Along with other black athletes, Ellis helped raise money for sickle cell anemia research and treatment. He lobbied Congress for the same, and the federal government ended up appropriating $142 million. He spent two summers working in a Pennsylvania prison and rehabilitation center, visiting with prisoners, playing basketball and bringing them hair spray because the older inmates were still using grease. Before the 1971 All-Star Game, Ellis dared National League manager Sparky Anderson to start "two brothers" -- namely, himself against already-named AL starter Vida Blue. He added that "when it comes to black players, baseball is backwards and everyone knows it." Privately, many of Ellis' peers agreed with his assessment; publicly, they were afraid to speak. The pitcher endured widespread scorn from fans and sports writers. He also received another letter:

"I read your comments in our paper the last few days and wanted you to know how much I appreciate your courage and honesty … I am sure also you know of some of the possible consequences … the news media … will use every means to get back at you … honors that should be yours will bypass you and the pressures will be great … there will be times when you ask yourself if it's worth it all. I can only say, Dock, it is …

"Sincerely,

"Jackie Robinson"

The Master of Disguise

Sometimes, the boy felt jealous. Mostly, it was weird. Dock Phillip Ellis III -- everyone calls him "Trey" -- would be with his father. And that was good. Only the two weren't really hanging out, doing father-son stuff, tossing a baseball around a public park or an Iowa cornfield or something. No. They were stuck at Dad's office, late into the night. Or visiting jails and prisons. Or driving into bad neighborhoods to meet with gang members. Just talking. So much talking. Especially with the kids, the kids Ellis counseled. The kids without fathers, or much hope. Some of them physically and sexually abused. Most using drugs. The kids Ellis couldn't shut up about, who called him "Dad," the same way Trey did.

You're not my sibling, Trey would think. Not yet in high school, he questioned his father. "Dad, is this your son? Then why are you treating him the way you would treat me?"

The man had a job. The boy understood. He just didn't grasp why his father cared so much. That was then. Today, Trey is 33, handsome like Dock, taller and more introverted. He misses his dad. Thinks about him every day. A former college basketball player, Trey has bounced around the game's minor leagues. He once had a stint with the Harlem Globetrotters, nearly attending the party that ended with former NBA star Jayson Williams accidentally shooting his driver. Trey makes a living through substitute teaching and bit parts in television commercials. He wants to become a firefighter. Someday. Maybe. If basketball doesn't work out. His father had a calling. Trey is still looking. "Counseling is what my dad loved," he said. "That feeling he got knowing he was changing somebody's life."

After rehab, Ellis moved back to Los Angeles. He went to support-group meetings: alcoholics, narcotics and cocaine, the Three Horsemen of the Anonymous. He went to therapy. He went to the beach, then decided that he didn't need a tan. He took psychology courses at the University of California at Irvine. He began counseling addicts, mostly working professionals in Beverly Hills. He left that gig to treat younger, poorer clients, then jumped again to work with prisoners.

At each stop, he counseled the way he pitched: high and inside. He confronted his patients. In his words, "Got in their s---." Ellis hated denial. He saw through self-deception, the evasive psychological crazy quilts woven around chemical dependence. He could be militant, the way he was as a player, only this time for real, arguing that baseball should drop beer sponsorships and that American jet fighters should shoot down incoming airplanes carrying narcotics.

"Dock didn't take no s---," said Johnson, the former Dodger, a recovering alcoholic who works in counseling and went to the same Arizona clinic as Ellis. "That's why he was good in the penal system. He was better there than the workforce. If Dock walked into this room right now, he would be like, 'What are you m-----f---ers doing? You had a drink? No? Then you all right.'"

Loud and abrasive, Ellis was still effective. He had empathy. He understood the fear. The pain. The emotional walls, erected for sheer survival, calcified over time. He knew how an alcoholic, drying out, would suddenly start scarfing a half-dozen candy bars a day -- because his body was still craving the sugar found in liquor. "You go into a rehab facility and the counselors have their Ph.D.s, they've read their books and know the psychology." said John Shandy, the recovering addict from Long Beach who met Ellis while incarcerated. "But as far as I'm concerned, nobody is going to listen to anybody about addiction who hasn't been there. Dock had been there and done it. A lot of people online say, 'hey, the [LSD no-hitter] is probably not true. A publicity stunt.' If you heard him tell the story, you knew damn well that s--- was true." Ellis was no damn fool; he knew that addiction was a matter of life and death. He made recovery his life's work. He met his last wife, Hjordis, while counseling her sisters. Ellis would give incarcerated addicts his personal phone number. He made one request: Right before you take that drink or that smoke, call this number. Just call this number and tell me that you're about to do it. "I used to call him once or twice a week when I was out," Shandy said. "He talked me down off the ledge all the time."

