Word: steroid
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...otherwise, smiling on him from the dais. Before members of the House Government Reform Committee and millions of fans watching on television, McGwire swore to tell nothing but the truth. Instead, he told nothing. After a moving opening statement in which he cried while ruing the deaths of young steroid users, the cameras clicked in wild anticipation. Was Big Mac ready to admit that he too had supersized himself with steroids? Would he acknowledge the danger and offer a lesson to the millions of teenagers who still look up to him? Would he take up the cause of Denise...
McGwire took a deep breath. "If a player answers no, he simply will not be believed," he said about the anticipated questions of his own steroid use. "If he answers yes, he risks public scorn and endless government investigations." So unlike fellow players on the panel, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro, who flatly denied taking steroids, and Jose Canseco, an admitted abuser, McGwire essentially took the Fifth. Mighty McGwire, the man whose eclipse of Roger Maris' home-run record galvanized a nation and who became this magazine's 1998 Hero of the Year, tried to draw a walk rather than...
During 11 hours of testimony, the House reform committee further embarrassed the game by making baseball answer for its weak steroid policy. Baseball officials told skeptical committee members that the current policy represents progress, since the sport inexplicably had no policy until 2002. But baseball still falls woefully short compared with other sports. In the NFL, players are tested randomly in and out of season, and first-time abusers miss a quarter of a season. Baseball players miss 10 days, or about 5% of the season--and the legislators were incensed to learn about language that allowed a fine instead...
...legislators all but scorned baseball executives' attempts to defend their drug policy. Commissioner Bud Selig, looking at times pained, at times as if he just lost his dog, claimed he didn't become concerned about baseball's steroid problem until the hulking McGwire admitted he took androstenedione in 1998 (andro was legal in baseball at the time). "No manager, no general manager, nobody ever came to me in the '90s," said Selig. At best, it showed big-league naiveté, since those drugs were clearly baseball's dirty little secret in the 1990s. Said Massachusetts Representative Steven Lynch, a Democrat...
...Democrat from Maryland, asked Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning, the opening witness and an ex--big league great, about a pitch he threw to Mickey Mantle. Representative Diane Watson, Democrat from California, dissed Arnold Schwarzenegger by flashing a 1987 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED cover featuring the Republican California Governor, an ex-steroid user, flexing under the headline HOT STUFF. Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen praised Cuban American Canseco for hailing from Miami. "It was a terrible day for baseball," says former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent. "It was a worse day for Congress...