Royal Rebel

The only thing Wilson appears to need help with — again — is listening to the people around him.

At the rundown Raytown Parks and Recreation baseball fields off Frost Road, Mohr asks Wilson to take a quick break from batting practice to do an interview for KSHB Channel 41. He rebuffs her repeatedly. Finally, she asks White for help. "We're trying to get Willie, but he's in his own world," Mohr tells White.

"Hey, Will, they need you over here for a minute," White shouts across the field.

Parents look up to see Wilson's reaction. He kneels at home plate with a bag of baseballs. He doesn't look up.

"I know, Frank. That's not my purpose here," he growls back angrily as he lobs another ball to a young hitter.

"He did the same thing to me," Mohr tells White.

"He's always been that way," White says.

Still, Wilson seems to have conquered his least-favorite exercise. At the end of the clinic, he sits with all of the other players at a long table near home plate to sign autographs. The line extends toward first base. Kids trickle past Wilson and the other players as though in a buffet line. One boy stops in front of Wilson and offers him a ball to sign. The kid thinks Wilson is Frank White. When he sees Frank a few seats down and realizes his mistake, the boy yanks his ball back.

"I got to get this signed by Frank for my grandma," the boy says shortly.

"Willie Wilson can sign it, too," his mom says, rolling her eyes apologetically.

Wilson laughs and smiles broadly. "No, that's cool," he says. The line now stretches into the outfield. It will be more than an hour before he can leave. "If he wants Frank to sign, that's cool. I'm ready for another."

On the Saturday night after the clinic, Wilson and a few players head to a party at a mansion just off a golf green in the Overland Park subdivision of the Links at LionsGate. The pad is three stories, filled with at least 15 flat-screen TVs wired to more than $150,000 worth of sound equipment. The home belongs to a sports fanatic and local real-estate-development mogul named William McCroy Jr., who has dubbed the place "the Man House." McCroy says he offers up his home to athletes as a private place to carouse.

Hearn and Pattin arrive in uniform. Pryor shows up in jeans. They gather in the basement, which is filled with sports posters, arcade games, a shuffleboard table, and a movie theater with plush cinema chairs. On the theater screen is a Royals game that no one watches.

Wilson arrives fashionably late with Mayberry and Mohr. He wears slacks, a bright-orange dress shirt and a slathering of musky cologne. At the bar, he grimaces when he realizes that there's only caffeine-free Diet Coke. He mixes it with whiskey anyway. "When you have a lot of things and they take it all away, beggars can't be choosy," he says.

Sore from the long day, Wilson hobbles gingerly around the basement. He shoots some pool by himself.

McCroy shows up as Wilson fills his glass again behind the bar. When McCroy gushes that Wilson can outrun any ball hit, Wilson stops him. He looks at his teammates, lazily scratching his stomach. "You can't knock yourself in every time," he says. "You need other people to make you great."

Hearn swigs a Bud Light past the plug of chewing tobacco already in his mouth. He watches Wilson intently. Wilson seems to relish the attention.

"You don't have the stress of ballplaying, so you can just be you," Wilson says. On July 9, he turns 52. "I feel better than 26."

Much of that comes from his resolution to stop trying to justify his past actions. Wilson says he rocketed to superstardom in the era just before pro athletes were coached on how to handle the press and groupies. He never realized the extent to which his daily moves would be scrutinized.

When talk turns to past transgressions, he'll no longer discuss specifics. Ask him about the cocaine scandal, and he will tell you, "All I did was call for somebody else. How would you like to go to jail for just talking about something?" Ask him about his illegitimate daughter, and he admits that he is estranged from her, but not by choice. "It was all about money. I had a daughter out of wedlock. There are about 50 million other kids that happened out of wedlock, but you don't see nobody talking about them."

If he's going to tell all, he says, he'll do it in a book that comes with a payday. "I'm not going to just give it to the public. My life is not free anymore."

As the sun sets, Wilson steps outside to smoke a cigarette. He looks toward the tree line, in the direction of his old home, which is just a few miles east. It was repossessed after he filed for bankruptcy. He puffs on a Salem and scrutinizes the golf course rolling out in front of him, planning where he might place his strokes.