#9 Mark Mcgwire admits steroid use
January 15, 2010
Bob Costas landed the first televised interview with Mark McGwire after he admitted using steroids and human growth hormone during his home run record-setting baseball career. And he left with the belief that McGwire has convinced himself of something that isn't logical - that his performance wasn't enhanced by the substances.

Costas said he believes McGwire was genuine in his remarks that they only helped him overcome injury, not gain physical advantages. But Costas added "that is different than saying I agree with everything he said. ... I think he genuinely believes that if he could have stayed in one piece, with the legitimate hard work he did and his natural ability he still would have done all this."

But Costas, a noted baseball commentator who values the integrity of past accomplishments, points specifically at McGwire's home-run ratio and scoffs at the reality of that
"Neither he nor anyone else would have been able to do this," he said. "That part of his response is not credible. But maybe he has convinced himself. And no one can quantify how many home runs he would have hit (without using performance-enhancing substances) - 50? 48? 46? Who knows?"

Costas had been hoping to line up an interview with McGwire for years. And when he got the coup Monday on MLB Network, it took McGwire only a few minutes to show live TV's unpredictability.

Earlier in the day McGwire admitted that he had used steroids and HGH during his career, in which he hit 583 home runs and smashed Roger Maris' single-season homer record. The admission came in a written statement, followed by short interviews with The Associated Press and select members of the St. Louis media.

But Costas, who hadn't seen or heard the previous interviews, was taken aback when McGwire said in this very public setting that he believed steroids didn't give him additional strength.

"It very much surprised me when, live, he disavowed any connection between steroids and performance," Costas said. "I haven't seen the tape (of the interview), but somebody told me I came back to it five or six times."

Costas had years to prepare, at least in his mind, his questions. And he had a game plan going in.

"You try to prioritize it," he said. "We'll first get to the stuff that's most topical, then get to personal stuff like what were these years away from the game like, touch on the Maris family. That will happen in the second half after we click through these pertinent things. But when a couple minutes in he says this (that steroids didn't help his strength), then I had to audible. It was like, whoa! If you believe that, it puts a lot of other things in a different light. If you believe you got no benefit from that, how do you explain the whole era? Are you the only guy who got no benefit from it?"

Costas said he thinks the reason that he and MLB Network were picked for McGwire's first national TV interview about the subject was the result of several factors, including Costas' track record and the amount of time - nearly an hour - the outlet could devote to the conversation.

"I had talked to him a couple times, the most recently of which was probably two years ago just to say if you ever want to talk about any of these issues, I believe you'd find a fair and credible place to do it with me," Costas said. "At that time I was at HBO, but I felt it was very important that if he ever spoke, that he do it at a place that not only was credible but also would be able to have a lot of time to devote.

"If you do it on a network news magazine (such as "60 Minutes" or "Dateline," you'd have 12 minutes, 15 minutes. There were a limited number of places that provide the proper forum. ... I'm pretty certain that had I still been at HBO that this would have happened on HBO. I hope anything I do is done civilly and politely."

And in retrospect, Costas said he would have changed two things in the interview - he would have asked McGwire why he apologized to the Maris family earlier in the day, given that McGwire said he didn't think steroids helped him break Maris' record, and he would have pressed McGwire for more details about the steroids he used.

Jose Canseco - a former teammate of McGwire's in Oakland who has long talked about McGwire's steroids use - told Evan Makovsky on a local radion s how that McGwire in the interview looked "like a little puppet completely orchestrated by Major League Baseball

Posted by jc at 6:22 AM