Bryan W. Alaspa 1The unsurprising sport story, but we share the blame
January 12th 2010 14:31
What would actually surprise me would be if there were people who actually believed that Mark McGwire, the baseball player, was NOT using steroids during his pursuit of the home run record in 1998. I mean, it was the worst-kept secret in baseball. Anyone who could look at his freakish, Popeye forearms and NOT think he was juiced to the adenoids is someone who lives deep, deep, DEEP in the country of Denial. So deep that no amount of rescue effort could possibly bring them back to reality.
I think most of us suspected something even back in 1998. I had a rather unique year that year. I spent the first half of the year living in St. Louis where everyone was rooting for McGwire to get the record. It kind of seeped into me so that even I was rooting for the guy. Then, halfway through, I moved back to Chicago. Back here in the Windy City everyone was rooting for Sammy Sosa to win the thing. Not being a Cubs fan, ever, I was still pretty happy to keep rooting for the guy on the Cardinals.
I also had the unique perspective in that I have been a nearly lifelong White Sox fan. I remembered when Sammy was on the White Sox. He was a very skinny, goofy-looking kid who looked like he had only, the day before, started shaving. He was wildly inconsistent. Sometimes he was the savior of the team but, more often than not, he was likely to strike out or screw up and be the goat of the game. Suddenly, here he was, with muscles in his earlobes and chasing one of the Holy Grails in baseball.
Baseball had just gone through a serious rough spot. There had been a strike back in the mid-90s and baseball fans, myself included, abandoned the sport in droves. I still resented that strike because the White Sox had been doing very well that season and there was talk of that year being “THE” year. I threw up my hands and said I was done with baseball.
I started to come back, like many fans, in 1998 and the run for the home run record is what got me to notice the sport again. This is why so many of us, back in the recesses of our brains, knew that something wasn’t right. These guys were TOO big and TOO muscular. They were freakish. The thing is, we didn’t care. All we cared about was the home runs, the record, and who would win. They could have been juicing themselves in the ass right at home plate and we would have cheered back then. We all chose to buy condos in Denial back then because, as fans, we wanted a reason to come back to the sport we had loved most of our lives.
So, while it is easy to point fingers at the players. While it is easy to sit back now, all these years later, and cross our arms in front of our chest, shake our heads and cluck our tongues. It is easy to rub one finger across another and say “shame, shame” to those players. However, we are as much to blame for it as they are. We fed into the machine and we accepted these obviously juiced muscleheads. We cheered for the home runs and got lost in the races. We fed the machine. Each of us became enablers.
Blame McGwire and Sosa (who has yet to admit to anything and suddenly cannot speak English) if you want to. It’s easy to do that and call them names. But you might want to wag a finger into the mirror there at your own reflection for a bit, too.
I think most of us suspected something even back in 1998. I had a rather unique year that year. I spent the first half of the year living in St. Louis where everyone was rooting for McGwire to get the record. It kind of seeped into me so that even I was rooting for the guy. Then, halfway through, I moved back to Chicago. Back here in the Windy City everyone was rooting for Sammy Sosa to win the thing. Not being a Cubs fan, ever, I was still pretty happy to keep rooting for the guy on the Cardinals.
I also had the unique perspective in that I have been a nearly lifelong White Sox fan. I remembered when Sammy was on the White Sox. He was a very skinny, goofy-looking kid who looked like he had only, the day before, started shaving. He was wildly inconsistent. Sometimes he was the savior of the team but, more often than not, he was likely to strike out or screw up and be the goat of the game. Suddenly, here he was, with muscles in his earlobes and chasing one of the Holy Grails in baseball.
Baseball had just gone through a serious rough spot. There had been a strike back in the mid-90s and baseball fans, myself included, abandoned the sport in droves. I still resented that strike because the White Sox had been doing very well that season and there was talk of that year being “THE” year. I threw up my hands and said I was done with baseball.
I started to come back, like many fans, in 1998 and the run for the home run record is what got me to notice the sport again. This is why so many of us, back in the recesses of our brains, knew that something wasn’t right. These guys were TOO big and TOO muscular. They were freakish. The thing is, we didn’t care. All we cared about was the home runs, the record, and who would win. They could have been juicing themselves in the ass right at home plate and we would have cheered back then. We all chose to buy condos in Denial back then because, as fans, we wanted a reason to come back to the sport we had loved most of our lives.
So, while it is easy to point fingers at the players. While it is easy to sit back now, all these years later, and cross our arms in front of our chest, shake our heads and cluck our tongues. It is easy to rub one finger across another and say “shame, shame” to those players. However, we are as much to blame for it as they are. We fed into the machine and we accepted these obviously juiced muscleheads. We cheered for the home runs and got lost in the races. We fed the machine. Each of us became enablers.
Blame McGwire and Sosa (who has yet to admit to anything and suddenly cannot speak English) if you want to. It’s easy to do that and call them names. But you might want to wag a finger into the mirror there at your own reflection for a bit, too.
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