It was not a game, but it featured marquee athletes on national television. It took place in a hearing room, not a stadium. C-Span, not ESPN or Fox, produced it, with relatively few cameras and no slow-motion or stat graphics.
And its star players were in business suits, not jerseys, testifying uncomfortably under oath.
On March 17, 2005, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro, with 1,708 home runs among them, went to Capitol Hill. They ended up with their Hall of Fame candidacies wrecked.
It was riveting and enervating, as congressional hearings can be. But the three men provided the human drama absent from earlier reports of grand jury testimony linking Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi to steroid use or in subsequent news conferences by Andy Pettitte and Alex Rodriguez in which they admitted to using illicit substances.
McGwire, who had retired in 2001, repeatedly told the House Committee on Government Reform that he would not discuss his past. That included his admitted use of androstenedione, which was legal in baseball when he hit a record 70 home runs in 1998, or accusations that he used steroids, published in a tell-all book by his former Oakland Athletics teammate Jose Canseco.
Sosa said he had never taken steroids and suggested that he was not all too familiar with speaking English, lending some comedy to the proceedings.
And Palmeiro jabbed his left index finger to emphasize that he was clean.
The hearing was, in a way, the steroids trial that has not occurred in baseball. The lawmakers were the prosecutors and the players the accused doing their worst in a clutch situation. A thinner, sad-looking McGwire choked up while delivering his opening statement. Sosa appeared bewildered. Palmeiro was defiant.
“Are you taking the Fifth?” Elijah Cummings said to McGwire at one point.
“I’m not here to discuss the past,” he said. “I’m here to be positive about this subject.”
There were more athletic and more astonishing sports moments on television during the decade. They included the Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal final at Wimbledon last year, and the exposure of Janet Jackson’s right breast by Justin Timberlake during the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show. Mike Piazza’s winning home run in the Mets’ first game after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And Steve Bartman’s interference with a foul ball at Wrigley Field.
Tiger Woods’ chip onto the 16th green during the 2005 Masters that stopped before the hole for two seconds and then dipped in, and Lance Armstrong’s seventh Tour de France win. The brawl between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers, and the Boston Red Sox’s comeback from three games down to beat the Yankees in the 2004 playoffs.
Brett Favre’s four-touchdown performance on Monday Night Football the night after his father died, and David Tyree’s sensational catch during the Giants’ victory in the Super Bowl in 2008.
But on that St Patrick’s Day in 2005 in the US capital, on a serious-minded network devoted to the sometimes arcane doings of Congress, three superstars put themselves on their knees.
What happened afterward says much about the power of images.
McGwire’s stonewalling under oath — more potent on TV than brushing off a reporter’s questions — sent him into a baseball exile, and overwhelming rejection by Hall of Fame voters, that he is emerging from as the new batting coach of the St Louis Cardinals.
Sosa’s career fizzled to an end two years after the hearing. And after the New York Times reported in June that he tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2003, the House committee said it was investigating the truthfulness of his testimony.
Palmeiro tested positive for a steroid months after the hearing and was suspended for 10 days on Aug. 1, 2005. The news might have been less stunning if the world had not seen him testify so aggressively to his innocence.
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