The star columnist looks back at the story he — and everyone else — missed . . .
Dave Kindred |
Jan. 14, 2010 8:01 a.m.
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That was the summer of baseball fun. Every day McGwire would fly one over the Arch and Sammy Sosa would splash one into Lake Michigan. In 1995, Cal Ripken began saving baseball from itself. McGwire and Sosa finished the job in 1998 by staging the greatest home run chase in history, better even than Maris and Mantle in 1961.
And now we know McGwire did it while using steroids. The big weepy lug has admitted it. During that summer of fun, every sportswriter in America had reason to suspect as much. In August that year, Associated Press sportswriter Steve Wilstein spotted a pill bottle in McGwire’s locker. The label identified the contents as androstenedione – a steroid precursor banned as a performance-enhancer in almost all sports around the world but not in major league baseball.
So what kind of numbskull columnist could have watched the last six weeks of the ‘98 season and ignored not only Wilstein’s reporting but the implications of andro’s presence, such as: If McGwire’s using that stuff, what else is in his body? What kind of idiot scribbler could know that McGwire used andro and yet celebrate the guy’s performance with Nobel prize hyperbole?
This kind: me.
I wrote those words in a column that went on to say the ‘98 season had been "a great national drama staged by the baseball gods and starring those happy warriors, McGwire and Sosa."
Oh freakin’ my.
It is no solace to say I had company in failure.
"Well, life went on," Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe wrote just the other day, recalling Wilstein’s reporting. "Did we in the media drop the ball? Absolutely. But the story was so darn good, you know?"
If any sportswriter suggested during that season that McGwire used steroids, I can not find a record of it. Without Wilstein’s reporting, in fact, McGwire likely would have reached 70 home runs without a hint of performance enhancement being written. A Nexis search of The Washington Post and The New York Times shows 53 mentions of "steroids" in McGwire-related stories, but none of those makes a direct connection of the man and the PEDs.
Why did sportswriters not connect the dots?
To start an explanation — as silly as it now sounds — those were simpler times.
They were days before BALCO.
Before Barry Bonds exploded into a linebacker’s body.
Before Ken Caminiti told his horror stories to Sports Illustrated.
Before the wondrous, graceful Marion Jones wept on her way to prison.
McGwire and Sosa happened long before the American sprint coach Trevor Graham got on the phone. It was June of 2003 when Graham made an anonymous call to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. He accused a number of athletes of using an undetectable steroid; he even mailed in a syringe with a sample of the new stuff, the steroid tetrahydrogestrinone. Its source turned out to be a man named Victor Conte, who had nicknamed the drug "the Clear." Conte ran the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, aka BALCO.
Meanwhile, Jose Canseco had written a book naming names of steroid users in baseball. Most readers dismissed the book as Canseco trash – until 2005 when Congress quizzed Canseco, McGwire, and Sosa. (For reasons still unclear, Bonds was not invited.) Under oath, McGwire refused to say anything more substantive than "I’m not here to talk about the past." That pitiable testimony was an implicit admission of the transgressions he only now has explicitly confessed to – yes, he used steroids during most of his professional baseball career.
Before BALCO, we were gullible, the media, the public, baseball fans everywhere. Whatever we knew about steroids, we knew in connection with football and track, not baseball. And now came this great home run chase – ". . . .the story was so darn good, you know?" We dared not blink lest we miss another astonishment. Who, then, would turn away to shout, "Are you people blind? Don’t you see STEROIDS blinking on McGwire’s forehead?"
The players’ union was so strong that it had turned away all efforts to impose drug testing; baseball’s leadership was left with only the previous commissioner Fay Vincent’s memo announcing opposition to steroids. But there was no testing and no penalty – practically an invitation for use by competitive, professional athletes looking for any edge, legal or illegal, ethical or unethical.
Lacking hard evidence and unwilling to deal in innuendo, I did not connect the dots leading from andro to steroids. So I gave McGwire a pass through my columns in ‘98. But by 2005, when he testified on Capitol Hill and transformed himself from savior to pariah, the steroids story had reached deeply into baseball.
Let’s look now at the Sporting News of August 13, 2006. Let’s go to that back page again. The columnist’s lede: "So, does Mark McGwire get into the Hall of Fame next year?"
Odds are, I wrote, he wouldn’t be elected. But the column wasn’t so much about that as about what I wish he had said to Congress.
"Yes, sir," he should have said, " I used steroids. Didn’t everybody?"
And then: "Nobody told us not to, and there was no rule against it. Now let me tell you some stories. . . . The androstenedione in my locker? The Cardinals knew about it. They could have asked me about it. No one did. No one reported it to the commissioner’s office. . . The owners and players at that time had not created a drug policy banning steroids. The absence of such a policy seemed to most players to be a tacit OK to do whatever we wanted to do. . . .This is not an excuse. I believe the use of steroids is wrong in athletics. Human growth hormone, for which there is no test now and no test coming anytime soon, is also wrong. Those drugs are invaluable in medicine, but in athletics they’re an insidious form of cheating. But let me also say, sir, that I’m a born and taught competitor in the meritocracy known as professional sports. When my competitors are using drugs that our sport has no rules against, I’m going to use those drugs too."
