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Kindred: How he and others missed/ignored the real McGwire story

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by 21, Jan 14, 2010.

  1. And infidelity is not illegal.
     
  2. It didn't start to unravel until two events:

    1. Verducci's SI cover piece.
    2. BALCO

    That gave us two important elements: A player who would talk (Caminiti, who gets short-shafted in the effort to praise Canseco as the hero of the saga). And a (sort of) public record.
     
  3. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    Absolutely, and the management angle is key. If a reporter in St. Louis really wanted to burst the McGwire myth in '98, even having some solid proof, would management have gone with it? I strongly doubt it.
     
  4. Joe Williams

    Joe Williams Well-Known Member

    I mentioned this on another thread but it seems to fit here too:

    Tom Boswell got savaged when he raised questions about Canseco and possibly McGwire as far back as the late 1980s. Tony LaRussa and A's folks were all over him. I'm curious to hear what Dave Kindred did at that point, given his WaPo connection with Boswell. Did that provide the door through which he or others could pursue baseball & steroids stories? Or offer commentaries?

    I don't agree with the sweeping generalizations on both sides in Dave's piece. That all of us were aware of the cheating and didn't care, and that all of them were doing it so they all deserve equal Hall of Fame consideration.
     
  5. Harry Doyle

    Harry Doyle Member

    I think DD and Jay are both right.

    The Tiger comparison, I think, is valid. Yes it's on a different plane, but you still have someone representing themselves to be something that they're not. My understanding from people around golf, and what I've read post-op, we KNEW Tiger was a bad apple. Rick Reilly had beaten the drum; Charles Pierce gave us a pretty good dose of it in the '90s. But we (the royal we, mind you) didn't bother to look into it because, as Kindred said in regard to McGwire, "We dared not blink lest we miss another astonishment."

    Tiger's integrity was part of his image, and thus part of his fame and part of what made us cover him. Yes, we would have covered him just as much if he were a prick -- but he wasn't. If somebody had taken the time to report that Tiger Woods wasn't the clean-cut dad that we had been led to believe that would have, without question, been a story.

    DD's point goes to the same idea. What are we learning here? We lament steroids in baseball, we whine that we missed the story. So what? There's inevitably something else going on that's the same type of deal right now. What is it? Steroids in the NFL? The gun culture of pro sports (too late)? Gambling? What we don't want is to be sitting here in another 10 years, older, fatter and angrier, bitching about what we missed back in 2010 or 2011.
     
  6. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    Sorry, Luggie, just don't agree.

    The Watergate guys had sources and plenty of paper.

    Oh, sure ... you could have put that bad-ass reporter out there and paid him to do nothing but chase this.

    But unless somebody was going to come forward, or Balco had happened several years earlier, you would have been spinning your wheels for months and into years.

    At some point, a newspaper has to decide whether the allocation of resources is worth the likelihood of a return. And even back in the Golden Days, this would have likely been a monumental waste of time and money under the circumstances then.
     
  7. I've probably read hundreds of Tiger Woods stories in the last 10 years. I can't recall a single one about what a great husband and father he is. Family mentioned in passing? Sure. I even remember some insinuations that domestic life was taking away from his killer instinct. But the story has always been his golf. Tiger, like most athletes, largely kept his family behind the scenes.
     
  8. Harry Doyle

    Harry Doyle Member

    That's true. Tiger hung out kind of in this middling land where nobody knew about his personal life. He answered questions from the press; there never were accusation that he was a bad father or husband, just as he was never praised as a great one.
     
  9. Dave Kindred

    Dave Kindred Member

    Boswell never wrote it. Said it on a radio interview, about Canseco only. I was gone from the Post by then.

    Yes, guilty to the generalized "we"; but I never said "all of them" were doing steroids; I said they all were playing by the same rules.

    As for mounting a columnist's crusade against steroids, I've been slow to accuse on suspicion, quick to condemn when presented with facts.
     
  10. lantaur

    lantaur Well-Known Member

    I vividly recall that Boswell statement - I thought he might have then referenced it again in a Washington Post column (or someone in the Post wrote about it).

    Anyway, Canseco threatened to sue over the remark. According to Boswell, this went back to 1985. I can't recall if any other writer followed up on it, but I'm guessing a threat of a lawsuit (which I'm guessing never came around) could have backed off many.

    http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1129&dat=19880930&id=iN8NAAAAIBAJ&sjid=8W0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=2529,10286589
     
  11. Den1983

    Den1983 Active Member

    But why wouldn't management have gone with it? To not be scorned on by St. Louis, or because they wouldn't think it was worth the trouble?
     
  12. On the other hand, when baseball players get bigger and stronger, most of the damage is done to the baseball. When football players increase their size and speed, they're only going to hurt each other more. "It's about the kids" is often the justification -- which one is more dangerous to them?
     
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