One day, Ellis invited Shandy into his detention facility office, the same office where he would let inmates make unmonitored phone calls from his desk, an unauthorized extension of trust.

"John Shandy," Ellis said. "You're afraid. That is why you're not going anywhere."

"He finally cracked me," Shandy said. "I struggle with fear every day. I never knew what that was until he pointed it out. He had a little anagram for fear: 'F--- everything and run.'"

Bitter about baseball -- Ellis felt used and discarded by the game -- he nevertheless worked in and around the sport, often with individual major leaguers, including a much-publicized spring training baby-sitting gig with troubled Yankees pitcher Pascual Perez. In the early 1990s, Ellis expressed interest in running the major league drug treatment program. About the same time, he told a magazine writer that "baseball owners are drunks. And so many front-office people are drunks. You go to the winter meetings and all you see are drunks. Deals are made when people are drunk. Writers write about, 'How could they make this deal?' Because they were drunk." He did not get the job.

"George Steinbrenner hired Dock," said Radice, the documentary filmmaker. "But very few people in baseball were willing to take him on in an official capacity because of his mouth."

Trey grew up with his mother, Renee, in Arlington, Texas. A latchkey kid, he visited his father during summers and holidays. In 1994, Dock and Hjordis moved to Fort Worth. Trey moved in with them. In high school, he was an honor roll student and a gifted basketball player. But he coasted. Passed the ball. Was happy to fit in with his teammates.

His lack of focus -- of aggression -- rankled Dock, who attended his games. All his games. "Sometimes it was like, 'Go home, Dad,'" Trey recalled with a laugh. "I remember a few instances with him up in the stands, yelling and cussing, where he had a bunch of fans and parents upset with him from our team. He wanted me to shoot the ball every time. It was embarrassing."

Ellis was making up for lost time. And for loss. He adored his father, Dock Sr., a self-made entrepreneur who worked on the docks and at the post office until he could afford to open his shoe repair shop. When Ellis was a boy, his father would go to his baseball games -- all of them -- from the El Segundo playground to Gardena's Thornburg Park. After victories, the two celebrated; after losses, Dad was there with a pat on the back. Sometimes, father and son played catch in the family's front yard. But not often. Dock Sr. had emphysema, a degenerative lung disease. By the time Ellis was a teenager, his father was largely bedridden, spending time at the VA hospital in Long Beach. His decline was slow. Terrifying. Near the end, he couldn't sleep in the same room as his wife. He had to curl up in a fetal position in order to breathe. He died while Ellis was in junior college, shortly before his son signed with the Pirates in January 1964.

"Dock kissed his dad goodbye in the casket," Ray Jones said. "I remember that."

"That hurt," Rambo said. "That was pain."

Ellis never discussed it. Not even with Hoffman, his lifelong sounding board. Ellis didn't visit his father in the hospital, either. Couldn't bear it. Hoffman went instead. Even now, the memory brings him to tears. "That was something Dock was never able to deal with," he said. "The death of anybody, serious sickness, as far as his dad or mom. Or any people that were real close to him."

Hjordis, now 52, saw the same thing. Saw how her husband coped, how he camouflaged his pain. How he created a psychic buffer, even with the people he loved. Get too close? Ellis would throw high and hard, make sure he maintained control. "Dock knew exactly what to say and do -- and what not to say and do -- to put those walls just high enough to where he wasn't completely blocking you," she said. "He kept you wondering. I used to tell him, 'You're a master of disguise. But you ain't fooling me.'

"That bothered him."

The buffering extended to baseball. At home, Ellis refused to watch the sport. When Hjordis dug up some of his memorabilia and displayed it in the family garage, he angrily told her to put it away. His favorite saying? According to his stepdaughter, Jasmine, it was, "F--- baseball."

"Even when he was playing," Hjordis said, "Dock found a way to be mentally disconnected from the game. He had to."

Why?

"All he ever wanted was to see his dad come around that [locker room] corner after a game, just one time."

Hjordis tells a story. Before the couple married in 1992, they lived together in Tempe, Ariz. One day, Ellis returned home from a trip to Los Angeles. "You know what, honey?" he said. "I went to see my dad today."

"You did?" she said.

"This is the first time I've gone to the cemetery since he died," he said. "I was finally able to see his grave."

Ellis was 46.

Pitching Naked

Afterward, Ellis remembered it like this: He was scared. Flush with adrenaline. Nine years out of rehab. Standing on a mound in Florida. Pitching naked.

Now deep into his baseball afterlife, Ellis had played in a Los Angeles recreational league, throwing gas past weekend warriors. He had played a pitcher in the movie "Gung Ho," leading Michael Keaton's team of disgruntled American autoworkers against their overbearing Japanese managers. Even in a bit part, acting was no small thing, given that film sets likely trump DEA seizure warehouses when it comes to the availability of abusable substances.

