Mark McGwire is the new Pete Rose.
He is the new Jimmy Swaggart.
He is the new Richard Nixon.
I wish he could have been Charles Colson.
Mark McGuire has made his place in history and its certainly not the one he was looking for. He has admitted to using steroids and human growth hormones.
And he has probably done it too late.
You see, Pete Rose did finally admit that he bet on baseball. But he didn’t do it until evidence had made it pretty clear and he’d tried every other way to redeem himself. Jimmy Swaggert did make his famous “I have sinned” speech through tears and disheveledness, but not until there were pictures and interviews and other kinds of evidence against him. Richard Nixon finally admitted to his misgivings after long having denied them.
When an apology comes after everyone else knows you’re guilty, it lacks a lot of its weight. In this instance, Mr. McGwire was fresh off another year of not being elected to the Hall of Fame, with numbers that made it clear that he never would.
Rather than point the finger, we can all learn from his case. Ever since the garden, when Adam broke the rules, felt shame, hid, lied, blamed someone else and even blamed God for his lot, we humans have learned the art of the cover up. And it doesn’t work.
Charles Colson, on the other hand, wowed the world decades ago. Before he was the leader of Prison Fellowship and a national voice for the intelligence of the Christian faith, he was part of Nixon’s Watergate team, and one of the first ones to confess his role and take his medicine. Since then, he had one of the shortest incarcerations and longest careers of all of Nixon’s co-conspirators, and his life is certainly a candidate for the Most Redemptive of that group.
I believe Brit Hume had a positive word for Tiger Words and the same holds true for Mark McGwire. And for you and me as well! I hope that the media picks up on it in a positive way. Like Tiger Woods, Mark McGwire’s story could eventually be one of forgiveness and redemption, especially if there is a supernatural and spiritual component to it. I hope that will be his path, rather than that of Mr.’s Rose, Swaggart and Nixon, who settled for media manipulation as their goal, rather than authentic repentance.