Now, of course, there are rules. Still, the temptations are such – millions of dollars! fame! celebrity! – that hundreds of players have continued to test positive for PEDs. Great players use them, mediocre players, hitters, pitchers, A-Rod, Andy Pettite. Big Papi, crazy Manny, probably mascots in silly suits.
That’s why the numbskull who ignored the andro in ’98 now votes for McGwire for the Hall of Fame. What McGwire did through the ’90s, no one else did. And they were all playing by the same rules.
Dave Kindred’s next book will be "Morning Miracle," an inside-the-newsroom account of two years in the life of The Washington Post. Now a contributing writer at Golf Digest, Kindred is a Red Smith Award winner and member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. He can be reached at inkstained1@aol.com. He can be followed at Twitter.com/DaveKindred and facebook.com/people/Dave-Kindred/509353295
Yes, and Leonard Shapiro of the Washington Post said he and other golf writers missed the Tiger Woods story. Boxing writers missed the Mike Tyson story, and nice guy Gilbert Arenas got a pass for his lockerroom antics. So what is going on. Are you all asleep except when there is a ball in action? I think this series of scandals shows the failings of the sport-writing profession. I blame this on an attitude that it is the game that is important, not these other issues. You have lost your relevance.
In the McGwire case, it was less a “miss” than an “ignore” for the poor reasons I cited. No one “missed” the Tiger story; it was hidden from all except the pay-for-information people of the Nat’l Enquirer. Tyson’s story was told in infinite detail from his teenage years. I don’t believe Arenas was given a pass on the gun story. So, I guess, Edward, you and I are in full disagreement.
Actually, Edward is right. Using Dave Kindred’s “logic,” all information is hidden until it’s not. Basically sportswriters are limited to waiting for someone to spill their guts, and then they cover it. Until then, there’s lots of supposition and speech codes. The coverage has devolved into analyzing apologies and creating poorly written, non-factual rants. The steroid issue was there. Sportswriters missed it, and they’ve spent the last decade throwing facts and ethics out the window to try to make up for their mistakes.
Edward is the hammer hitting the nail on the head. Dave Kindred is the brightly colored top spinning quickly around the issue but never touching it. There’s really very little substance to this column because he and other sportswriters refuse to accept the truth, and they refuse to change.
If you missed asking the question back in 1998…did it never occur to you to ask the question again? The only person I can ever remember asking a steroid question “back then” was Rick Reilly. I remember watching a vid of this question and Sosa trying to run away.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/inside_game/magazine/life_of_reilly/news/2002/07/02/life_of_reilly/
Maybe writing about a sport doesn’t (or didn’t) include being a crusading journalist or breaking the locker room barrier; why beat yourself up, or even address, what you didn’t do? If you knew about something that could be corroborated…write about it. I think a lot of sports writers in the late 90′s “got along to get along” with their subjects.
Just my 2 cents.
lazzz
What a cop-out. Any reporter worth his/her salt would have made the leap, or at least tried to make the leap from Andro to ILLEGAL drugs like steroids. You keep overlooking that. Baseball had no policy, but the law does…steroids are ILLEGAL. I guess it’s a lot easier to be rubbing elbows with sports celebs and go to every sporting event for free and write about sports for a living than to actually do sports journalism. And the sad thing is the lack of credible coverage of the wrong-doers serves to taint that do it right (players and the journalists that cover them) by allowing the fans to look and think the worst. Pujols is one of those players who, by all accounts, is clean. But how can you expect fans to believe him or the media that cover him?
Way to go, Dave!
Sportswriters are still the most relevant chroniclers of our time.
edward doesn’t know what he is talking about.
The media’s blind eye extends back much further than 1998. Two examples that are being conveniently forgotten in the this week of weak mea culpas by sportswriters:
1) Ten years before columnists were genuflecting at the feet of McGwire and Sosa, fans at Fenway Park were chanting “Ste-roids! Ste-Roids!” at Jose Canseco during a 1988 playoff game. A game that McGwire also participated in as Canseco’s teammate. Canseco had to comment on it after the game to the national media.
2) At the same time in the 80s, Pete Rose was working out at gyms run by steroid dealers and even living with one of them (Tommy Gioiosa). Weightlifting was becoming a huge part of the baseball training regimen for the first time, and with it, links to a steroid subculture in the lifting and bodybuilding community that had been around for decades (See Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Pumping Iron.”)
So it’s not like the dots weren’t there to be connected with even a modicum of effort at journalism LONG before McGwire was asked about the andro in his locker, let alone before Ken Caminiti went public.
No rule against it?
“the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990 listed anabolic steroids as Schedule III controlled substances in the U.S.” – Wikipedia
What he did was illegal at the time. How’s that for a rule?
