BOSMA’S BREAKDOWN
by Tony Bosma
Eleven years ago, I was a 13-year-old kid who loved nothing more than baseball in the summer. I grew up loving the sport, even though my Cleveland Indians had broken my heart twice and sent me to bed crying in 1995 (the first, and so far last, time I ever cried over sports).
But, that summer was different than any other I had experienced. In fact, I never thought the game of baseball could get better, or that I could be more glued to a television every time baseball was on.
In 1998, I did a lot of things. I was in my last year of middle school awaiting to join the big leagues (high school). Like every other overly-hormonal teenager, I was checking out girls and figured God put girls on this earth simply to drive young men crazy (I had no idea how true that was, or the lasting power it had). I was starting on my schools football and basketball teams, and playing third base for a traveling All-Star team. I was watching so much ESPN and Baseball Tonight that I’m surprised I have any brain cells left.
Eleven years later, when I think about 1998, none of those experiences are the first thing I think about.
My mind always goes immediately to my obsession with following Mark McGwire’s race toward the all-time home run record held by Roger Maris.
To me, McGwire was Hercules (ironic). He was more important than the President of the United States. He was a man amongst men, a god amongst disciples. If anyone was watching TV when a Cardinals game was on, there was sure to be a fight if the remote wasn’t handed over quickly.
Watching McGwire, to me, was like my father watching the USA vs. USSR in Lake Placid. Like my mother watching Larry Bird or Omar Vizquel. It was like a homeless man winning HGTV’s dream home.
I thought nothing could have been better. When McGwire was close to passing Babe Ruth’s 60-home run season, I started keeping every newspaper he was in, every magazine I could find, and spent my lunch money on posters and pennants of him to hang in my room. I even moved my favorite Dallas Cowboys and Cleveland Indians posters to a different wall to idolize McGwire on what I liked to call my Wall of Fame. Hell, I even relocated the Chicago Bulls indoor-hoop that hung on my wall for well over a decade.
At 13, I thought all of that McGwire memorabilia was going to make me rich one day.
I was crazy.
I was too young and naive to think the athletes I loved were taking performance enhancing drugs in order to achieve such great heights. Looking back now, it just seems absurd.
On Monday, McGwire admitted to taking steroids and HGH, even during the nirvana summer of 1998. No one was surprised and though he fought back tears during the entire interview with Bob Costas on MLB Network, many are questioning the words he spoke.
How couldn’t we question those words? In 2004, McGwire found himself on Capital Hill being questioned about his use of steroids and PEDs, but he did’t want to talk about the past. It took all this time for him to come clean, and I’m not sure he got the mess out of the carpet.
To be honest, I don’t want to talk about the past either and admit that I once idolized a man who cheated to break a hallowed record. I don’t want to talk about the fact that I moved my Emmitt Smith poster to another wall and put my indoor hoop in a place that I couldn’t hit a fade-away three at the buzzer and land on my bed.
Sure, I could still take that shot, but I would have crashed into my closet and probably went through the wall into my parents bed room, or through the window. Yet, as much as that would have hurt, it didn’t hurt as much as admitting that I spent a whole summer watching a fraud.
McGwire choked out the following quotes to Costas:
“You don’t know that you’ll ever have to talk about the skeleton in your closet on a national level. I did this for health purposes. There’s no way I did this for any type of strength use.”
“There’s not a pill or an injection that’s going to give me, going to give any player the hand-eye coordination to hit a baseball.”
And to the Associated Press: “I wish I had never played during the steroid era.”
I’m not going to dissect each one of those quotes, that would lead to a lot of expletives in this post. But here’s McGwire finally coming clean to the world, yet he takes the blame off himself and directs it toward the era in which he played.
Dan Marino isn’t looking at the NFL currently and telling the world he wishes he had never played in the running-game era of the league. He may be thinking it, but he’s not blaming offensive coordinators for Peyton Manning and Brett Favre breaking all his records.
Weak excuses will overshadow the power of apology and honesty. Especially when you’re telling them to a cynical society who doesn’t trust athletic accomplishments very much anymore.
If there is no pill or injection that will help you hit a baseball, then why take them if you’re claiming it wasn’t for strength? I understand the will to get healthy and back on the field, but if you didn’t want these drugs to help you hit home runs, why not try something else that ails your wounds without making your arms the size of a redwood?
I’m not going to sit here and say if there was a pill I could take that would help me be the best at my job and in life, and also make my knee stop hurting every time I walk, that I wouldn’t take it, even if it was illegal. The truth is, I would, and you probably would, too. But when I got caught, I wouldn’t hide behind lame excuses and lie to the world. There’s no valor in that. It’s not courageous, and it never works.
But in McGwire’s situation, here’s what you say:
I’m sorry to the fans, the game of baseball, my family and the Maris’ for the shame I have brought on myself and the record Roger Maris worked hard to achieve the right way. The truth is, I took steroids and PED’s because I knew it would help me get back on the field because my body was broken down and I didn’t know what else to do. I also knew these drugs would increase my strength, and as a home run hitter, I also knew they could help my career.
I knew all of this, but I did it anyway. I made a mistake that I will forever pay for, especially since it will affect the way people remember as a player and hurt my chances of entering the Baseball Hall of Fame. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about the long-term ramifications of my decisions. I wasn’t thinking about the millions of kids who looked up to me and the example I was setting. When I look back on my decisions now, I know I did the wrong thing. Looking back, I’m not saying, in that moment, I wouldn’t have done the same thing. But knowing what I do now, I’m ashamed at my actions and I’m truly sorry.
I will spend the rest of my life educating the world about the danger of steroids and PED’s and take full responsibility for what I did. It was my decision, and it was the wrong one.
I’m sorry, from the bottom of my heart, for taking these drugs and participating in the Steroid Era of Major League Baseball.
I know nothing that I say today makes up for my past discretions, but this is the first step in trying to make some right out of the wrong I’ve done. I know this apology is a long-time coming and I am sorry for living a lie and cheating.
Sincerely,
Mark McGwire
Had McGwire said that, years ago or on Monday, the world would have forgiven McGwire and the weight would have been off his back. Unfortunately, he left too much unanswered.
I’ll never forgive McGwire for ruining what I thought was the best summer of baseball in my life. But when I look back on 1998, I’ll no longer think of how much I adored McGwire. Maybe I’ll think about the first championship my baseball team ever won. Or that impressive one-handed interception I ran back for a touchdown.
Those thoughts will feel much cleaner, and at least they were real.
January 12th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
Great post. Your thoughts on this are not dissimilar to mine, which are how great I thought he was as a younger baseball fan. And how I now feel like it was all a lie.
January 12th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
great post, very true on what he should have said, why does no one take that approach?