Personal
In his autobiography, "On the Run: The Never Dull and Often Shocking Life of Maury Wills," Wills claims to have had a love affair with actress Doris Day as noted. Day denied this in her autobiography Doris Day: Her Own Story, and said it was probably advanced by the Dodgers organization for publicity purposes.
Wills was well known as an abuser of alcohol and cocaine until getting sober in 1989. In December 1983, Wills was arrested for cocaine possession after his former girlfriend, Judy Aldrich, had reported her car had been stolen. During a search of the car, police found a vial allegedly containing .06 of a gram of cocaine and a water pipe. The charge was dismissed three months later on the grounds of insufficient evidence.
The Dodgers paid for a drug treatment program, but Wills walked out and continued to use drugs until he began a relationship with Angela George, who encouraged him to begin a vitamin therapy program. The two later married.
In his New Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James is highly critical of Wills as a person, but still calls him one of top 20 shortstops of all time, ranking him #19.
He is the father of former major leaguer Bump Wills, who played for the Texas Rangers and Chicago Cubs during his five-year MLB career. The two had a falling out following the publication of Maury's autobiography in 1991, involving a salacious anecdote, but now occasionally speak.
In 2009, Wills was honored by the city of Washington, D.C. and Cardozo Senior High School with the naming of the former Banneker Recreation Field in his honor. The field was completely renovated and serves as Cardozo's home diamond.
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Famous quotes containing the word personal:
“Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,—what ample borrowers of eternity they are!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox!”
—D.H. (David Herbert)