By Michael Miner
The London press also linked the two stories. The Guardian headline, “US Obsessions: A beleaguered president, a triumphant baseball player,” ran over a six-column picture of McGwire clobbering his 61st home run. The Observer termed the “contest” between Sosa and McGwire “a happy apotheosis to the President’s problems.” The Telegraph had McGwire remarking, “People have been saying it is bringing the country together. So be it. I am happy to bring the country together.” The Telegraph headline announced, “McGwire’s 62nd gives America the hero it needs.”
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Everyone was cheering him on. “Even supporters of opposing teams want McGwire to put wood on leather,” Hugo Gurdon observed in the Telegraph. “They boo their own pitchers if they ‘walk’ him–that is, deliberately throw wides which he cannot reach, allowing him a free saunter to first base.” When McGwire cracked his record-setting homer the Times told Britain with a straight face that he’d “long since escaped the sports pages, shoving the Monica Lewinsky affair from the headlines.”
I called Kettle, the Guardian bureau chief in Washington, and asked him why, if the moment was incomprehensible (and presumably of little consequence to the noncomprehending), he bothered reporting it.
Of course he was speaking of Don Bradman.
“RUTH’S 60 HOMERS STILL TOPS
Contemporary sportswriters who want to excoriate Frick could begin by asking what a sportswriter was doing as commissioner of baseball in the first place. (Then they could ask what sportswriters are doing choosing MVPs and Hall of Fame members.) But to rip Frick for being troubled by the new 162-game schedule is to fail to exercise historical imagination.
