// posted December 23, 2005 by Lou Schuler

I got Sports Illustrated's year-end issue yesterday, and was surprised to find a remarkable story on baseball's steroid scandals. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a lot of the material in the story was new information -- if nothing else, much of it was certainly new to me.

The story isn't available on the SI website, so I'll just type out a few key paragraphs. The scene is the congressional hearings on March 17.

The biggest news -- if I'm right and it is news -- is in the following passage:

McGwire, on the other hand, looked guilty from the start. ... [H]e came off like a miserable schoolboy tormented by his conscience. He didn't rebut Canseco, and he held off any questions about past steroid use with this weak stand-in for the Fifth Amendment, "I'm not here to talk about the past."


For those who had seen him the day before, it was no shock: When McGwire and his lawyers met with Davis, Waxman and committee staffers on March 16, he seemed, according to one observer, "in agony." According to Davis and Waxman, McGwire wanted blanket immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony, a deal Congress cannot grant without Department of Justice approval. Waxman walked away from the meeting with the impression that McGwire had used illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Davis came out of it with an even more detailed read.


"McGwire wanted to tell a story," Davis says. "But it's a five-year statute of limitations for steroid use, and he'd been retired four years."

Davis went on to say, as quoted in the next paragraph, that he thinks McGwire will spill everything when the five years are up. Since he retired after the 2001 playoffs, that means October 2006 is the target date for his tell-all.

Another part of the story isn't new, but is still an entertaining trip down memory lane. Remember how Sammy Sosa pretended he couldn't speak English during the hearings? He had his lawyer read his opening statement, and sat with a translator. But he still answered all the questions himself ... sort of:

"To my knowledge, I don't know," Sosa responded to a query about teammates using steroids. "I can tell you, Mr. Chairman," he said when asked if he thought baseball should adopt the Olympic drug program, "I don't have much to tell you." Asked if he supported baseball's policy on steroids, Sosa said, "I don't have the specific question to explain to you."

The real point of the story, by S.L. Price, was to say something that's grudgingly acknowledged but rarely said aloud or mentioned in print: Of all the once-respected ballplayers involved, only the thoroughly disreputable Jose Canseco came off as telling the truth, or something very much like it.

And Canseco gets the best line in the story:

"Today the truth means nothing; perception means everything. We are a lost society of lost souls: liars, con artists, manipulators."

What I love about that line is that he could have been talking about anything: politics, baseball, politics, corporate life, politics, religion, or perhaps even politics.

Tags: sports