On Mark McGwire and Fallen Idols

I take a momentary break from Margaret Edson’s W;t to address Mark McGwire’s confession yesterday to having used steroids.  The man whose homerun race with Sammy Sosa “saved baseball” and who then refused to “speak about the past” in a Congressional hearing is finally opening up.  Or at least opening up to a degreee.  He still doesn’t acknowledge the extent to which steroids helped him or admit that he probably would not have bested Roger Maris’s homerun record without them.

How are we to handle the fact that our sports heroes routinely let us down? (As Octave says in Jean Renoir’s film Rules of the Game, “In the air, they’re gods, but on earth they have feet of clay.”)  Bernard Malamud’s baseball novel The Natural helps us negotiate this terrain.

If you haven’t read The Natural, don’t think you know it by having seen the Robert Redford movie.  In fact, the movie is guilty of the very hero worship that Malamud is challenging.  At the end of the film, a final homerun allows its faltering hero to go out on top.  In the book, the hero strikes out and then must face tabloid headlines and the disillusion of a young boy.

This isn’t the only time Hollywood has butchered the ending of a Malamud novel.  I vaguely remember, from my childhood, an embarrassingly overwrought final scene in the movie version of Malamud’s The Fixer.

As a Jewish writer, Malamud is suspicious of triumphant conclusions.  Bad things happen, not all of them deserved.  Certainly Roy Hobbs, the natural baseball player whose bat “Wonderboy” accomplishes marvels, doesn’t deserve his final degradation.  Dazzled by the lights of fame, he finds himself out of his depth and goes from one screw-up to another.  In the end, he breaks down and cries and the world is deprived of his gift.

Isn’t this the kind of work we should be reading to help us better handle the Mark McGwires and Tiger Woodses and other celebrity scandals that periodically fixate us?  Malamud is telling us that we must learn to live with our flawed selves.  We are not innocents and should stop pretending that we are.

The ending of The Natural, as I recall, invokes the “Say it ain’t so, Joe” cry of the little boy to Shoeless Joe Jackson following the 1919 scandal where Chicago White Sox players fixed the World Series.  As I interpret this scene, Malamud is reminding us that we are not children.  Our feigned innocence, rather, is a form of denial, and if we insist on continually hiding out in it, we will go on being perpetually disillusioned.  We will be on a treadmill of our own devising, and each new expose will resemble the last.

In point of fact, we have long known that baseball players were taking steroids.  We just chose not to acknowledge it.  We have long known that people can’t be as perfect as the image that Tiger Woods projected.  We just engaged in the fantasy that perfection was possible.  Hollywood too often promotes our fantasies whereas Malamud brings us back to earth.  This writer offers us a more realistic view of human fallibility, and perhaps we would put less pressure on our idols, and treat them more humanely, if we listened to him.

I think this would help us deal better with flawed politicians as well.  And with our own flawed selves.