I’m glad Mark McGwire nearly broke down before the congressional committee investigating baseball’s steroid problem. Children all over the country were bawling their eyes out.
Last Thursday, McGwire gave his best performance since the summer of 1998, when he shattered Roger Maris’ single-season homerun record. Dodging and weaving, he did everything short of taking the fifth. Consider this exchange:
Rep. William Clay (D-MO): “Can we say you played with honesty and integrity?”
McGwire: “Like I said. I’m not going to talk about the past.”
Given the opportunity to flat out deny claims that he used steroids, McGwire repeated his mantra: “I’m not here to discuss the past.”
Questioned about whether he considered steroid use to be cheating, he replied, “That’s not for me to determine.”
Asked if he was asserting his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, Big Mac shook his head no, but viewers had to feel that he was silently saying “yes.”
I can remember watching the ’89 World Series, in which the Oakland A’s – anchored by McGwire and bash brother Jose Canseco, along with Dave Stewart and Ricky Henderson – faced off against the San Fransisco Giants. An avid Kansas City Royals fan, I always rooted for the American League, and my seven-year-old self was ecstatic when the A’s knocked off Will Clark and the Giants in four games.
It’s a sad day when the best thing you can write about a childhood hero is that he had the decency not to lie to Congress.
Noticeably absent from the hearings was Barry Bonds, who now holds the single-season home run record that McGwire briefly owned and who has told a federal grand jury that he took designer steroids.
Baseball’s reigning home run king claimed that he thought his trainer was giving him flaxseed oil and a cream for his arthritis.
And we’re supposed to believe that a man who can recite every ingredient in the things he eats didn’t notice a little something extra in his Tiger Balm? Or didn’t want it there?
Congress tried on Thursday to make baseball’s steroid shame into a parable. Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) responded to cGwire’s evasiveness with, “If the Enron people came in and said, `I don’t want to talk about the past,’ you think we’d let them say that?”
Souder’s an idiot. Enron ruined lives. Baseball, for everything it’s worth, is a game. And as McGwire and others fall from grace, the tragedy is personal, not symbolic.
It’s a stubborn reminder that those who achieve great things are not always the people we thought they were. McGwire was not loved for his records – after all, few people like Bonds very much as a person – but for his decency.
He cried while talking about abused children and asking people to give money to help. He tirelessly called for Roger Maris’ election into the hall of fame. He quit taking the muscle-builder Androstenedione because he feared kids would follow suit.
So to see him unable to deny cheating is like learning that Cal Ripken had a stunt double play when he was hurt.
Great baseball players are almost mythical, and truly good people who put on a baseball uniform are even more so.
In 1972, Pittsburgh Pirates hall of famer Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash a few months after his 3,000th hit. He was taking medical supplies to victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. In addition to countless schools and youth centers, the bridge that connects Pittsburgh’s north side and downtown bears his name.
In Missouri, politicians are calling for the Mark McGwire Highway, a stretch of I-70 near St. Louis, to be renamed.
John Kraemer is a first-year law student. He can be reached at kraemerthehoya.com. One Humble Opinion appears every other Tuesday.