Mark McGwire: Mark of Excellence

Mark McGwire is a total freak. Not because he hits home runs more than 500 ft., or because he has 20-in. biceps. No, he’s a freak because he’s able to exhale his emotions, making them dissipate before action. He invites his ex-wife and her husband to his Christmas parties. He spoke to reporters even as some of them peeked into his locker and hunted down his ex-wife and past girlfriends. He didn’t go after bad pitches, no matter how many pitchers tried to derail his record chase by avoiding the strike zone. Blinded by thousands of popping flashbulbs from both sports photographers and fans waiting for his record-breaking 62nd homer, he says he didn’t notice any of them. Mark McGwire would be a robot, only who would make a robot that goes to therapy and cries during press conferences and Driving Miss Daisy? And who would give a robot red hair?

Sitting at a large conference table, disguised in a button-down shirt and wool pants, his game scowl gone, he doesn’t look like that robot. He looks almost unintimidating, like the metarational man he’s become. “The one thing I’ve learned is the mind controls everything,” he says. “Your mind can throw the attention off to the side.” Tony LaRussa, his manager at both the A’s and the Cardinals, says McGwire has a unique ability to “control his emotions, to stifle them.” His best friend on the team, catcher Tom Lampkin, says McGwire “has such control on the mental side. He doesn’t let things stew inside him. He puts a cap on it.” So as McGwire shattered the most famous record in sports with 70 homers in a season, he didn’t embrace the conflict; he transcended it.

For an intensely physical guy who grew up in a household with four brothers and no sisters and who never did very well as a student, McGwire, 35, has embraced a Jeffersonian rationality. And at the same time, he’s got this softness that also plays against type. If Aristotle and Oprah had spawned, and there was, like, a lot of red dye around, the result would have been Mark McGwire. He’s deeply devoted to his son and his charity for sexually abused children. He’s been going to a therapist every week since 1991, and plans on continuing long after Woody Allen is cured. Why not, he explains, if it helps him? And why shouldn’t his ex-wife hug him after his record-breaking home run? “No divorce is ever peachy keen. But Kathy and I are two grown adults,” he says–not only the largest man to say peachy keen but also probably the last one.

Rational Man was produced by his parents, fine, upstanding people by all accounts, as well as by the troubles McGwire had in the early ’90s. When he was a young player it had all come naturally: he dominated the majors through sheer native ability, setting the rookie home-run record in 1987 with 49 and helping his team win the 1989 World Series. But after that McGwire went through several foot injuries, preventing him from completing a full season, and also went through a painful breakup with the girlfriend he was living with. He stopped lifting weights. His hitting slumped so badly, he was booed by fans. “When I tore my left foot for the third time, I went in the clubhouse and I said, ‘That’s it. I am tired of rehab. I’m tired of going through this b.s.,'” he says, remembering the moment in 1991 when he almost quit the sport. “I had my family and friends talk me out of it. They said it would be the biggest regret of my life, and they were right.” It’s from this experience that McGwire’s strength, his ability to separate emotion from action, emerged. It’s when he entered therapy. And though injuries kept him out of most of two seasons, and he thought about quitting once again in the beginning of 1996, he’s had the strength to stay. It’s a strength that comes not from the Catholic Church McGwire attended as a child but through the modern religion of self-help.

There’s another side, one he hides because Rational Man doesn’t just hand over his private life. Relaxing with friends, he’s often giggling and goofy, in a way that they find endearing but that, in a man his size, can come across as oafish. He realizes that this is not everyone’s image of a hero. So McGwire has become a self-publicist of the Bob Dole school, manufacturing a stilted, stiff, serious persona. Yet he still counts among his best friends two stand-up comics. McGwire, though more anal and neat than any straight guy besides Jerry Seinfeld, gives keys to his cars and house to friends. He’s a big, lumbering guy who got made fun of in the minor leagues for referring to a play as a “toughie-woughie,” a guy who brings a towel to comedy clubs so he can bite it to prevent his big cackle from drawing attention. McGwire may look down unemotionally when he rounds the bases, but comedian buddy Mark Pitta knows better. During batting practice in Phoenix, Ariz., one of McGwire’s long balls broke some advertisement, and Pitta recalls McGwire telling him, “I just wanted to lift my arms and say, ‘Yeah! I broke something!'”

