Juiced (19 page)

To make matters worse, this came at a time when I was already depressed about baseball. No matter what I did in the game, no matter what I accomplished or how I played, it seemed I could never fill the shoes that had been laid out for me. I could never live up to the expectations the fans had built up for me. I would never get them to like me.

All I ever wanted to hear were those words: Jose Canseco, the All-American hoy. Jose, the national icon. Let's be honest: That's what everybody wants, isn't it? Doesn't everybody dream of being a household name, known by everyone, respected by all? Doesn't everyone think about being recognized wherever you go, watching people tap each other on the shoulder to say, "Look, isn't that him?!"

I was famous enough to be all over the place in the media: on magazine covers, in episodes of The Simpsons. But I don't feel I was ever truly accepted. They always depicted me as the outsider, the outlaw, the villain. I was never ushered into that special club of all-American sports stars, which is reserved for guys like Mark McGwire or Jason Giambi or Cal Ripken Jr.

After all, I was dark. I was born in Cuba. I would never be allowed to feel I really belonged. I saw this from the beginning with the way they pitted McGwire and me against each other during my first run with the A's, but after I returned to the team in 1997 and saw the special treatment he was getting by then, it really hit home for me. I realized for the first time that I would never, ever become the all-American sports hero.

It was over before it even began: That was the thing I came to realize. No matter what I did-the MVP, the 40-40-it didn't matter. I could never make the fans happy enough for them to view me the way I wanted to be viewed.

Who wouldn't be depressed, facing up to that?

And then, on top of it all, I found out about Jessica and Tony.

I didn't even want to think about it or analyze it. I just knew what I had to do. I walked over to my closet in the bedroom of that big house in Weston and pulled out a gun.

This wasn't just any gun, it was something called a Street Sweeper, which is a type of a machine gun. I don't have it any more, obviously. It's actually a barrel with twelve shotgun shells in it; the back of it pulls out, like a machine gun. Whatever it hits, it's going to destroy. All it takes is one shot. I used to use that thing when we would go deep-sea fishing; if we caught a shark, I'd shoot the hell out of it with the Street Sweeper.

But that night I wasn't thinking about shooting any sharks. I pulled the gun out of the closet, and carried it with me in one hand back toward the bed. The next step would be to lie down there and shoot myself. It was all happening spontaneously. I didn't give a second's thought to writing a note, or to the consequences of such an act. I just felt I had only one choice left.

But before I could get that far, something very strange happened.

From somewhere indistinct nearby, I heard my daughter make a kind of strange sound, a little squeal, a quiet cry. Whatever I heard, or thought I heard, it snapped me out of a trance; it distracted me from what I was doing. I put the gun down and walked through the hall to go to my daughter's room to see if she was all right.

What happened? I was wondering: Why would she make that strange noise?

But here's the eerie thing: That house in Weston was enormous, roughly 22,000 square feet. The main part of the house alone was 13,000. You could shout, and it wouldn't even travel halfway across the house. The master bedroom was at one corner; my daughter's room was way down at the far corner of the house. And her door was shut. So there was no way on this earth that I could have heard my daughter make that sound. It was just not humanly possible.

Something had decided that it wasn't my time yet.

When I looked into her room, of course, she was fast asleep.

She was just a baby, still not a year old. I lifted her up on my chest, and she stayed asleep the whole time. We walked down that long, long hallway together; then I got into bed and put her right on top of my chest. I could hear her heart beating, slow and regular. I knew she was sleeping deeply and peacefully. And it was as if I absorbed some of that sense of peace from her that day. I knew I could never leave her. That was the night my daughter saved my life.

Before the night ended, the phone rang a few times. It was Jessica, trying to reach me. But eventually I just took the phone off the hook, and lay there with Josie on my chest, letting my mind go. But my thoughts were about my daughter, not about the situation. Finally, after a long time, I fell asleep.

The next day I spoke with Jessica, and she said she was coming back. She wanted us to get back together. She kept telling me she couldn't believe she had gone up to Kansas City to see Tony. It was one of those things: They had met and talked a few times, and she'd decided to fly up to see him. Jessica and I were separated, but only recently, and I never thought she would all of a sudden take up with an athlete. Today I'm no longer bothered by the whole thing, but back then it was a new and fresh shock for me.

Tony and I talked that day, too-just a brief conversation, no hostility, no anger. I never get like that. I have absolute respect for all athletes. Hell, it wasn't Tony's fault. A beautiful girl like Jessica? What guy wouldn't jump at a chance with her? Plus, I had to admit, Jessica and I weren't really together. But in my mind and my heart we still were.

Jessica and I tried to make it work again after that, but we've never been able to. We've been back and forth so many times, I can't even count. But the thing that never changes is we always have Josie in common, and nothing is as important to me as my daughter. That's a strong bond.

Playing baseball takes a lot of time, but especially in the off season, you can spend a lot of time with your daughter, and I was always around. Jessica and I experienced so many amazing moments together with Josie-like when she first started talking. People always talk about a kid's first words, as if there were one magical moment. But it's never a word, it's more like a series of sounds that transcend into something else-a little bit of baby music, and suddenly she's spitting out a word.

Unlike me, Josie has always had a ton of personality. You can tell if kids are going to be dominating or bashful, and I was a very shy kid. Not my daughter. She's a rascal now, boy. She loves the camera, and people, and being out front and taking over. For a grown-up shy kid like me, it's amazing to watch. The older she gets, the more she develops her own personality, especially now, at the age of eight. I like just sitting there watching her. I can spend hours with her, watching her facial expressions; she's so smart, always trying to trick Dad into giving her an extra candy, or playing video games with her a little longer. Kids are so smart; they learn so fast, it's just incredible. All you can do is watch closely. If she does something wrong, you want to be firm with her and teach her the right way, but at the same time, in the back of your mind, you're thinking, "Wow, she's so smart. Man, look how cute she is!"

