Published: Tuesday, January 12, 2010
McGwire trying to rewrite history -- again
ST. LOUIS — So there he was again, finally out in the open for the first time after five years of self-imposed exile, talking with tears welling in the corners of his eyes and emotions bubbling up in his throat. Mark McGwire was back before the baseball public again, no longer the hulking baseball muscle man with a Bunyaneque home run swing.
This not-so-Big Mac was different: smaller, softer, anguished. He was a perfectly packaged, tearfully repentant sinner repeating his well-rehearsed talking points in a series of handpicked, cathartic media interviews where he masterfully repeated his message.
“All I've wanted to do is come clean,” he kept saying over and over again. “I've been wanting to do it for a long time.”
Choking back the tears with a sniffle to clear his throat and a stern bite of his lower lip, McGwire played the role of the sympathetic fallen hero to perfection.
“I'm asking for a second chance,” he kept saying, “and I hope that they give it to me.”
So here he was on Monday afternoon, taking his first step back into the harsh light of day, and if you wanted to feel a little sympathy for McGwire, who could blame you, because he came across in every interview as a likeable, genuinely sorrowful man. Yet once you got beyond those tears and the heartsick mood, here's what we're still left with after McGwire's long awaited first public admittance that he did in fact use steroids during his career as one of baseball's most storied home run hitters:
He's finally ready to talk about the past, but he's doing it with the misguided spin of a revisionist historian.
Nearly 12 years after that enthralling summer of 1998, when an entire baseball world suspended its own skepticism as McGwire kept bashing those majestic homers over the fence at ridiculous rates, he was at it again. He wanted us to believe him, not our lying eyes.
He admitted that he did use a wealth of performance-enhancing drugs during his major-league career, but he never did it to become a better hitter. He admitted he used exotic blends of performance-enhancing drugs that by all accounts only serious PED-addicted body builders favor, but he wanted us to believe that it was done for health purposes only. He told us that his old, beefed-up body and those baseballs that left the yard with frightening urgency and tape-measure magnificence had nothing to do with the hard-core ‘roids that he kept ingesting into his body.
It was all about hard work and a God-given gift of rare hand-eye coordination, he said with tears in his eyes.
And of course, we're supposed to believe that.
Well, feel free to follow McGwire's trail of tears toward his rather curious version of his role as the central character in the steroid era, and I guess if you do, you're probably part of the legions of incurable McGwire lovers who were shocked by Monday's revelation.
I won't hitch a ride on that fantastic voyage with you. As tortured as McGwire appeared to be as he went on his mea culpa tour, it's stunning to believe that he's still trying to convince us that everything we saw from him was all on the up and up, that his God-given gift of exceptional hand-eye coordination — not some chemical magic from the tip of a syringe — created those historic home run milestones. More practical people can't put much merit in McGwire's revisionist history.
The more he talked, the more it sounded like McGwire felt someone put a hook in his mouth and literally dragged him kicking and screaming toward the vials of ‘roids and HGH. His explanation makes him sound like a reluctant man who was a victim of circumstance.
“I wish I had never played during the steroid era,” he said.
Here's a far more accurate account: This was not a man who was hauled reluctantly into the wicked current of the steroid era. He was in fact the well-documented drum major leading the parade. McGwire, La Russa and the entire Cardinals organization kept calling it “a mistake.”
Well, it wasn't a mistake.
Mistakes are unwitting blunders. This wasn't some accidental faux pas that McGwire entered into with little or no forethought. It was done by an intelligent design. He stacked and he cycled hard-core body-building drugs. He wasn't merely dabbling with stuff to get healthy. He was doing it to get bigger, stronger, richer and more heralded in his profession.
He was a walking, talking minister of sophisticated steroid usage in baseball, and history will remember him as an authentic voice that bedazzled his many followers with his intoxicating message. They looked at his massive, muscular body and his stunning displays of power never seen before in baseball, and legions of players wanted to get the same stuff he was using. He may not have been baseball's original steroid sinner, but he was the clearly the guy who popularized it with the masses.
And while I admire him for finally having the courage to step up and talk about it, that doesn't give him unconditional absolution. You can't absolve McGwire partly because he can't seem to admit to his own culpability, but mostly because his true place in baseball history has permanently been set as the man who made steroids a necessary evil of the baseball business.
