Here's a little scuttlebutt that won't be in
the column. A source close to the team
told me that Vin Baker was not the heaviest
drinker on the team. Make of that what you
will; I have my own surmises. That's all he
told me.
Josh, true or not, it's something people need to be more than a tad
cautious about making too many extrapolations from. Not just the who, but
the what.
First and foremost - having a problem with drinking is not a strict
function of how much you drink, it's a function of the effect what you
drink has on you and whether you are addicted. I've known medically
diagnosed alcoholics who only had a couple drinks a day but the problem
stemmed from their NEED for those couple and the effect the ones they drank
had on them.
Second - heaviest drinker how? In a given situation or as a continual
thing. There's a difference in being the one who drank the most at a few
ge-togethers and hence was "a heavier drinker" in people's eyes who were
there and someone who is a heavy drinker in the sense of continually
drowning themselves in a bottle. I don't drink very often, but have a
reasonably hard head when I do if I want to have several drinks on a given
night out. So I might seem like a heavier drinker to someone, when another
person obeying the 1-2 glass of red wine a day for health reasons idea is
actually in truth a much heavier, and certainly more regular, drinker than I.