This Hero Manifests Grace and Modesty

Here’s Mark McGwire in his little castle on a California island. It’s an impossibly gorgeous December day. The big man is at ease on a couch, wearing a T-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. Behind him, a harbor channel sparkles diamond blue. Docked at the pier a few steps away is his boat; its name is Four Bases.

For Mark McGwire, there’s one question.

So, 61?

“People talk about 61 like, ‘It’s your goal, isn’t it?’ It’s never been a goal. Can it be accomplished? I’ve never talked to Ken Griffey Jr. about it. But I’m going to speak for him. If we sat down, we’d say, ‘Yeah, you know what? I think it can be done.’

“We were close to it. We had bad Julys. If we did halfway decent in July, home run-wise, we’re at 61 or over 61. Will it be done? It has to be one of those years when somebody walks away from the game and goes, ‘I did everything I could possibly do.’ ”

But that kind of season, everything working perfectly--has it ever happened?

“I guarantee you, ask any hitter, if you’d asked Ted Williams, he’d have said, ‘You know that .406? I could’ve hit .420.’ Roger Maris might’ve said, ‘Hey, I could’ve hit 65.’ That’s how baseball is. That’s what drives guys to work harder.”

Here Mark McGwire allows himself a little smile, almost a smile of mischievous anticipation. He’s morphing into Huck Finn hefting a 34 1/2-inch, 33-ounce stick. Somehow, with the red hair and green eyes, the big man has a little-boy look to him.

And he says of that hitter’s dream season, “It’s never happened. But, you know what? It could happen.”

*

Amazing, what 58 home runs will do for you the year after you hit 52. You become a person.

Not that Mark McGwire hasn’t been a person.

But he’s no media hound confirming his ego on an hourly basis. He prefers the work to the celebration. So we hardly knew him beyond the extravagant numbers he put up.

We saw the man only when we saw him cry.

Amazing. He calls hitting a home run the most difficult act in all of sports. “Or more people would do it more often,” he says. And then in two seasons he hits 40,000 feet of home runs. Hits them so hard that Sandy Alomar is glad one clanged off Cleveland’s scoreboard. “Or else it goes around the world and hits me in the back of the head,” the catcher says.

A Babe Ruth for the new millennium, McGwire hits rising line drives of such distance that outfielder Steve Finley of the San Diego Padres says, “I don’t chase Mark McGwire’s shots--I admire them.”

After he turned around Randy Johnson’s heat and sent it 481 feet, McGwire circled the bases head down rather than admire the missile’s flight. “I respect pitchers too much to show them up,” he says. From the mound, the Seattle Mariners ace caught McGwire’s eye in the dugout and touched his cap bill, power saluting power.

“Mark hits it farther with less effort than anyone ever,” says Tony La Russa, who has managed McGwire in Oakland and St. Louis. “The arc of Ken Griffey Jr.’s swing has gotten bigger than when he hit line drives. Juan Gonzalez is a terrific power hitter, too. But you look at Juan’s arc and look at Mark’s--Mark’s is more compact, simpler.

“It’s timing, and it’s a gift not everybody has. He reaches the ball at the exact moment when he can max it out.”

Amazing, he gives the Cardinals a bargain deal. The city loves him, he loves the city, and in 10 hours he does a three-year, $30 million deal. Instead of auctioning himself on the free-agent market and busting the bank somewhere, he takes $7 million a year. He defers $2 million so the team can use it for other players and gives away $3 million the next three years to his Mark McGwire Foundation for Children to help youngsters who can’t help themselves.

For that singular act of faith, hope and charity, as well as for a singular season of excellence, McGwire was honored as the Sporting News’ 1997 Sportsman of the Year.

“The quantity and sheer power of Mark’s home runs have put him in a class of his own, but his moving example of selflessness and loyalty have made him equally unique,” TSN President James H. Nuckols says. “For both of these reasons he has helped us see the game differently and made it an exceptionally easy choice for us to name him as Sportsman of the Year.”

Amazing, the athletic feats, the scoreboards dented. But then to witness on a daily basis a larger evolution at work: “More impressive than anything he’s done on the field,” La Russa says, “has been Mark’s development personally. So much attention is given to the ball leaving the park that we don’t see his completeness, the player, not just the hitter. And he’s become a team leader by example and by voice. He’s what a major leaguer is supposed to be.”

