TURN OUT THE LIGHTS...THE PARTY'S OVER :

Going, Going ... Gone (Tim Keown, 8/07/02, ESPN the Magazine)

The possibilities were limitless. Mark McGwire could turn his name into a commodity, his image into a series of trinkets, his life into a string of appearances. Mark McGwire, Inc. He could take the time-honored farewell tour, be carted around the country like a traveling museum piece, human memorabilia, a walking item from the Home Shopping Network. He could enter the land of the perma-grins, with a gift and an ovation in every city. Hey, what do you know -- another recliner! Laughs and handshakes all around. It's been done before.

But McGwire has always treated public ostentation the way a WorldCom exec treats a visit to a congressional hearing. So it's perfect that he would just up and disappear. No sign, no trace. Retirement by fax. He long ago lost control of his public persona, which had turned him into a human ink blot, allowing everyone to see what they want when they want. A bigger-than-life, bigger-than-the-game crown had been forcibly stuffed onto his head, and resistance was futile. Disappearance might have been his only chance. [...]

For years he built and fed his body to maximize its ability to hit home runs. It earned him 583 career homers, a strip-mined psyche and injuries unique to the heavily muscled. He overdeveloped his body, hit 70 homers and gained the national adulation that coincides with breaking a hallowed record. And then, in the end, he dealt with the humiliation of hitting .187 and striking out nearly 40% of the time. His body failed him. And the questions he always endured and never enjoyed didn't stop. In fact, with the issue of steroids in baseball gradually pushing its way to the forefront since the discovery of androstenedione in McGwire's locker in 1998, the questions he might have faced had the potential to turn from fawning to accusatory.

If creating and upholding a legend wasn't satisfying during the good times, why suffer through the bad? He would never be allowed to be a solid, productive player, a guy out there helping his team with 30 homers and 75 RBIs. The legend made that impossible. He didn't enjoy it when the attention was resoundingly positive, and he knew poor performance wouldn't divert the attention elsewhere. The questions would simply mutate, from "Can you do it again?" to "Why can't you do it anymore?"

The closest he comes to the legend now is to drive the Mark McGwire Highway, a stretch of I-70 that runs past Busch Stadium. He slips into town, visits his in-laws and plays golf with clubhouse assistant Kurt Schlogl. If it doesn't interfere with golf, he'll have lunch with La Russa, Jocketty and head athletic trainer Barry Weinberg. The only sign of him in Busch Stadium -- aside from the thousands of McGwire T-shirts and replica jerseys in the stands -- is the "62" sign just beyond the leftfield fence, signifying the landing spot of his record-breaking homer. But St. Louis hasn't forgotten him. When it was revealed that McGwire had taken one of his surreptitious trips to town during mid-June, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said, "If our editors knew that, we'd be on a stakeout." [...]

"I love the way he's managed to stay away," says Tino Martinez, McGwire's replacement at first base. "That's the way it should be done. Just go off and be who you want to be. It's an inspiration. It's a pure thing. He didn't play the game for the fanfare, and he didn't leave the game looking for it."

So few people today have sense and dignity enough to walk away from the easy money that celebrity offers if you're willing to make a spectacle of yourself--it's great to see someone who's done it and who's at peace. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 12, 2002 7:25 AM