And, for a different perspective on this:
http://keitholbermann.mlblogs.com/archives/2010/01/i_used_steroids_during_my_play.html
Edward is rignt to an extent but it’s more that: the people who cover sports today are so out of touch, so disconnected from the reality of life and the people who play the games they cover. In the end, McGwire got over because he was seen as the Great White Hope of the game. He was too good to be dirty for the army of aging middle-aged white men who cover the game and are nostalgic for the game that was played in their childhood. Nobel Peace Prize? Give us a break. You are irrelevant and there is no turning back.
Edward is rignt to an extent but it’s more that: the people who cover sports today are so out of touch, so disconnected from the reality of life and the people they cover. In the end, McGwire got over because he was seen as the Great White Hope of the game. He was too good to be dirty for the army of aging middle-aged white men who cover the game and are nostalgic for the game that was played when they were children. Nobel Peace Prize? Give us a break. You are irrelevant and there is no turning back. Look around any major leage baseball pressbox. Look at the faces, the names, the bylines.
Michael: I’ve never quite understood the “illegal” aspects of steroids. Yes, I know the law. But every time I wrote anything about steroids, the Google monster placed advertisements for steroids alongside my columns. You could mail-order ‘em.
Olbermann, by the way, is not the only reporter who ever failed to get verification of steroid use by an athlete and thus could not report it.
The owners and commissioner needed homeruns to revive baseball. The owners and commissioner closed their eyes and wished they were back in 1961. I hope all of these baseball writers and the veteran’s committee remember that baseball got out of control due to a lack of oversight of the commissioner and the owners. I hope that no owners or commissioners from the “Steroid Era” are ever elected to the Hall of Fame. Bumbling Bud Selig and greedy owners have been the worst thing ever for baseball.
The problem is that sports writers are fans. Hire some business reporter geeks to cover sports, and coverage will become much tougher.
Oh, you mean those busines reporters who did such a good job keeping us informed about banks, mortgage companies, and Wall Street’s predators the last couple years?
As I always say before wading into this morass again, this is somebody else’s drug frenzy, not mine, but I don’t see any real journalistic mal-, or non-feasance in not accusing someone of a crime — possession of a controlled substance — without conclusive evidence that they, you know, possessed it. Or, at the same time, reporting that someone was doing something that was perfectly within the rules of the game at the time. If something is not forbidden, it is allowed. In 1998, Andro was not forbidden in baseball, so therefore, it was allowed.
How, exactly, would the drug warriors have written the column back in 1998? “Mark McGwire, whose possession of a legal substance not banned by his sport and conspicuous body-type and obvious professional improvement leads one to the conclusion that he is breaking federal law, hit two home runs last night…”
Don’t think so.
Anyone who has been following Dave Kindred’s thoughts on this subject knows he has been all over the map.
From the end of 2007:
“Anyway, I’d prefer less self-flaggelation. It seems to me that the San Francisco Chronicle’s reporting on BALCO was the steroid story’s equivalent of the Washington Post’s reporting on a burglary at the Watergate apartment complex. Both grew from police stories, both led to federal investigations, both reached congress, both changed the cultures in which the crimes grew. That’s work to be proud of.”
He also brought up David Eckstein’s name in relation to the Mitchell report before it was released. Eckstein’s name was not in the report.
I’d encourage people to do their homework a little better in the future, especially when statements like this are made: “(H)undreds of players have continued to test positive for PEDs. Great players use them …”
I’m sure that Mr. Kindred, of course, meant to make a more factual statement, such as “Dozens of career minor-leaguers have received 50-game suspensions in connection with PED use.” But that’s too boring, I guess. It’s far more flashy to paint everyone with the same brush, just as Mr. Kindred and others have been doing for more than a decade.
Over a hundred players in the bigs — not hundreds, yes — but Canseco, right more often than wrong, has estimated 50-80 percent of all players.
I have not been “all over the map” on the subject of steroid reporting. I have always said newspapers were behind the story — with an explanation that Wenalway omits. BTW, he quotes me not from anything I wrote for publication but from a posting to a message board, Sportsjournalists.com. Here’s my thinking that he omitted: “I ask again, if a $20-million, 20-month, MLB-blessed, FBI-supported, federal prosectuor-assisted, senatorial level-staffed investigation can be given access to executives, managers, players, doctors, and journalists and yet turn up nothing but the public record and the uncorroborated accusations of two — two! — lowlifes seeking reduced sentences, how in hell was any newspaper’s sports department supposed to report on steroid use?”
As for Eckstein, I never used his name, not even on the message board, except in second reference to a note on the list of users from the poster “Buck Weaver.” His note went, “If David Eckstein is on the list, Jesus will weep.” And I replied, “I hear there are tears at the corners of his eyes.”
Wenalway, I gave you a my-bad on the “hundreds.” Published reports had the A-Rod-and-others list at 104 names.
Dave –
Please do not engage this pest more than is necessary.
“What McGwire did through the ’90s, no one else did. And they were all playing by the same rules.”
Really? Everyone was using steroids? Do you think there was any top performer in baseball during the Steroid Era who was _not_ using steroids?
That would be pretty grim.
It only goes to show where there’s will there’s a way. Keep on trying. – Last week I stated that this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister and now wish to withdraw that statement. – Mark Twain 1835 – 1910