And we kept doing that,” Akens replied.

Aikens has been doing that for 10 years. Like Blue, Martin and Wilson, he served a short sentence after the 1983 season, but that wasn’t the worst. That’s not why Samuel Goldwyn Films changed Aken’s life story into the movie “The Royal,” due out on July 15. The film was streamed and premiered in a limited theater and premiered at the Hall of last Friday. fame.

For 67-year-old Akens, it was his first trip to Cooperstown. There, Brett is enshrined for a career that ended in 3,154 hits in 1993. Mexico after spending eight major seasons as a slugging first baseman with the California Angels, Royals and the Toronto Blue Jays until 1985.

In 1994, he was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for selling 2.2 ounces of crack cocaine to masked female officers four times. Aikens said he responded when he was interested in women and she asked him to cook cocaine into cracks.

With that decision, Aikens — the first player Two multihomer games in the same World Series, 1980, when the Royals were defeated by Philadelphia — the public face of a large disparity in the criminal judgment of crack cocaine and powdered cocaine. Federal law in 1986 punished people with cracks much more severely. It took Congress until 2010 to reduce the disparity in judgments between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1.

Aikens has been imprisoned for 14 years and is no longer in jail. “The Royal” mainly records the return to society. Reconciled with his wife and family, became a father again, and works on the road. With the help of a manhole digging crew and Brett, he secured a job as a Royals minor league coach.

“How many people in the world will live on earth and get movies?” Said Akens, a special assistant to the Royals as part of the leadership development team. “Not many people. I hope the movie will help save lives.”

Actor Amin Joseph, who plays the crack dealer in the FX series “Snowfall,” depicts Akens. Joseph, 42, grew up in Harlem and said he remembers the crack vials scattered around the playground. He was attracted to playing another kind of person who was influenced by drugs.

“There are real people in our community who are dealing with this and still healing. As Willy often says, all of them have a second chance to put their friends in a powerful place. I wasn’t a luxury major league baseball player to give, “Joseph said. “Many of these people have lost and forgotten what we consider to be society, the people we judge.”

Aiken’s career gave him a way back to baseball, but it wasn’t always smooth. He had to first confront his past and show that he could share his experience.

Aikens was like an unlikely public speaker who had dealt with stuttering in much of his life. Brett first advised him to tell his story for Brett’s son’s high school athlete. This scene is roughly depicted in the movie. It became a revelation.

“When I picked him up at a half-baked house and listened to him, I had tears in my eyes. I really did,” Brett said. “I was very proud of him.”

Akens, who testified in Congress in 2009 and urged the sentencing reform of drug offenders, has since spoken to Royals prospects and team students at the Urban Youth Academy many times. The message is too relevant to baseball. Cocaine was a tragedy in the 1980s, but the death of Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs in 2019 revealed the victims of an opioid epidemic in the sport.

This year, four Angels teammates received an oxycodone pill from former Angels communications director Eric Kay, who, like Skags, was convicted of two charges for his role in Skaggs’ death. Revealed. Prosecutors alleged that Skaggs died from one or more pills he received from Kay. These tablets looked like oxycodone, but were actually fentanyl, a much more potent opioid.

“The drug they currently have is mixed with oxycodone and such a drug, which is a blind killer,” Aikens said, referring to fentanyl. “When I was using the drug, you could sit there for hours and days and snort and smoke cocaine. But now with this drug, fentanyl, You can take this one tablet and you can knock it out. It doesn’t even give you a chance. “

Almost despite himself, Akens survived to get another chance. Now he took his story to the theater in Cooperstown — and soon went far beyond that.