Keith Olbermann
Say it ain't so, Big Mac
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
The story is not just apocryphal — it contains enough syrup to cover all of tomorrow morning's pancakes east of the Rockies.
Shoeless Joe Jackson is coming down the courthouse steps during the investigation into the crooked 1919 World Series. And in a fictional moment straight from the pages of a morality play, a boy of about ten rushes up to the toppled Chicago White Sox slugger and pleads: "Say it ain't so, Joe! Say it ain't so!."
Jackson, eyes cast to the ground, his future oblivion stretching out before him like the gates of hell, mutters: "I'm afraid it is, son."
In the new updated Mark McGwire version, it's the steps of Capitol Hill which the mighty slugger descends. The little kid asks the same plaintive, glimmer-of-hope question. And McGwire puts on his half-moon glasses and reads a prepared statement: "On the advice of counsel, son: No Comment."
Most of those covering the steroids hearings before the House Government Reform Committee appear to have missed the obvious headline. The stories you'll read will either focus on denunciations of Jose Canseco, or McGwire's unwillingness to 'name names.' A few will mention the holes beginning to show up in baseball's new so-called 'get tough' steroid testing program. Far fewer will note that Mark McGwire just attached an indelible question mark to himself, as surely as if he'd had it tattooed on his forehead.
Rafael Palmeiro? He vigorously denied ever using steroids.
Sammy Sosa? He denied ever using steroids — in two languages.
Mark McGwire? He took a called third strike over the outside corner, and walked back silently to history's dugout, never to return.
If it hadn't been so tragic, so much like watching as cops fail to talk the guy out of jumping, McGwire's testimony would've been reminiscent of the old "Saturday Night Live" sketch about the Three Mile Island Nuclear accident. After President Jimmy Carter is exposed to a massive radiation dose, plant 'spokesman' Richard Benjamin is asked "is it true that the president is 100 feet tall?" and replies with a mixture of mirth and disdain: "No! Absolutely not!" A second reporter then asks: "Is the president 90 feet tall?" and Benjamin replies "No comment."
It's not just that six-and-a-half years after a steroid precursor was spotted, unhidden, in his locker, McGwire tearfully told the committee, the public, and the ear of baseball history, that he would neither confirm nor deny that he ever abused steroids. More importantly, he not only insisted his lawyers wouldn't let him answer, but he also went on to insult anybody who did — even though three of them were sitting at the same table he was, and a fourth was being piped in over a big-screen television.
"If a player answers, 'No,' he simply will not be believed," McGwire said, doubtless to the surprise of Sosa and Palmeiro, who had just said no, and Curt Schilling and Frank Thomas, who immediately thereafter would. "If he answers, 'Yes,' he risks public scorn and endless government investigations," which must've made the absent Jason Giambi feel like pretty much of a sap, and, oddly, which must also have made Jose Canseco feel surprisingly validated.
Tears or no tears, McGwire is a pretty weak excuse for a martyr. When even the Committee changed its mind and agreed Giambi shouldn't testify because of his previous testimony in an
While to some degree every player who testified used the platform to advance his own ends, underscore his own virtues, or pitch his own worthy causes (or book), only McGwire also chose to portray himself as a victim of the committee's — and the public's — pursuit of the truth.
In his opening statement, he was the one who ratcheted it up to the level of the Communist Witch-hunts of the '40s and '50s by insisting he would not "participate in naming names and implicating my friends and teammates," at least in part because "My lawyers advise me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family, or myself." At the same time McGwire was acknowledging "There has been a problem of steroid use in baseball."
In other words, Mark McGwire testified steroids had been abused in the game. But he wouldn't say by who. And apparently it's far too dangerous to say "I didn't." And though he was clearly emotionally distraught over the testimony that preceded his — about the deaths of two high school steroid users — even his long-standing and sincerely charitable commitment to helping abused kids, was not compelling enough to get him to say something personal,
As to what McGwire described as the "public scorn" part of saying "Yes"?
Indeed, that would pose a problem, especially if you broke the then 37-year-old record for most homers in a season with andro in your system. Especially if your health began to deteriorate in seemingly direct proportion to the rate at which your muscle mass grew. Especially if you went from 70 homers at age 34, to retired just after your 37th birthday. Especially if you were saying all this the very same day that the man who in turn broke your record, Barry Bonds, underwent a second operation on a knee, with his club saying it had no "timetable" for his return (by the way — what would happen if Bonds never returned?).
There would be a lot of public scorn if you confessed. And the sea of history would close up over you and the year you had, and they might not vote you into the Hall of Fame, and your name would become synonymous with deception.
So, of the two remaining options, obviously the preferred one would be to refuse to say anything. That way, the sea of doubt would close up over you and the year you had, and they might not vote you into the Hall of Fame, and your name would become synonymous with evasion.
Apparently that stonewall choice was much better than saying "hell no, I didn't use them." Obviously, that's because...
Well, you know what? Sorry, I thought I had something to write here to explain why McGwire denying steroid use was somehow different and more dangerous than Sosa or Palmeiro or Thomas or Schilling doing so.
But that something seems suddenly to have escaped me.
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03/14/05:Baseball's Watergate
The writer hosts MSNBC's “Countdown with Keith
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