The events leading up to my lesson started during the Summer/Fall of 1998.
Mark McGwire.
I've pulled for the Cubs ever since my childhood, but that summer, "Big Mac" won me over, albeit competing with Cubs slugger, Sammy Sosa for the single season home run record.
I remember the early rumblings about McGwire and steroid use, but I wrote them off as people just trying to create a story. I had read about his use of androstenedione, but since it wasn't banned by MLB at the time, I didn't care. Someone had likened "andro" to creatine to me, and so I didn't dwell on it.
I believed in Mark McGwire. He was the next Cal Ripken Jr. He was one of the good guys. He helped save baseball. Screw Jose Canseco and his stupid book. No educated person would take anything he had to say seriously...right? He was just a washed up, broke, former player trying to make a buck by publishing a sensational book...right?
I banged the drum for Mark McGwire for years, well after most people had come to believe that it obvious that he had been "doping," I was reminding whoever would listen that without a confirmed failed drug test, you have to extend the benefit of the doubt.
Then, on March 17, 2005, I learned my lesson. I was actually excited leading up to that day. Congress had called a hearing in which current and former players would be asked, under oath, about steroid use in professional baseball. McGwire would finally shut everyone up who had been talking trash about him.
But he didn't.
He didn't want to "talk about the past." I put down the drumstick. By saying nothing, he said everything. I sat in a hotel room that day, watching that subcommittee hearing feeling numb, like someone had punched me in the gut and knocked the air out of me.
I didn't give a crap what anyone else said at that hearing. To me, that hearing was about McGwire having a chance to silence his critics with "the truth." I learned that day, however, that the "truth" didn't exist as I imagined it.
Today, we learned, definitively, that where his critics smelled smoke on that day in 2005, and after the 1998 season, and apparently back to the early 1990s - there was indeed fire.
I wish I could say that after the level of disappointment I felt on that day in 2005, I'm not that fazed about McGwire's confession today. For most of this evening, I believed it. But as I finish writing this, remembering how badly I wanted McGwire to be what I wanted him to be, the reality is that it sucks now, just like it did then.
