(2 of 2)
So forget the speeches last Tuesday, the confetti and that awful, foot-high award that baseball made up just so Bud Selig could have a reason to be onstage. (The Commissioner's Historic Achievement Award? Did someone come up with that during the game?) Forget that apple-pie groundskeeper kid who caught the ball, for which somebody had offered $1 million, and gave it up straightaway. No, instead, look at the details. After McGwire hit the home run (see attached photo of the historic event), it turned into a Little League game. The excited new record holder forgot to touch first base until his coach pulled him back. He lifted his son and kissed him. He jumped into the stands to hug the Maris family. And if that wasn't somehow touching enough--the tribute to the veteran who never got to see his memorial--the camera went to a shot of McGwire's applauding ex-wife. If your ex were going to have a big night, would you be there? This guy has got to be all right.
It's hard to tell sometimes. He's not a guy who looks comfortable around attention; in fact he has skirted it all pretty well until now. He stays in suburban St. Louis at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, alone with Spectravision when not with friends and teammates. McGwire hasn't even done much on the endorsements front--though that cap he keeps wearing at press conferences for the Abbey, a fledgling restaurant in Seal Beach, Calif., has got to be worth some kind of meal--and his few public appearances have been less than stellar: his taped spot at last week's MTV Music Video Awards included the sentence, "Give it up for the Backstreet Boys."
But it doesn't matter, because he did what we wanted. The truth is, we originally got into this thing because it's cool to watch numbers go up. That's why the Dow Jones is such a star and why it's kind of fascinating to watch the votes come in on C-SPAN, even though you don't know what people are voting on. (Come on, Dems, you lazy bums! Get to your seats and vote!) But once this chase became so big, we had to look for a deeper explanation, something greater than the obvious self-satisfaction of being able to say we witnessed history.
We have to look deep inside McGwire for the real drama. Not that he slumped after his divorce and went to therapy and cried at the press conference where he donated $1 million of his yearly salary to sexually abused children. That's great for flashback stuff, but that's not what made last Tuesday so special. And the horse race with Sammy Sosa was a kind of interesting sidenote. But what makes this gripping is that when the lights came up, McGwire glowed. In a country whose history has included such popular expressions as "predestination," "manifest destiny" and "how to win friends and influence people," McGwire learned the power of self-assuredness. As he put it, he was meant to do it. That's hard to disagree with. That's what made it so difficult, and such a triumph.
Hey, it's hard not to get caught up in the sentiment.
--Reported by Staci D. Kramer, with the Cardinals