Whenever Missouri State Rep. Don Calloway Jr. hops onto Interstate 70 heading west out of downtown in “Baseball City USA,” the nickname Cardinals fans prefer, he immediately intersects a personal crossroads of responsibility and regret.
The five-mile portion of I-70 clearly marked by the green road sign “Mark McGwire Highway,” — a stretch roughly as long as the distance traveled by the 70 home runs McGwire hit in 1998 — still bears the name of the discredited former Cardinals slugger. It would be like Clark Street bordering Wrigley Field being named “Sammy Sosa Lane.”
Unlike Sosa and Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, McGwire has not been publicly linked to a positive steroids test. But he nonetheless has lived under a cloud of suspicion since refusing to “talk about the past” during congressional hearings in 2005.
In the four years since McGwire whiffed on Capitol Hill, several disappointed Missouri politicians, Calloway included, have tried unsuccessfully to take the player’s name off the highway.
As Major League Baseball brings the All-Star Game to St. Louis this week for the first time in 43 years, the public debate over the section of road named for McGwire may have diminished.
For Calloway, the discomfort has not.
“It’s still embarrassing to try to raise kids here who will idolize sports heroes who played fair and had principles and values when we hold up guys like [McGwire] who were cheaters and have a highway named for him,” Calloway said. “There isn’t anybody who would tell you he was above-board. There is still an important statement to be made that we won’t hold up people who didn’t do things the right way.”
Jack Buck’s family passes
Calloway tried to formalize that sentiment in May when he introduced a bill in the state legislature proposing McGwire’s name be removed from the section of I-70 from Goodfellow Boulevard to the Mississippi River and renamed “Jack Buck Memorial Highway.” Buck, who died in 2002, called Cardinals games for 47 seasons, his voice the soundtrack of summer for generations of Cardinals fans in Missouri and across the Midwest.
But members of Buck’s family expressed their reservations over involving the broadcaster’s name with anything as controversial as McGwire. During 11th-hour legislative maneuvering in May, tucked into a judiciary bill, the legislature instead passed a measure proclaiming a seven-mile stretch of Highway 40 to be “Jack Buck Memorial Highway.” It awaits Gov. Jay Nixon’s signature.
“We love Jack Buck because he was one of us, the same with Lou Brock, Ozzie Smith, Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, guys who lived here, knew us, knew our neighborhoods,” Calloway said. “It was never that way with McGwire. The day after the season ended, he was back off to California. If he had more of a connection with people of the city who supported him so much, there wouldn’t be such down feelings about him right now.”
Attempts to reach McGwire, a Cardinal from 1997 to 2001, were unsuccessful. The closest McGwire has come recently to sharing his thoughts about the controversy likely to mar his baseball legacy forever was a March interview with the New York Times.
“I’m such an easygoing guy, I don’t need to sweep away any bitterness,” McGwire said.
A decade after the highway dedication , bitterness lingers among some residents who once cheered McGwire during the unforgettable summer of ’98.
That season was considered the One That Saved Baseball, a summerlong festival along the Mississippi River when the home run race between McGwire and Sosa brought millions of baseball fans back to the game they had soured on after the ’94 strike wiped out the World Series. But given the revelations, 1998 looks like the peak of baseball’s steroid era, and many of those thrills now feel cheap.
“The home run chase revitalized baseball right here, and we were so proud and so excited. But as things have come to fruition and borne themselves out, it’s tainted,” Calloway said. “Citi Field in New York has Jackie Robinson Rotunda.
“And we have Mark McGwire Highway.”
Calloway just shook his head.
Bob Costas was one of the first voices to express caution over baseball’s inflated home run numbers, saying in 1996 that “something was out of whack.” He understands how his St. Louis neighbors could be of two minds on McGwire.
“There’s no way to know this 100 percent, but most fans see the steroid era as a blight on the game that compromises the authenticity of the records,” Costas said. “But most people don’t want steroid users hung in the public square. I don’t think most people in St. Louis have problems with Mark McGwire as a person. Because there is ambivalence, people don’t know quite what to do with that ambivalence, and they’re reluctant to undo what they did.”
“It would be different,” Costas said, “if they decided to name something for him now, of course. But there is a difference in revoking something and taking his name off it, which seems punitive and a little harsh. Everybody got caught up in [1998].”
Bill now a big regret
Ryan McKenna was a freshman state senator in 1999 who took great pride in being a co-sponsor of Missouri Senate Bill No. 10, authored by retired Sen. John Scott. Their work put McGwire’s 70-homer season on the map — literally.
McKenna felt a rush run through him when he introduced himself to McGwire during a visit to the Cardinals’ spring training site in Jupiter, Fla. At a nightclub inside the hotel where both men were staying that night in ’99, McKenna approached McGwire to shake his hand as the legislator who carried the bill renaming I-70.
“I’ll never forget it. He just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t give a [darn],’ and he turned and walked away,” McKenna said. “He just didn’t care. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have withdrawn the bill.”
Would he do away with the honorific?
“It’s not a priority, but I’d support changing its name,” McKenna said. “In retrospect, it is one of the biggest regrets I have in 10 years as a legislator.”
In 2006, McKenna tried changing the road’s name to “St. Louis Cardinals Baseball Highway,” but that effort, like a similar one in 2004 by then-state representative Wes Wagner, failed.