He does all that hero’s work with grace and modesty. Then at a news conference announcing his new contract, someone asks about his interest in abused children. He hesitates. How to answer? He doesn’t know how to turn a life’s experience into a sound bite.

How to talk about Polly Klaas, the 12-year-old girl whose 1993 abduction and murder chilled the Bay Area during McGwire’s years with the A’s. How to talk about the “missing children” sweatbands he wore in games. What does a man say about his fears born of divorce so soon after he became a father? How can he convey his girlfriend Ali Dickson’s passionate involvement in the protection of abused children? All that inside him and no way to get it out.

He falls silent. A reporter’s clock on the silence: 33 seconds. When he finally speaks, it’s in generalities. Children have a special place in his heart. They are God’s gifts to us. And the biggest big man in baseball cries.

“We had never seen the depth of the personal side until then,” La Russa says. “He showed us, ‘This is a better way to be.’ ”

*

Though McGwire had no way to know it, at that moment he made it out of the hole.

He remembers the hole.

It’s October 1991. He’s a mess. And not just in baseball, which is bad enough. Worse, it’s his whole life.

Love has skipped on him. A woman he couldn’t live without became a woman he couldn’t live with. At work, this strongman who hit 49 home runs as a major league rookie has a nightmare year. Whisperers say he can’t catch up to fastballs because he’s afraid of them. They say the A’s will trade him before he loses all value. Even he wonders. Is this it?

He hits .201 with 22 home runs. He is in free fall from his rookie season four years earlier when he hit .289 with the 49 home runs. It is the latest evidence of a melancholy pattern that threatens to break him before he breaks it.

He throws his gear in his car. He drives south. He drives 5 1/2 hours to Los Angeles. He drives alone.

No radio.

No phone.

Driving, thinking. He asks himself questions he has asked during the season. “Do I know who I am? Do I like what I see in the mirror?”

One word answers both questions.

No.

*

It’s December 1997, and Mark McGwire has new answers now.

“I was in a deep hole, and I didn’t think I could climb out,” he says of the darkness of 1991. “A live-in relationship problem affected me off the field. And you can say you’re going to go out and play the game and not let it affect you professionally. But . . . well, everything accumulated and accumulated and just came crashing in on me.

“I was walking on air--in a bad sense, not a good sense. I wasn’t grounded in any firm beliefs about how to live my life. I allowed no positive energy in my life.

“It was horrible, and yet it was the biggest learning experience of my life, both in baseball and in life. I learned that I had to be who I am, not somebody somebody else wants me to be.”

McGwire now sees the elements of failure invisible to him then. Married a year out of college, a father soon painfully divorced, he wasn’t ready for love again. Complicating the complexities, some Einstein figure in an A’s uniform had a brainstorm about changing the way McGwire hit.

Quit pulling everything, the genius told the dead-pull hitter. Use the whole field, go to right more.

Problem was, McGwire followed the fool advice. He tinkered with his hitting mechanics so much as to build a swing that incorporated a zillion moving parts.

“He’d gotten into a terrible, defensive position, much too complicated, allowing the ball to travel too far before initiating his swing,” says Doug Rader, hired by La Russa as the A’s hitting coach in the winter following the ’91 debacle. “It was no character flaw. His approach was just so bad that he was getting beat by fastballs.”

Or, to quote La Russa: “Mark had gotten a little funky with his stroke.”

“I had the label of being a home run hitter,” McGwire says, “when I wanted to be known for my defense, too, and for being a complete player. I fought against that label.”

In McGwire, then, baseball had its first recorded case of a man reluctant to be known for hitting balls out of sight--until, in the winter of 1991, after that long drive down the California coast, he realized, “I needed to change my life.”

So he began regular sessions with a psychiatrist. Nothing dramatic, he says. Just common-sense explanations of life.

“But you’d be amazed,” McGwire says, “how many people don’t want to use common sense.”

Such as: If the first hit of your Little League career is a home run, if you knock down fences in college, if you get to be 6-5, 245 pounds and hit 49 home runs as a rookie, you’re pretty much entitled--nay, even obligated--to think of yourself as a home run hitter.

“I decided I wouldn’t fight it because that is what I am, a home run hitter, that’s me, that’s what God put me here to be,” he says. “Now if I get a hit to right field, you can pretty much count on it being an accident.”

In 1992 McGwire moved from that sickly .201 to .268, from 22 home runs to 42, from 75 runs batted in to 104.