Here’s the childishness you don’t see, the rational exuberance: he sometimes makes comedian friend Scott LaRose pretend to be his security guard. Although McGwire never refuses autographs, he tells people at restaurants to wait until he’s done eating, and only partly because it’s annoying to have a meal interrupted. “It’s also just to see how long they’d wait,” says Pitta. “Because he has three courses. He eats like an ex-con.” Instead of complaining about the bad call that cost him his 71st home run, he gets excited. “The funniest thing about it is the two people that fought over the ball, they were on The People’s Court, ruling on who gets the ball. I thought that was hilarious.” And of his disappointment in not reaching the World Series, he says, “I got to throw out the first ball of the last game of the World Series. I thought that was pretty exciting.” After 162 games and 70 homers, a first pitch is somehow still neato.

He doesn’t have much of a temper, even when he talks about the one transgression he felt he experienced this year, when a reporter peered into his locker before an interview and spotted a bottle of androstenedione pills. This substance is classified by the FDA as a nutritional supplement and is allowed by Major League Baseball. But it is in the same chemical family as the banned anabolic steroids, and like those body-building drugs, “andro” increases the body’s testosterone. McGwire’s voice doesn’t get louder when he discusses it, but his tempo speeds up a bit because he’s angry that this breach of privacy might cause kids to try andro. “I discourage children, especially in high school, from taking the stuff,” he says. “Androstenedione only helps me get through my workout throughout the season. I’ve been through so many injuries in my career, this was one little step that helped me. But by no means does it help you hit a baseball. People think it’s a drug. It’s not a drug. It’s a food supplement. It does not help Mark McGwire hit home runs. Mark McGwire’s hand-eye coordination was given by the man upstairs.” A combination of intense fame and self-help training will make almost anyone talk about himself in the third person.

McGwire never hid the pills, telling most reporters who asked about steroid use throughout the years that he takes anything that’s legal. So it upset him not only because of the accusations that he was trying to cheat but also because reporters compared andro to steroids. And steroid use proved a problem for his brother J.J. A star football player whose career got sidelined when a BB-gun accident left him with a glass eye, J.J. became a body builder and, like many of those athletes, began taking steroids. McGwire, LaRose and other friends and members of the McGwire family intervened. “He hasn’t done that for three years,” says McGwire. For him, the moral code is obvious: if the law, Major League Baseball and the company that has supplied him with andro since 1992 all say it’s O.K., then it’s O.K.

McGwire is a simple guy. About his recent trip to Australia with his girlfriend Ali Dickson, he says, “It was sort of like going to San Francisco or Hawaii, only it was 14 hours away.” He lives alone in a 5,000-sq.-ft. house on the water in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, where he has two powerboats, one a large sleeper moored outside his house that he hopes to take on summer trips after he retires. “I always loved watching the sea gulls and the boats,” he says. “I just love the way of life around the beach. It’s very kickback.”

He also loves classical music, the Three Tenors and a show on the Learning Channel called Trauma: Life in the ER. Never a crazy partyer, he’s gone even more Zen in the past few years. “He seems very mature now,” says Pitta. “At one point he was going through women like Kleenex. He proposed to one and then called it off. Now he treats women with more respect.” Shortly after the season ended, McGwire got back together with Dickson, who had stayed a close friend after they broke up last New Year’s Eve. During their breakup, Dickson, who had been a volunteer at a child-abuse clinic, continued to work for the charity to which he weepily pledged $1 million a year at a press conference. Says McGwire: “She’s my best friend.” She’s friends with Kathy, McGwire’s ex, and the two couples often hang out. Who are these people?

