Curtis defines himself by his religion—he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t swear, and he actively reproved teammates who did. It’s that same fervor that comes up again and again in his court testimony and his interview with Hanlon, Curtis waving away the allegations against him in biblical language: When one student became upset when he penetrated her vagina with his finger, he told her they were both being “tested.” By way of making his victims feel complicit in their abuse, he would tell them the real enemy was “temptation.” He believes the girls will recant their stories, and he is prepared to offer them his “forgiveness.”
Chad Curtis was a hardnosed ballplayer good enough to play 10 seasons in the majors—and divisive enough to bounce through six different teams during that time frame. It was always his belief that he was the sole arbiter of morality that made him so unlikable in the clubhouse. One such incident was triggered by, of all things, Sisqo’s “Thong Song,” and Curtis’s objection to the lyrics.
Until one day in April, when Royce Clayton, the team’s African-American shortstop, was playing the song, and Curtis walked over to the stereo and turned it off. Clayton turned it back on; Curtis turned it back off. The two got in each others’ faces and nearly came to blows.
“This shit happens 20 times a year in a major league clubhouse,” Clayton told me recently. The difference this time, he said, was that reporters saw the confrontation and took an interest — and Curtis took an interest in explaining his side.
“He decided to keep talking about it,” Clayton said. “He decided to go to the media and self-promote about how good a Christian he is. And the media bought into it, and I knew why: It was because we’re in the Bible Belt, and here was a black dude he could go after, saying, ‘He was listening to profanity in front of kids.'”
The incident was one of many during a career in which Curtis was known more for his aggressive proselytizing and capacity for moral reprobation than anything he did on the field. In Texas, his teammates complained that he’d turn off Jerry Springer when they watched it in the clubhouse before games: “We’d be like, ‘Whoa, what are you doing?’ And he’d be like, ‘This isn’t good for you to watch,'” former teammate Frank Catalanotto said.
In New York, Curtis would throw away the porn some players kept stashed in the bathroom. When management suggested that Curtis keep an eye on second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who they feared was partying too hard, Curtis took the assignment to its mall-cop extreme, yelling and banging on Knoblauch’s hotel room door to make sure he was there. He clashed with Derek Jeter, chastising him in front of reporters for fraternizing with then-friend Alex Rodriguez during a bench-clearing brawl between the Yankees and Mariners, and offending him by persistently soliciting him to attend chapel after Jeter had already turned him down.