But you can't just go gaga on them all the time-because they'll spot your weakness every time. You can't let them see you're really smiling, because then they know: Okay, I got Daddy now. She definitely has me in the palm of her hand. I take her to the movies, to the arcade; she's very athletic, so I take her golfing and bowling. We play softball together. She's old enough for tennis now, so I want to start getting her into tennis.

A little while back, Jessica had a casting call for Target, which was looking for a model for a national TV commercial.

But she didn't have a babysitter lined up for that day, so she took Josie along with her. For a few years, people had been telling Jessica and me that Josie should be a model; we'd even been approached by talent scouts for modeling agencies. "Wow, you have a beautiful daughter," they would say. "Is she interested in modeling?" We always said no, figuring that Josie was too young for that.

But last summer, Jessica and I had begun talking more seriously about letting Josie try a little modeling, since we knew she would enjoy it. Then, a few weeks after that, the Target casting came up. Jessica brought Josie along with her, and guess who got the national commercial for Target?

My daughter's got beautiful green eyes, curly blonde hair-and the personality to go with it. And-no surprise-that day she got her first modeling job as well.

18. Steroid Summer, The McGwire-Sosa Show, and the Fake Controversy over Andro?

Ownership is looking the other way, even though there
are obvious users people constantly point to. When
something happens, there are going to be huge
liability suits.
-
REGGIE JACKSON

That next season, I signed with the Toronto Blue Jays as a free agent, and for the first time since the 1991 season I stayed healthy enough to play in 150 games. I finished with 107 RBIs and a career-high of forty-six home runs. But, believe me, no one was paying any attention at all to what I was doing. That was the summer when everyone was hitting home runs, and forty-six only ranked me third in the American League. Over in the National League, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were the biggest thing to hit baseball in years. They traded home runs all summer long, battling it out to see who would take Roger Maris's single-season record.

McGwire and Sosa brought the game of baseball back to life that summer, pure and simple. They generated so much excitement, so much interest, that the cloud that had been hanging over baseball since the 1994 strike was finally lifted. People were as excited about baseball as they had ever been, even going back to the heyday of Babe Ruth and those guys.

And why? Because the owners had been smart enough not to chase steroid use out of the game, allowing guys like McGwire to make the most of steroids and growth hormone, turning themselves into larger than life heroes in more ways than one.

The owners' attitude? As far as I could tell, Go ahead and do it.

And why not? The steroid spectacle was making money for them. It brought the game back to life. Eventually they were going to have to find a way to deal with steroids, but back then they weren't worried about it. They weren't even testing. Instead, they gave players every reason to get bigger and stronger.

If the athlete did his part, jabbed himself in the butt with the steroid needle, and grew stronger and tougher and better, the owners did their part and wrote out the checks-which just kept getting bigger all the time. Everybody was profiting, and they never even had to answer difficult questions, since no one wanted to ask them. There's a name for that kind of thing: Good business.

Baseball had been in really serious trouble since the 1994 strike, and absolutely everyone knew it, from fans to players to sportswriters to owners. The sport was on a downhill slide, and had no idea how to right itself. People thought it needed a shot in the arm. In the end, though, what it took was a shot somewhere else.

That was the point in the history of the game when the steroid revolution really exploded.

If the owners were asking themselves, How could we bring baseball back?, it seemed as though they finally hit on the simple answer: home runs. So how could you pump up the sport and get an exciting home run race going? The players knew the answer to that: steroids. I believe that the leadership of baseball made a tacit decision not only to tolerate steroid use, but actually to pretend it didn't exist among baseball players, even as it was making the sport more popular with the public. They obviously knew what they were doing, too. Baseball has been on a roll ever since.

If the owners want to evade responsibility for their part in the steroid revolution now, let them try. I'm not going to name any actual owners; I don't want anyone picking up a phone and sending a hit man after me. But let's put it this way: I know what they were thinking about players juicing up the game. They're good businessmen, and they made a business decision, pure and simple.

To see how successful their laissez-faire attitude toward steroids was, just look at the summer of 1998 and how interest in the game exploded. You heard it all the time that year: This was just what baseball needed, the excitement of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both going after Maris's record in the same year. The McGwire-Sosa contest was great for ratings, great for attendance, and great for the viability of the game. That summer was everything the owners were hoping for.

McGwire had been a pretty big player back in Oakland, but by the summer of 1998 he was huge-up around 280 pounds.

Balls that would have been fly-ball outs earlier in his career now sailed over the fence for home runs. He hit forty-nine as a rookie, so there was never any doubt that he was a natural slugger-one of the greatest ever, if you ask me.

But it took a lot of injections to get him past Roger Maris that summer.

I don't know Sammy Sosa personally, so I can't say for a fact that he ever took steroids. But I remember thinking that his transformation looked even more dramatic than Mark's. It looked like he was trying to make up for lost time by bulking up faster than McGwire ever had. He gained thirty pounds, just like that, and got up to 260 so fast, you could see the bloating in his face and neck. It seemed so obvious, it was a joke.

And the results ended up in the record books. Sammy had always been a big swinger, and when he connected, he could hit the ball a long way. But through his first nine seasons in the major leagues, only once did he hit forty homers in a season.

Then he started bulking up, and with his new body hit sixty-six homers in 1998, sixty-three the next season, fifty the year after that, and then sixty-four in 2001.

The summer of 1998, though, was the high-water mark for steroids in baseball. At the time, I joked that so many guys went rushing to hide their vials in the locker room when the media showed up that it was like watching roaches scurrying for cover after the lights go on.