Next thing you’re gonna tell me …
The pope is Catholic.
Hugh Hefner is a ladies’ man.
Gilbert Arenas believes in the right to bear arms.
Tiger Woods enjoys fooling around.
Smoking can be hazardous to your health.
Politicians stretch the truth.
Kids love Sesame Street.
Don Rickles knows how to hurl an insult.
Bill Belichick isn’t media-friendly.
We live in a digital age.
We also live in an age of short memories, hypocrisy, anti-enlightenment and enough “what the hell’s going on out there” to make Vince Lombardi roll over in his grave. Take your pick.
Now an admission of guilt isn’t good enough. Mark McGwire cheated baseball, cheated the record books, cheated the integrity of the game. He made some bad choices. People are upset, and they have a right to be.
But 11 years ago, didn’t he — and Sammy Sosa — save baseball? Didn’t the sluggers help bring baseball back from the dead? Weren’t they celebrated for hitting balls farther and harder than anyone had ever hit them before? Weren’t they praised for blasting a leather sphere into the stratosphere every 6.3 at-bats and cheered for matching each other magical home run for magical home run until Big Mac pulled away to stand alone atop baseball’s Mount Everest? Wasn’t he lionized and championed as a symbol of all that is right with America?
Many of those same people who celebrated the chase are the same people who now treat McGwire and Sosa like pond scum. But unlike Sosa, McGwire has come clean.
McGwire’s remorse seems real, genuine, sincere.
Just admit it.
The one-time college player of the year who started his major league career with 49 home runs did. But two major questions remain:
1. Why did it take five years for McGwire to speak to anyone?
2. Why did he take steroids if they weren’t to enhance his performance?
These are the obvious thoughts. They don’t take much imagination. The real head-scratcher is this: Why is no one commending Mark McGwire for doing the right thing?
When he was cheating the game, he was hailed as a hero, bigger than Paul Bunyan, a legend among Hall of Famers. Now that he’s baring his soul about all the dirt he did, he’s vilified as a Hall of Shamer.
A lot of people profited off Mark McGwire. A lot of people in positions of power overlooked the bulging, Incredible Hulk suspicions and enabled the Steroid Era to happen. The PED culture existed and flourished because it was allowed to exist and flourish. Yet every baseball season over the last half-decade, the only names that keep popping up to give the game a black eye are the names that appeared on 25- and 40-man rosters.
More than just players are culpable for this mess. More than players brought scandal to the national pastime. But don’t expect anyone who didn’t wear a uniform to sit down for an interview or call a news conference to confess anything anytime soon.
Old habits die hard.
Somewhere along the line in sports history — right around the time needles began appearing in Major League Baseball locker rooms in the late 1980s — someone like Mad Men’s Don Draper sold a big shot on the idea that athletes are role models. It made perfect fiscal sense.
Ethical sense is another story. Athletes are not role models. How many more flaws must be exposed to hammer that point home?
Athletes are entertainers. Always have been. Always will be. We watch a Red Sox-Yankees game for the same reason we go to a Quentin Tarantino movie to escape from reality and see what will happen next. The only difference between being an A-list actor and superstar jock is that lying, cheating and debauchery gets a lifetime achievement award in Hollywood.
Big Mac may not have told the whole truth and nothing but the truth on Capitol Hill, but at least he told some of the truth now. That’s more than most can say.
After the last ember of outrage burns and the indignity of being skewered on Saturday Night Live subsides, Mark McGwire can return to the game he loves with a clear conscience — to teach hitting and share some life lessons.
Batter up.
