A MAC FOR ALL SEASONS
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It's not so hard to figure out why we look to the athletic arena for heroes. No ancient Greek dramaturge would turn his back on material like this: one man tested in crisis; the victor emergent from the sweat and roil of combat; gifted with superhuman size and godlike strength; and, perhaps most important, confronted with the brutal and inescapable vulnerability that all great athletes must face--the daily threat that an inferior force might vanquish them. Athletic heroism attains the heights of glory through its very proximity to defeat. And it dramatizes the worth of workaday values we want our kids and our neighbors' kids to absorb: diligent attention to practice and homework, concentration, persistence, equanimity, teamwork.

In no sport is this more visible than it is in baseball. The other team sports, so dependent on the careful knitting of disparate talents for every act, never isolate the hero quite the way baseball does--especially when it places him alone in the batter's box and challenges him to perform the most difficult feat in all of sports. Even off the field, the baseball star has always seemed to have a more sharply defined persona than other athletes do. Decades pass, and still we feel we know them. Babe Ruth, the profane if lovable libertine; Mickey Mantle, the gifted man-child; Roger Maris, the decent citizen victimized and nearly rendered mute by the crippling weight of publicity. But of all the baseball titans, Mark McGwire in some ways most resembles Joe DiMaggio, coincidentally stricken by life-threatening illness just as McGwire was setting the home-run record. Admired by their teammates, considerate of their foes, blessed with a spare, natural grace, both men represent the merging of two traits not always found in close athletic proximity: talent and dignity.

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--he hadn't yet turned 24--he looked to become only the 11th man in baseball history to hit 50 home runs in a season. Going into the last day, he had 49. He also had a very pregnant wife ready to enter a California hospital. McGwire skipped the last game. "You always have another chance to hit 50," he said, and some might have taken that for either arrogance or stupidity had he not completed the thought with, "but you'll never have a chance to have your first child again."

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. He repeated the feat in 1997, and now, in 1998, he has shredded it, performing prodigies unheard of in sport or in most other areas of human endeavor. Thirty-seven years ago, Maris surpassed Ruth's record by 1.6%; McGwire catapulted the same record forward by a nearly unfathomable 14.75%. Here is what a 14.75% improvement over some other well-known marks would yield: Someone would drive in 218 runs. The mile record would be 3:11.29. Even so hyperthyroid a measure as the Dow Jones industrial average would leap ahead to the vicinity of 10,100. In a sport whose progress is characteristically Darwinian in both style and speed, McGwire not only collapsed the decades, he invented a new algebra.

The 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 I was meant to do. He actually calls it "karma," which is not a usual baseball-player word, and his acceptance of it relaxes him. And focuses him.