Long Live The King

By Joel Stein

As a climax to the story, it was a little weak. There was no conflict, no point of dramatic tension, not even a gaudy parabola for the money shot. On Monday, after fans had waited 37 years, Mark McGwire hit his record-tying 61st home run of the season, and the next night he showed up for his prime-time network-television special to hit No. 62. The record-breaking shot was McGwire's shortest, lamest homer of the year. Afterward, we looked to the media to be told what the moral significance was. It was like someone brought in the writers from Home Improvement.

But a good director knows that if you're going to eke out some drama, you've got to zoom in on the details. So go back to spring training, when every sports reporter is flying into Jupiter, Fla., to ask McGwire if he's going to break the record--as if he were going to break out some pro-wrestling rant like "Maris? Maris was a whiny schoolgirl compared to me. Boo-ya." Or look at the opening of the season, when the SportsCenter announcers started to calculate his home-run pace. Sports Illustrated put him on the cover--even before opening day. If ever a man was set up for failure, it was McGwire.

McGwire responded first by grimly ignoring the pressure: he wouldn't discuss the record, threatened to end the batting- practice show and, for a short stint, denied some interview requests. Then--and here's the part of the film where we cue the Aerosmith ballad--he internalized the pressure and turned it into motivation. He held press conferences before every road series. He started to smile at reporters. By the end, when the fans' flashbulbs made the park seem like it was being pelted by a summer lightning storm, he stood in the on-deck circle with his eyes closed, calmly absorbing the energy. Whereas the fans' abuse made Roger Maris lose his hair and hate the game, McGwire reacted to the irrational expectations with irrational exuberance.

As he approached the record and the pressure seemed unendurable, he started hitting home runs at a pace never before seen: seven in eight games. The weekend before the broken record, the McGwire alert was sounded: a press corps 600 strong went to St. Louis, McGwire's 10-year-old son flew in to be bat boy, and it seemed that everyone in the world with the last name of Maris had to put his or her life on hold to sit in Busch Stadium. "He put more pressure on himself that day than any other time I've seen him," Tony LaRussa, who has managed McGwire almost all his career, told TIME. "There are certain things you can't force. You just do the best you can, and it happens or it doesn't happen. I think he was going to try to force a home run that day." He was. McGwire choked during batting practice, overswinging at each pitch. His first time up he grounded out on a 3-0 pitch, the first 3-0 pitch the leader in walks had swung at all year. But his next time up he willed some lame line-drive single to jump over the wall. It was his less cocky version of Babe Ruth's called home run. "As humble as he is, his wanting to do it and forcing it are about as close as he'll ever come to calling it. He wanted to hit it that day, and he did," LaRussa said. "To me, it was literally superhuman."

So forget the speeches last Tuesday, the confetti and that awful, foot-high award that baseball made up just so Bud Selig could have a reason to be onstage. (The Commissioner's Historic Achievement Award? Did someone come up with that during the game?) Forget that apple-pie groundskeeper kid who caught the ball, for which somebody had offered $1 million, and gave it up straightaway. No, instead, look at the details. After McGwire hit the home run (see attached photo of the historic event), it turned into a Little League game. The excited new record holder forgot to touch first base until his coach pulled him back. He lifted his son and kissed him. He jumped into the stands to hug the Maris family. And if that wasn't somehow touching enough--the tribute to the veteran who never got to see his memorial--the camera went to a shot of McGwire's applauding ex-wife. If your ex were going to have a big night, would you be there? This guy has got to be all right.

It's hard to tell sometimes. He's not a guy who looks comfortable around attention; in fact he has skirted it all pretty well until now. He stays in suburban St. Louis at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, alone with Spectravision when not with friends and teammates. McGwire hasn't even done much on the endorsements front--though that cap he keeps wearing at press conferences for the Abbey, a fledgling restaurant in Seal Beach, Calif., has got to be worth some kind of meal--and his few public appearances have been less than stellar: his taped spot at last week's MTV Music Video Awards included the sentence, "Give it up for the Backstreet Boys."

But it doesn't matter, because he did what we wanted. The truth is, we originally got into this thing because it's cool to watch numbers go up. That's why the Dow Jones is such a star and why it's kind of fascinating to watch the votes come in on C-SPAN, even though you don't know what people are voting on. (Come on, Dems, you lazy bums! Get to your seats and vote!) But once this chase became so big, we had to look for a deeper explanation, something greater than the obvious self-satisfaction of being able to say we witnessed history.

We have to look deep inside McGwire for the real drama. Not that he slumped after his divorce and went to therapy and cried at the press conference where he donated $1 million of his yearly salary to sexually abused children. That's great for flashback stuff, but that's not what made last Tuesday so special. And the horse race with Sammy Sosa was a kind of interesting sidenote. But what makes this gripping is that when the lights came up, McGwire glowed. In a country whose history has included such popular expressions as "predestination," "manifest destiny" and "how to win friends and influence people," McGwire learned the power of self-assuredness. As he put it, he was meant to do it. That's hard to disagree with. That's what made it so difficult, and such a triumph.

Hey, it's hard not to get caught up in the sentiment.

--Reported by Staci D. Kramer, with the Cardinals

With reporting by Staci D. Kramer, with the Cardinals