Mark McGwire, whose inflated statistics and refusal to address his past came to symbolize a synthetic era in baseball history, acknowledged on Monday that he used steroids through the 1990s.
McGwire has been out of baseball since retiring after the 2001 season, making few public appearances besides his infamous performance before Congress in 2005, when he dodged questions about steroid use. He starts next month as the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, and said he needed to make the admission to move forward.
“It’s something I’m certainly not proud of,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “I’m certainly sorry for having done it. Someday, somehow, somewhere I knew I’d probably have to talk about this. I guess the steppingstone was being offered the hitting-coach job with the Cardinals. At that time, I said, ”˜I need to come clean about this.’ ”
And in other news, the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.
I’m shocked, SHOCKED, to find there’s gambling going on in here…
“It’s something I’m certainly not proud of,†he said in an interview with The New York Times. “I’m certainly sorry for having done it…. So I’m returning all my earnings for that period…. er no, I’m entering an Episcopal seminary next fall. With Andre Agassi.’
It’s a fascinating story. I just did a long interview with a writer for the Terre Haute Tribune-Star
http://www.tribstar.com/
on McGuire and the whole subject of honor, truth-telling, sports, integrity, and modern culture. The piece will run in Sunday’s paper.
What particularly interested me in McGuire’s comments was the language he used: not words like lying, cheating, and stealing, which have to do with right and wrong, but rather words of emotional satisfaction: “it was not enjoyable….”
Maybe that’s partly because this is the language people use these days. But maybe too people use this language because the culture emphasizes personal feelings over objective standards of right and wrong.
And in any case at some point the words we use influence the thoughts we have and the principles we embrace.
What McGuire should have said was that he was wrong–just flat-out wrong–not to come clean when he testified before Congress in 2005. There’s more than a whiff here of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
Reminds me of a student who talked about the purpose of going to church: “to get emotional satisfaction.” Me: Well, what if a man is cheating on his wife. Should he just receive from his church emotional satisfaction? Shouldn’t he be challenged to do the right thing? She could start to see that, but it was difficult. Our culture is saturated in the notion that to invoke principles of right and wrong is to be “judgmental.” C. S. Lewis said, “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”