But this was different. This was real. Ellis was wearing a real uniform, that of the St. Petersburg Pelicans, a team in the Senior Professional Baseball Association, baseball's answer to senior golf, a short-lived league that gave about 200 aging ex-pros a final shot at fading glory.

Ellis was a pitching coach. He also threw relief. He was 44, working for his old friend, Pelicans manager Bobby Tolan. It was 1989. Ellis was facing the Orlando Juice, bottom of the ninth inning, looking for a save, and, for the first time since his professional career began in 1964, pitching completely sober.

"It was like an entirely new world for him," said Golenbock, the sports writer whose book, "The Forever Boys," chronicles the Pelicans' season. "It took a tremendous, tremendous amount of courage for him to go out there."

On the mound, Golenbock wrote, Ellis took his time. Glared at hitters. Made them wait. He turned his back, stared at the outfield, looked around. He shuffled his feet, time and again, just like he did in the majors. He wiped his arm against his lips, too, because his mouth was dry, the same way it always got dry when he was high. Too high to be scared. Too high to feel pain.

Blotted out.

Years after pitching for the Pelicans, speaking to a group of inmates at a correctional facility in Adelanto, Calif., Ellis talked about the LSD no-hitter. He talked about his fear of failure, and success, and how, when he was loaded, he wasn't afraid of either one. He talked about his father. About being mad at God.

"Something happened when I was a little boy," he said. "My father was taken from me. I blotted it out.

"To keep him alive."

Back on the mound in Florida, Ellis retired two batters. He walked two more. On his final pitch, he threw a slider for a strikeout. He saw the hitter. He saw the catcher. The baseball felt like a baseball. He knew exactly what happened to yesterday.

Stubborn, But in Love

Ellis met Hjordis in 1985. Loved her. Trusted her. Butted heads with her, early and often, because both of them were stubborn. Still, he shared as much as he could. But not the no-hitter. Ellis didn't talk about the game for years. The first time Ellis told her about his no-no, the long-retired pitcher did something she almost never saw him do. Not when Hjordis' mother died. Not even when Ellis' daughter from his first marriage, Shangaleza, died in 2002 at age 31 from a heart attack brought on by complications from Type 1 diabetes and kidney dialysis.

"He cried," she said. "It was pretty painful for him. I think it was something he kinda sorta wished would go away. But he came around to realizing that it wouldn't."

Ellis was right. It didn't. But slowly, man and myth began to diverge. Ellis' lifelong emotional drawbridge had been lowering, denial giving way to self-awareness. After his first sober game with the Pelicans, he went straight to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. "I'm afraid," he told attendees. During his Shrine of the Eternals induction speech in 1999, Ellis dropped his head. His voice cracked. "Life is not a bundle of joy," he said. "Especially if you care about people. You can get hurt because a lot of people take that for a weakness."

In 2000, Ellis moved to Apple Valley, Calif. He still counseled prisoners. He also lived on a golf course, rode around in a cart with his buddies, liked nothing more than to holler at his wife over the back fence of his house. "Jordie! Bring me a sandwich!" He pulled weeds, flooded the sidewalk with his sprinkler, rearranged the rocks in his front yard six times a day. At a nearby lake, he went fishing with his grandson. He watched cooking shows, made a mean peach cobbler. One Thanksgiving, he arranged the hard-boiled eggs on his signature potato salad to read "D-O-C-K," just like the vanity plate on his old pimpmobile. The salad was a runny mess, a family joke; the man could not have been prouder.

Ellis had dogs. Lapdogs. Two of them. Mercedes and Renardo. He walked them every day, gleefully racking up neighborhood grievance fines because the dogs barked at everyone, golfers and landscapers and delivery guys. The little yappers were loud. Like their owner. Trey couldn't believe it. "When we were kids, we used to always try to get a dog," he said. "We got one once. Kept it for maybe a week. When my dad would be walking down the hallway, the dog wouldn't move. So pretty much, my dad would drop-kick it and say, 'Get the f--- out of the way! This is my house!' He just hated dogs. Then all of the sudden he moves, and one dog turns into two. And I was like, 'Damn, what the hell happened?'"

"Dock was happy," Hjordis said.

The call came as a shock. Thanksgiving 2007. Hjordis already was worried. She had been out, visiting relatives. So had Dock. The two were supposed to meet up. Only Dock was missing, not answering calls.

In the early evening, Hjordis' phone rang, a call from Dock's sister's house: "Dock is ill. We might have to take him to the hospital."

"What do you mean?"

