Coming Clean: Mark McGwire admits he cheated

Even if you aren’t a baseball fan, you still need to read this.
Mark McGwire, the big first baseman who played St. Louis Cardinals and Oakland Athletics revealed a secret that he has kept to himself for 11 long years. He cheated.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

In 1998, McGwire broke Roger Maris‘s single season home run record by clubbing 70 round-trippers. Today, he admitted that he did so while on steroids, enhancing his performance.

McGwire retired in 2001 and since, has remained in almost total seclusion. Rather than living the life of a true American hero, he has lurked in his palatial home, watering the lawn and reading. He could have repeated the home run trot well into his senior kids, talking to school kids an business groups. He could signed baseballs and patted Little Leaguers on the head. But he couldn’t. “I hid it from everyone,” he said in a phone interview. He also admitted, “I wish I had never played.”

Every day, the truth haunted him. The trophies. The baseballs in cases on the mantle. The photos of him shaking hands with dignitaries were all reminders of the truth. He had money. He had a beautiful wife. He had everything but peace.

Baseball fan or not, you can relate to his pain. If you’ve ever had a secret, a deep, dark secret, you know the agony. The truth never goes away… It’s there when you go to sleep. Its there when you wake up. It’s everywhere.

The truth/deception struggle is every where. If you are an employee, there is many opportunities to shade fact, to tell a lie, or not be honest. The same works for other interpersonal relationships. And certainly businesses and corporations engage in continual truth bending.

The problem is that truth will eventually come to light. “I never knew when, but I always knew this day would come,” McGwire said.

I don’t think McGwire chose to lie in a single moment, but instead slid into it a little at a time. Tom Drout said this, “Failure to embrace and act upon truth will always result in deception.”

The key is to love truth — and let it stand for what it is. If we are people of the truth, we will never have to spend energy on a lie.

Mark McGwire will pay a heavy price for his deception.
And so will you and I , unless we all embrace the truth.

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