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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. Screwball

    Screwball Active Member

    This.

    The team doctor of the Carolina Panthers team that played in the Super Bowl distributed steroids to players. Can you imagine if the Mitchell Report had found that a team doctor, rather than Kirk Radomski and Brian MacNamee, distributed steroids to baseball players?

    http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060718/SPORTS/607180659/1006

    Also, the Mitchell Report (available online) contains a six-page list of baseball/steroids articles from 1998 and earlier.

    Alsom
     
  2. da man

    da man Well-Known Member

    I don't know that everyone thought they were safe. I wrote a story on andro and creatine a couple months after the McGwire andro story broke and coaches, ADs and state athletic officials all agreed that they were a concern and all said they were telling kids not to take that stuff.

    Of course, the kids took it anyway.

    I just went back and re-read the story -- ain't the Internet grand? -- and it says AP reported that andro sales increased fivefold in August 1998.
     
  3. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Yeah, it did seem plausible. They were also legal.
     
  4. That's true. There were stories in the '90s about whether Creatine and other GNC products were safe. I probably wrote one or more of them. But the fact is that we were all convinced that GNC was fueling home runs, not steroids. By 1998, steroids almost seemed obsolete, a relic of the Cold War.
     
  5. Ben_Hecht

    Ben_Hecht Active Member

    In St. Louis?

    No chance.
     
  6. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    No paper or news organization in 1998 wanted to do anything to take anything away from the HR chase. It was win-win for newspapes, TV stations, the game of baseball etc...
     
  7. Ben_Hecht

    Ben_Hecht Active Member


    Wholly understood.


    St. Louis remains the poster child of See-No-Evil, for multiple, obvious reasons.
     
  8. AD

    AD Active Member

    don't forget: bob nightengale broke one of the first -- if not the first -- steroids stories in, i think, the sporting news.
     
  9. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Found a story By Jeff Bradley from April 2000 where he raised the issue in ESPN the Mag.

    http://espn.go.com/magazine/vol3no07roids.html
     
  10. Bubbler

    Bubbler Well-Known Member

    I don't know if I'm a lone voice in this or not, but the navel-gazing about what should have been done vis a vis steroid accusations -- when, as Frank Ridgeway points out, there wasn't much reporters can do without subpoena powers anyway -- serves little purpose.

    What's the point of it? What's done is done. All the guilt does is cement the perception among some readers -- rightly or wrongly -- that we weren't doing our jobs. Why reinforce that?
     
  11. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    I think the writers who admitted they missed the boat have a lot greater credibility than those act like they knew it all the time.
     
  12. HanSenSE

    HanSenSE Well-Known Member

    And though it's been said, many times, many ways, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Unlike Bud Selig, I doubt this is the last time anyone will turn to steroids to boost a batting average or keep a career going. We now have a roadmap when this happens again.
     
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