Curt Schilling penned a letter to his 16-year-old self warning him against the dangers of tobacco. His 16-year-old self didn’t write back warning him against the dangers of believing the post office can deliver a letter 32 years in the past.
“Dear 16-year-old Curt,” Schilling writes—jeopardizing the bloody sock and the very existence of Kingdoms of Amalur through his ignorance of Ray Bradbury’s “butterfly effect”—at the Players’ Tribune. “Tomorrow at lunch, a kid is going to dare you to take a dip of Copenhagen. If you say yes, like I did, you’ll be addicted for the rest of your life. Well, the rest of your life up to the point when you are diagnosed with cancer.”
Schilling writes:
You will develop sores, you will lose your sense of taste and smell. You will develop lesions. You will lose your gums — they will rot. You will have problems with your teeth for the rest of your life. You will meet men — many good, honest men — who chewed. None of them will have their entire face. They will be missing jaws, chins, cheeks, noses and more. None will live more than a year or two after you meet them. All of them were tobacco chewers.
Schilling didn’t say if chewing tobacco also unleashes delusions, like a person carrying on a conversation with another version of himself, as Patrick Troughton and Colin Baker did in The Two Doctors, or priority mail delivering envelopes postmarked 2015 to 1983.
The three-time World Series champion developed squamous cell carcinoma after using tobacco for several decades. His mouth cancer diagnosis came in February 2014 upon visiting a doctor after a dog bite. Schilling neglected to warn his younger self about the dog.
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