Word: mcgwires
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...girth of Mark McGwire's forearm is greater than that of a large man's neck; his biceps look as if they've been inflated with a bicycle pump. Your hand could conceivably disappear in his; if he chose, it could certainly be crushed. Yet something other than his pure physicality strikes you about McGwire. Revealed in his deep green eyes is a self-knowledge as imposing as his size and strength: I am who I am, what you see is what you get, and if I'm going to hit 70 home runs, well, that's what...
Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa says he's never known a ballplayer so able to keep his eye on the task. "He has this technique that allows him to totally tune out distractions," says LaRussa, who has been McGwire's manager, in Oakland and in St. Louis, for all but 18 months of the player's 12-year career. "And he did this with the whole world watching." Fifteen minutes or so before game time, "Mark would withdraw from the clubhouse horseplay and stare into his locker. You'd see him, and you'd know he was spacing...
...didn't much like being turned into a carnival sideshow, but he never let it distract him. When a reporter spotted androstenedione, a legal but controversial steroid, in McGwire's locker, the slugger explained that he used it to protect himself from the muscle tears that so often plague finely conditioned athletes, especially those few so well muscled as he, and he left it at that. Though he was criticized, McGwire marched ahead, not even pausing to rip off the head of the reporter who'd gone peeking into his locker. What kind of a modern athlete would fail...
...September, when every game offered the chance for a record, each McGwire at-bat would be accompanied by the gaudy detonation of thousands of flash cameras. "It was blinding," says McKay. "I asked him if it bothered him, and he said, 'I don't see them.'" He didn't see what was on the periphery of his concentration because, says LaRussa, "he knew where he was going." This made it easy for the manager, whose only contribution to McGwire's record, he confesses was "making sure he knew what time the game started...
Unquestionably, McGwire's feats of 1998 were granted a deeper dimension by the presence of his confederate, the ecstatic Sammy Sosa. Here was a joyous, ebullient counterpoint to McGwire's more sedate self. From the moment in midspring that Sosa launched a sudden torrent of home runs like none ever seen in baseball history--he hit 20 in June alone--the two men were flawlessly scripted antagonists cast in the same play. This was rapture vs. gravity, spontaneity vs. self-restraint, Latin brio vs. California cool. Their collision seemed inevitable; yet what ensued was less a crash than...