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(c) 2010, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Visit the Post-Dispatch on the World Wide Web at http://www.stltoday.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
—————
ARCHIVE PHOTOS on MCT Direct (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): mcgwire
This not-so-Big Mac was different: smaller, softer, anguished. He was a perfectly packaged, tearfully repentant sinner repeating his well-rehearsed talking points in a series of handpicked, cathartic media interviews where he masterfully repeated his message.
“All I've wanted to do is come clean,” he kept saying over and over again. “I've been wanting to do it for a long time.”
Choking back the tears with a sniffle to clear his throat and a stern bite of his lower lip, McGwire played the role of the sympathetic fallen hero to perfection.
“I'm asking for a second chance,” he kept saying, “and I hope that they give it to me.”
So here he was on Monday afternoon, taking his first step back into the harsh light of day, and if you wanted to feel a little sympathy for McGwire, who could blame you, because he came across in every interview as a likeable, genuinely sorrowful man. Yet once you got beyond those tears and the heartsick mood, here's what we're still left with after McGwire's long awaited first public admittance that he did in fact use steroids during his career as one of baseball's most storied home run hitters:
He's finally ready to talk about the past, but he's doing it with the misguided spin of a revisionist historian.
Nearly 12 years after that enthralling summer of 1998, when an entire baseball world suspended its own skepticism as McGwire kept bashing those majestic homers over the fence at ridiculous rates, he was at it again. He wanted us to believe him, not our lying eyes.
He admitted that he did use a wealth of performance-enhancing drugs during his major-league career, but he never did it to become a better hitter. He admitted he used exotic blends of performance-enhancing drugs that by all accounts only serious PED-addicted body builders favor, but he wanted us to believe that it was done for health purposes only. He told us that his old, beefed-up body and those baseballs that left the yard with frightening urgency and tape-measure magnificence had nothing to do with the hard-core ‘roids that he kept ingesting into his body.
It was all about hard work and a God-given gift of rare hand-eye coordination, he said with tears in his eyes.
And of course, we're supposed to believe that.
Well, feel free to follow McGwire's trail of tears toward his rather curious version of his role as the central character in the steroid era, and I guess if you do, you're probably part of the legions of incurable McGwire lovers who were shocked by Monday's revelation.
I won't hitch a ride on that fantastic voyage with you. As tortured as McGwire appeared to be as he went on his mea culpa tour, it's stunning to believe that he's still trying to convince us that everything we saw from him was all on the up and up, that his God-given gift of exceptional hand-eye coordination — not some chemical magic from the tip of a syringe — created those historic home run milestones. More practical people can't put much merit in McGwire's revisionist history.
The more he talked, the more it sounded like McGwire felt someone put a hook in his mouth and literally dragged him kicking and screaming toward the vials of ‘roids and HGH. His explanation makes him sound like a reluctant man who was a victim of circumstance.
“I wish I had never played during the steroid era,” he said.
Here's a far more accurate account: This was not a man who was hauled reluctantly into the wicked current of the steroid era. He was in fact the well-documented drum major leading the parade. McGwire, La Russa and the entire Cardinals organization kept calling it “a mistake.”
Well, it wasn't a mistake.
Mistakes are unwitting blunders. This wasn't some accidental faux pas that McGwire entered into with little or no forethought. It was done by an intelligent design. He stacked and he cycled hard-core body-building drugs. He wasn't merely dabbling with stuff to get healthy. He was doing it to get bigger, stronger, richer and more heralded in his profession.
He was a walking, talking minister of sophisticated steroid usage in baseball, and history will remember him as an authentic voice that bedazzled his many followers with his intoxicating message. They looked at his massive, muscular body and his stunning displays of power never seen before in baseball, and legions of players wanted to get the same stuff he was using. He may not have been baseball's original steroid sinner, but he was the clearly the guy who popularized it with the masses.
And while I admire him for finally having the courage to step up and talk about it, that doesn't give him unconditional absolution. You can't absolve McGwire partly because he can't seem to admit to his own culpability, but mostly because his true place in baseball history has permanently been set as the man who made steroids a necessary evil of the baseball business.
———
(c) 2010, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Visit the Post-Dispatch on the World Wide Web at http://www.stltoday.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
—————
ARCHIVE PHOTOS on MCT Direct (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): mcgwire
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