Word: mcgwires
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Unlike the almost unknowably silent DiMaggio, however, McGwire was an accessible and affable presence from the very beginning of his remarkable career. It was in June 1987 that the Los Angeles Times first put the words McGwire, Ruth and Maris in one headline. McGwire's major league life wasn't yet 60 games old. Soon he rushed past the rookie home-run record, and crowds of reporters buzzed around him like so many mosquitoes on a July night in St. Louis. Still, his mien was so benign that one of his nicknames was McGee-Whiz. In September of that year...
...McGwire would wait nine long years for his 50-home-run season. Divorce, injuries, eye trouble, crises of confidence and of desire conspired against him. For the eyes, he changed contact lenses as often as some people change socks. For the crises, he sought the help of a psychiatrist, which was rare enough for a professional athlete; rarer still, he spoke about it in public. In time he regained his confidence, his health and his unprecedented ability to hit home runs. When he finally had a 50-knock season, in 1996, he apparently decided to make it a habit...
...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...