“I started becoming who I am,” he says.

For the old questions, then, came happier answers.

“Who am I? I’m Mark McGwire, the man I’m supposed to be. Do I like what I see in the mirror? Yes.”

*

“Did we consider trading him? Yes,” La Russa says. “His problems had started before the .201 year. The game can get away from you, you lose the feel. It’s a sensitive thing, playing major league baseball. He couldn’t have had another couple years like those.

“And ‘salvage’ would not be too strong a word for what he was then able to do in ’92. He was at a crossroads. But as with most good people, he never lost himself during the struggle. Being a man of great pride, he was stung by all the criticism. And you could see he was carrying a great burden. But he never did anything to embarrass himself. The way he handled the adversity, that’s what you look for in a person.”

Foot injuries cost him most of the ’93 and ’94 seasons; he played only 74 games and says of those dispiriting years, “I couldn’t have gotten through them if I hadn’t had ’92. And I wouldn’t have had ’92 without the bad year of ’91. I’m a firm believer that things happen for a reason, and I know that just watching the games those years made me a better hitter. I learned a lot just watching. I learned much more of the mental side. I learned how to stay positive.”

*

Now the melancholy descent at the turn of this decade has become an ascent of an unprecedented kind.

After 39 home runs in the strike-shortened ’95 season, McGwire hit 52 home runs in ’96. Then came the 58, making him only the second player to hit 50 home runs in successive seasons. Babe Ruth did it 70 years ago.

So one day the telephone rang, Mark McGwire calling for Ali Dickson.

They’d met at a casual dinner with friends in Boston but had neither seen nor spoken to each other for a year.

“Why’d I call her?” McGwire says. “I really don’t know. Just out of the blue on a road trip to L.A., I called her.”

She worked as a movie director’s assistant. She’d heard of him, a baseball player somewhere. Truth is, until the phone rang, she’d pretty much forgotten the dinner a year earlier.

She had her life. After graduation from UCLA, where she’d been a varsity volleyball player, Dickson worked as a volunteer with sexually abused children. For a year now, she has done her work at Stuart House in Santa Monica, west of Los Angeles.

Her passion is palpable. The daughter of a social worker, familiar with dysfunctional families, Dickson had a college friend who’d been a victim of physical abuse as a child.

“All her trouble in life was evident in her family story,” Dickson says. “She was always searching for the love she missed at home.”

It’s a story too often told. Dickson says abuse touches one in four girls, one in eight boys.

“I came home one day and talked to Mark about it,” she says. “I said, ‘God, can you believe this is happening to children?’ I shared with him what I had learned and what I saw at Stuart House every day. I said, ‘Something has to be done.’ ”

McGwire says that when he visited Stuart House with Dickson, he, too, was touched. They saw children laughing, children apparently happy. But they knew pain cowered under the laughter.

“Mark started talking about the foundation idea,” Dickson says. “He asked, ‘How about $1 million a year?’ Then, ‘Do you think $500,000?’ He said, ‘How about $100,000?’ I had no idea what he was going to do until the day he did it.”

When Ali Dickson heard that McGwire would give $1 million a year to his children’s foundation, she says, “I started crying.”

*

So, 61? Expert testimony from Rader, the hitting coach, once a Gold Glove third baseman with power.

“Mark’s a terrific guy, I love him. He doesn’t act to shower himself with praise. He’s very elegant in the way he accepts all this stuff. I mean, here’s a guy who had 49 home runs his rookie season and he bolts the last day to see his son born. He says he’ll have another chance to hit 50 but no other chance to see his son born.

“He has the purest, simplest swing this side of Paul Molitor. His plate coverage and his bat speed are second to none. Everybody thinks he’s sitting on fastballs, but he’s the best curveball hitter I’ve ever seen. Because of the short length of his swing, he has fewer variables than anybody.

“Here’s the bottom line: If you’re not on top of your game, he’s going to hurt you. And if he’s on top of his game, he’ll hurt you no matter what.”

So, sir, 61?

“It’s impossible to size him up historically. It may not even be in his best interests to participate in this day and age. At a time when hitting 25-30 home runs was truly extraordinary, he’d have been a 40-home run man. He’s been shortchanged by this era.”

So, 61?

“Everybody thinks of 60 as a benchmark, but that’s a bogus number. Look, if they keep adding two teams to the big leagues, Mark might hit 105.”