"He's incoherent. Seeing things. He passed out. We couldn't wake him."

The next day, Ellis was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, a generally irreversible disease that can cause a host of health problems -- including brain dysfunction -- and often results in organ failure and death. The illness, Hjordis said, hit her husband "like a Mack truck." Early on, she still went to work counseling substance abusers, trying to earn enough money to cover mounting medical bills and a pharmacy's worth of prescriptions. Most afternoons, however, she found herself racing home, each and every time her husband dropped the phone. Ellis needed round-the-clock supervision. Rambo and Jones kept a weekend vigil, driving up from Los Angeles. Mostly, they saw their friend sleep. And wither, dropping from 235 pounds to 150.

Ellis slipped in and out of ambulances, hospitals and consciousness -- one minute aware, happily chatting, the next minute unsure of who you were or why you were sitting in his living room. "They would release him from the hospital, and we would get home at 4," Jasmine recalled. "By 4:30, Dock would be in the kitchen, pouring out every seasoning he had on the counter. Then we would call 911 again."

In May 2008, Ellis was placed on a liver transplant list. His age and rapidly declining health made him an unlikely recipient. He was dying. Like his father.

Back came the old emotional walls. When the wife of former major league player and friend Willie Crawford visited him in the hospital, Ellis blew up. When Stargell's widow, Margaret, wanted to fly out for a visit, he said no. Margaret was hurt. The cold shoulder took her by surprise. Years earlier, Ellis had been like a brother during Stargell's extended illness, more than once traveling cross-country on short notice to offer emotional support. But now? "[Dock] was trying to protect [Margaret]," Hjordis said. "He knew what she had already gone through."

At one point, Ellis sneaked into his garage. Went through his papers and personal effects. Meticulously removed every photograph of himself with his wife, sisters and mother. Even now, Hjordis can't figure out how her husband pulled it off. But she thinks she knows why. "We all came to the determination that he thought he was protecting us," she said. "An out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing."

Out of sight. Out of mind. A final attempt at blotting out. Except … from his hospital bed, Ellis asked Hjordis for a favor: Could he come home? For just one day? To see his mother? Naomi Ellis had dementia. She lived in a nursing home. The morning of their visit, Hjordis got her husband dressed. Drove him to the facility. He was weak. Could hardly lift his head. Until he saw his mother, coming around a corner.

Ellis stood up. His eyes got wide. He looked like a child, lost in a department store, reunited with his parents at long last. "My mommy," he said. "I got to see my mommy!"

Ellis began to sob. "Now," he said, "everything is going to be OK."

The final weeks, Hjordis said, were horrific. Ellis went on 24-hour dialysis. He ate and breathed through tubes. He suffered two heart attacks and a stroke. He lost his ability to walk. His greatest joy was a medicinal inhaler. He went into a coma. Came out. Went back in. Ultimately, his family made a wrenching decision. Ellis was taken off life support.

Jones, Ellis' lifelong friend from childhood, doesn't remember that. Doesn't much want to. He remembers Election Day, driving Ellis to a polling place, watching returns on television, the joy on his sick friend's face when Barack Obama was elected. Trey remembers bedside conversations, his father telling stories, a sense of togetherness. Of feeling loved.

Shandy, the recovering addict, has been sober for 9½ years. He has a good job. He lives by the ocean. A framed photograph of Ellis hangs on a wall just outside his bedroom. Shandy looks at the picture every day. "I can still hear his voice," he said. "When you were talking to Dock, you didn't feel like you were being diagnosed or studied. You felt like you were having a conversation. It was real. Dock was real on every level."

Hjordis remembers her husband on the phone, talking to Tolan, giddy because his old senior league manager wanted to know his ring size. The Pelicans were sending out championship rings, almost two decades late. Ellis had lost his World Series and AL pennant rings, one in the bathroom of an Arizona highway rest stop. He never bothered to replace them. This was different. This too was real. "When the ring got to the hospital, Dock was so frail that he couldn't put it on his finger," Hjordis said. "It would just fall on the floor. But he was so excited."

Near the end, Ellis came out of a coma. Suddenly alert, he asked his family and friends to hold hands. To pray. Everyone was shocked. Not because Ellis was conscious but because he never prayed. "He was telling us, in his own way, to love life," Hjordis said. "To love one another. Don't waste the time you have left here on Earth bent up and angry about things you can't change."

Hjordis gets choked up. She misses her best friend. Lord, does she miss him. "One good thing came out of this," she said. In those final months, she saw her husband live fully, unguarded, as the person he always wanted to be. No longer afraid. No longer pushing the world away. A man, not a myth. "It probably sounds crazy or weird or stupid," she said, "but Dock's illness allowed the real Dock to be exposed before he left this Earth."