Dickson, 28, a nearly 6-ft.-tall former UCLA volleyball player, is more athletic and less Miss Georgia than the blond-coiffed baseball wives she often sits with during games. She wants to write screenplays and reads Hollywood trade magazines when anyone not named McGwire is at bat. Brighter and snappier than her boyfriend, Dickson grew up with six brothers in a household similar to McGwire’s. They make a handsome couple you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

Dickson runs the Mark McGwire Foundation, with a pledged $3 million of McGwire’s money and tons of unsolicited donations coming in by mail–some in $70 checks and some in $1 bills from young kids. The foundation will be funding two facilities this year in St. Louis, Mo. (the Family Resource Center and the Evangelical Children’s Home), and two in Los Angeles (Children’s Institute International and the Stuart House, Dickson’s old workplace). “I have had a couple of really close friends open up to me and tell me that they were abused and it scarred their lives,” McGwire says, becoming the first slugger to use the phrase open up to refer to anything other than his batting stance. “Ali worked at a sexual-abuse home in Santa Monica, and I got to go there and see firsthand these young, innocent children walk through the door, and it’s heartbreaking. That’s why kids are into drugs and alcohol and violence.”

Though known for his frugality, McGwire has become an impressive philanthropist. On. Jan 9, he is planning to play host to a fund-raising concert in Walnut Creek for LaRussa’s charity, the Animal Rights Foundation. He also donated almost half the $2 million he got from McDonald’s, the one endorsement he’s done since he broke the home-run record, and got the Golden Arches to quietly give six-figure sums to a handful of charities, including ARF and the Sammy Sosa Foundation, which helps victims of Hurricane Georges in the Dominican Republic. McGwire posed with a Great Dane on the cover of the 1999 ARF calendar, even though he’s allergic to dogs. If you make a particularly sad face, it is likely you can get McGwire to give money to your cause.

McGwire himself didn’t see a lot of abuse growing up in a very happy, nondysfunctional family in Claremont, Calif. Although he and his brothers were only a few years apart, they were not very close; he wasn’t a best man or groomsman at any of their weddings. He’s made an effort to become closer to them over the past year, but only Dan McGwire (who played in the NFL in the early ’90s as backup quarterback with the Seattle Seahawks) showed up for Mark’s record-breaking game. “My other brothers were working at the time, and they couldn’t get away,” Mark explains. What, was Felicity on that night, guys?

But McGwire seems more surprised that so many people close to him came, and felt incredible pressure to hit No. 62 quickly, so they weren’t traveling with the team for the next two weeks. Partly out of humility and partly to relieve stress, McGwire doesn’t talk baseball with his family and friends during the season. His good friend, business manager and accountant Jim Milner remembered talking to McGwire on the phone the night he had become the first player to hit 50 homers for three seasons–and McGwire never mentioned it. “I was watching SportsCenter, and I said, ‘He didn’t even tell me,'” Milner says. McGwire also coped with the stress through a mysterious method of visualization that Dickson taught him, which sounds a lot like phone sex but less fun. “Over the phone before he goes to sleep, you just tell him stories and take him out of it,” she explains.

It wasn’t until late in the season, his friends say, that McGwire realized how significant breaking Roger Maris’ record was. Never a baseball historian (when his Olympic team stopped in Cooperstown, N.Y., he got pizza), McGwire was surprised by the attention. “The thought of television changing the games to go prime time…” he says in wonderment. “The thought of almost every reporter in the country and almost the world watching one player–it’s unheard-of.” When McGwire, after hitting 70, said he was “in awe of myself,” he wasn’t trying to be cocky. He was just finally getting it.

By No. 62, he understood, running over to shake the hands of the Marises, whose father had been resented for breaking Babe Ruth’s record without a Babe Ruth career. McGwire spoke of Maris to the press, making sure his predecessor, on whom he probably only recently got briefed, finally got his due in memoriam. McGwire was making sure, even in his moment of pure exultation and relief, that he did the right thing. Hug son, hug teammates, hug ex-wife, hug Marises and, oh, yeah, touch first base.

Setting the single-season home-run record, Dickson says, changed him, not because of the fame but because of the achievement. “In his everyday life I see a more confident person,” she says. “Not just as a player but as a person. Because he was able to manage the stress and overcome it.” McGwire’s challenge was thrust upon him, not only to deliver with his bat and to withstand the pressure, but to act like a hero for at least one baseball season. If he did it a little stiffly, you have to wonder this: Who would feel natural with 10,000 bulbs flashing as he worked? And would you want that person as a role model for your kids? Stiffness, it turns out, can be incredibly genuine.