Word: asterisked
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...boost testosterone levels. While it's perfectly legal in the U.S. and the major leagues for McGwire to take the supplements, it sends an absolutely wrong health message to kids everywhere. If he does beat Roger Maris' home-run record, there will always be--for me, anyway--a mental asterisk next to his name...
...even at home games in Yankee Stadium. The stress got so bad, his graying crew cut started to fall out in chunks. He was 26. With the rationale that Maris' season was eight games longer than Ruth's, commissioner Ford Frick, a friend of the Babe's, put an asterisk by Maris' name, which was not removed until 1992, seven years after Maris died. Maris never accepted an invitation to Yankee Stadium, and he moved to Florida, where he sold beer and avoided baseball. He is not in the Hall of Fame...
...older fans, who always viewed Maris as a placeholder until the second Ruth, are rooting for McGwire to erase the imprint of the asterisk. The younger fans are pulling for him too. So the pressure is entirely different from what Maris faced. Still, even the positive pressure can be draining. Paul Molitor, who made a go at Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, says, "I would go home after a game, and it was like an out-of-body experience. My face would be up there [on TV], and everyone would be talking about whether I was going...
...quite forgive his breaking Babe Ruth's record for career home runs. Roger Maris? We killed him. First we made him bald and drove him out of New York, then out of baseball. And soon he was gone. They called it cancer, but we know it was the asterisk...
...Great Leap Forward, at least 20 million more were sacrificed to a leader's theories. In that context, the man before the tank seems almost a counter-Mao, daring to act as the common-man hero tirelessly promoted by propaganda and serving as a rebuke--or asterisk, at least--to the leaders and revolutionaries who share these pages...