Undeterred, St. Louis-based state Rep. Talibdin El-Amin followed up in 2007 with a proposal to rename the highway for the city’s first African-American comptroller, John Bass. But El-Amin’s efforts stalled because of more pressing legislation. Not that the state representative has accepted what he calls the “incongruous” connection between the McGwire Highway and many of the neighborhoods it speeds through adjacent to it.
“It should be named for somebody like [John Bass], from our community, who would be an ongoing history lesson for our kids,” El-Amin said. “Some people were saying, ‘What’s the big deal?’ Well, I said if it’s not such a big deal, then take the sign down.
“In the absence of so many role models in the African-American community, I thought it’d be better to honor someone more representative to give hope.”
Caught up in the moment
Martin Mathews remembers being an inspired, wide-eyed 22-year-old in May 1947 when Jackie Robinson played in St. Louis’ Sportsman’s Park the summer Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier.
“I was out there four hours early just to get tickets, and the lines, oh, they were long,” recalled Mathews, 84.
On his office wall are pictures of himself with Ronald Reagan, Michael Jordan, Walter Payton, Oprah Winfrey and others he has encountered in his esteemed career in the community. The shrine wouldn’t be complete without a reminder of the history Robinson made in 1947.
Mathews, the co-founder of the nationally recognized Mathews-Dickey Boys and Girls Club in St.Louis, called that ’47 baseball season one of the two most memorable he ever had experienced.
The other was 1998.
“Just like everybody wanted to see Jackie then, everybody wanted to see McGwire. You’d see license plates from all over the Midwest in the parking lot,” Mathews said. “I was out there (Sept. 8, 1998) when he hit No. 62 (off the Cubs’ Steve Trachsel). There were 15,000 people who couldn’t get in. People didn’t care if the Cardinals won. They cared if McGwire hit a home run. So we can’t forget that.”
For that reason, as much as Mathews believes African-American pioneers in town such as Bass or T.D. McNeal (Missouri’s first black state senator) deserve to be honored, he has no problem seeing McGwire’s name adorn the highway that runs near his building.
“I know why it bugs people, but it doesn’t bother me because I was out there when he was hitting all those home runs, so I don’t think we need to take the guy’s name down,” Mathews said. “He who is without sin cast the first stone. This is an imperfect world, and McGwire isn’t perfect. But he did some great things for baseball.”
St. Louis stands on own
Downtown businessmen such as Gary VanMatre, the general manager of former Cardinal Mike Shannon’s restaurant, a McGwire-sized home run away from new Busch Stadium, would prefer to focus on the $65 million the All-Star Game is expected to pump into the local economy.
VanMatre would like to restrict the conversation to the baseball glitterati expected to order thick steaks and drink cold beer in his restaurant for days or how Commissioner Bud Selig and local hero Albert Pujols already have reserved private rooms.
But, inevitably, he knows an out-of-towner will bring up McGwire’s name being on the highway, putting him in an awkward spot inside his comfy bar.
“I don’t know how much I want to comment on that in terms of how the city feels. … What I can say is this city is ready to turn the page,” VanMatre said. “You hear rumblings about McGwire, but it’s not overall a huge issue in the city.”
In the days leading up to baseball’s Mid-Summer Classic, it will be an issue hard to ignore for anybody leaving the ballpark and heading west on I-70.
“When all the writers descend on St. Louis, I’m sure it’ll get mentioned, but you have to remember it was done during the feel-good period of ’99,” Costas said. “It seemed like such a natural thing at the time. He didn’t hit 69 or 68 home runs. He hit 70, and there’s a Highway 70 running through St. Louis. When it happened, it was something that captured the good feeling in the community. It was a prototypical St. Louis moment.”
Now there are moments Calloway drives by the green road sign with McGwire’s name and considers what he will tell his infant son, Don III, when the boy is old enough to ask who Mark McGwire is and why does he have a highway named for him.
“I think I’ll say he brought a lot of excitement to the city, but we found out later that he did it in a way that wasn’t altogether proper, and I will leave him to make his own judgments,” Calloway said. “Sadly, McGwire was a small but very visible part of a bigger picture in baseball. It’s just that not every other player in the picture has a highway named for him.”
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Shame Avenue
The Mark McGwire Highway is far from the only civic tribute to a ballplayer whose contributions haven’t always brought pride on the city that honored him.
*Pete Rose Way
Baseball’s Hit King still has a street named in his honor running through Cincinnati’s southern section of downtown that Reds fans can’t miss on their way to the Great American Ballpark.
* Sammy Sosa’s star
In 2000, Sammy Sosa was the first baseball player honored in Miami’s “Little Havana” section with his name embedded in a sidewalk on Calle Ocho — a tribute reserved for Hispanic celebrities and humanitarians.
*Alex Rodriguez Park
Last February, the University of Miami named its baseball stadium for Alex Rodriguez within days of the revelations that Rodriguez’s name was one of 104 names on a list of Major League Baseball players who reportedly tested positive for steroids in 2003. Rodriguez never attended Miami but committed to the school before turning pro and made a $3.9 million donation to its baseball program.
*Rafael Palmeiro Center
Mississippi State University, Palmeiro’s alma mater, named a $3.8 million, 68,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art athletic facility for the disgraced former slugger in 2005 — months after he served a suspension for testing positive for steroids.
— David Haugh
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dhaugh@tribune.com
Does honor no longer fit? Vote on whether the Mark McGwire Highway should be renamed at chicagotribune.com/mcgwirepoll
