I AM THE FORREST GUMP OF BASEBALL’S STEROID ERA
Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds . . . and Me
Author Steven Travers wrote the best-selling Barry Bonds bio featuring another “Forrest Gump” figure, Dodger catcher Chad Kreuter on the cover
The film Forrest Gump came out in 1994. In that film starring Tom Hanks, a young, naive man moves throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in innocent proximity to many of the biggest world-changing events of our times, ranging from Elvis Presley to Bear Bryant to segregation; to Vietnam to LBJ to Watergate; to the fad era of the ‘70s to AIDs in the ‘80s. Ironically, 1994 was the year I started writing professionally.
The 20-year period between 1982 and 2002 mark the years in which I came into close personal contact with the three principal sluggers of baseball’s “steroid era”: Jose Canseco, the “godfather” of steroids in the game; his protege, Mark McGwire, who re-popularized the game setting the home run record; and Barry Bonds, McGwire’s college rival who surpassed all the records and still holds them.
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Little could I imagine, growing up a young baseball player in California, that the game would take me into such rarefied air, that I would come to know, be teammates, classmates and associates of world famous athletes whose names reverberate throughout the echoes of sport. But I did.
Growing up I was a good player. I never really let myself dream that I could play in the Major Leagues. I did, however, believe I could get a scholarship to play in college and sign a professional contract with some club. At that point I would “play it as it lays.” If I had the goods to get to “the Show,” so be it. But first there was Redwood High School.
The baseball program at Redwood was so good that I logically assumed if I could play there, a college scholarship would naturally follow, and then pro ball. That is indeed what happened. In my senior year, our team was named national champions by Collegiate Baseball magazine and the Easton Bat Company. This followed up our legendary coach, Al Endriss, being named National Coach of the Year. At the end of the 1970s The Sporting News, the “bible of baseball,” named Redwood the National High School Program of the decade. In later years retrospectives by MaxPreps and Student Sports magazine ranked that 1977 team the 13th best prep team of all time.
I wanted to go to USC badly. Two of my Redwood teammates, Jim Connor and Mickey Meister, received full rides to USC. To my knowledge these are the only two players from our league ever to get scholarships to USC straight out of high school, and at that time their program was far and away the best in college baseball.
I , however, received no love from the Trojans. I ended up at Santa Monica College, where in the fall of 1978 I pitched a fall ball game against the defending national champions, Southern Cal. I managed to pitch five perfect innings. After the game Marcel Lachemann, the top assistant under legendary head coach Rod Dedeaux, approached me. God bless him, Jimmy Connor talked me up to Lach, who told men he was going to keep his eye on me.
In 1979 at Santa Monica College I led the state in games pitched with a 1.97 earned run average, earning All-Southern California Conference honors. I received attention from a number of programs, including Loyola Marymount, California, Utah State and Yakima Valley J.C. But the only one that interested me was USC. I was invited to speak to Coach Lachemann at their Dedeaux Field offices.
“We like what we saw,” he told me. “We can’t offer you a scholarship but if your parents can afford tuition, there will be a spot in our program for you.” He showed me a print-out that included my name among the “top 50 prospects in Southern California.”
I called my dad, and indeed his law practice was going well and he assured me he could afford to pay for me to attend USC. However, when a spot on USC’s team in the California Collegiate Summer League, Charter Oaks, was not offered me, I began to have second thoughts.
My dad suggested I spend the summer at our condominium near Lake Tahoe. I could work a job clearing the local ski runs, train in the Northstar gym, and play for a fast semi-pro team in nearby Reno that played four nights a week. I still thought I was headed to USC, but after having a dominant summer, the new baseball coach at the University of Nevada, Del Youngblood told me there were still a couple of scholarships left, offering me one. So I played two years at Nevada, made All-Northern California Baseball Association, and left holding several school pitching records.
From there I signed with the St. Louis Cardinals. In the first seven weeks of the 1981 season, I led the Appalachian League with a 1.70 earned run average with a strikeout per inning. Every night I heard our manager, Johnny Lewis, call director of player development Lee Steven in St. Louis, extolling my virtues. I had a developed a true big league “out pitch,” the screwball. Three pitchers, Mike Cuellar, Mike Marshall and Fernando Valenzuela, won Cy Young awards throwing the screwball. In addition Ron Perranoski, Tug McGraw, Jim Brewer, Willie Hernandez and Bill “Spaceman” Lee were succesful big league hurlers using the screwball.
But on August 10, due to sheer negligence on Lewis’s part, which I do not need to get into, I tore my rotator cuff. The Cardinals, instead of sending me to the Kerlan-Jobe Clinic for laser surgery, released me during Spring Training in St. Petersburg, Florida, 1982. I told them to issue me a ticket to Phoenix, where Dick Wiencek, the Oakland A’s director of player development, signed me.
The culture of the A’s was entirely different from St. Louis. First of all, it seemed like half the players were from Pepperdine, with a tremendous emphasis on West Coast players. The story behind the Pepperdine connection concerned an A’s scout who it was said did not like fighting the L.A. traffic. Figuring every college team would roll through Malibu to play the Pepperdine Waves, he just hung out there in the sunshine looking at the ocean, consequently signing most of their players.
The first guy I met was Chuck Fick, a true baseball character that we rarely see any more in this era of social media, in which white players are afraid to show any personality lest somebody accuse them of racism and toxic masculinity. But Chuck was incredible. Many readers will recall who he was. After baseball he tried acting. He was the first baseman in Mr. Baseball who asks Tom Selleck, “You got any naked pictures of your wife?” He was also the catcher in Naked Gun when Leslie Nielsen plays the crazy umpire.
He was also at least two or three years older than the scouts realized. Chuck had come out of high school in Torrance and played quarterback at El Camino J.C. Not having attracted good offers, he then switched to Santa Monica College to play catcher, where he should not have been eligible, but somehow nobody got on that he had used up junior college athletic eligibility at El Camino.
From there it was on to Pepperdine, where his teammates joked he was “25 going on 30.”
Now he was in camp, indeed several years older than many in the organization realized he was.
Within minutes of meeting Chuck he was my best friend. He proceeded to introduce me to everybody in the organization, which as I say included many ex-Pepperdine Waves. I personally knew many of these guys because my good friend Brad Cole had been a pitcher on their 1979 College World Series team, in which Chuck was the catcher. Among the Waves in Spring Training with Oakland that March were an infielder named Kevin Jacobson, a catcher named Bill Bathe, an outfielder named Jay Schellin, and others. Everybody in baseball, it seemed, was on a first name basis with Chuck Fick.
Then there was Dave Weatherman, a superstar college pitcher who had led Cal State, Fullerton to the College World Series title. He was best friends with my old Redwood teammate Frank Ferroni, and I had met him visiting Frank in Fullerton. He and I became fast friends.
Despite the injury I had suffered the previous year with the Cardinals, I managed to have an excellent spring. Towards the end of camp I showed up at our minor league facilities at the Arizona State practice fields. Every day players would come here and look at sheets of paper laid out on tables. Those sheets told every single player in the organization, from Class A to Oakland, where they were to be on that day. For instance, a player might be assigned to play for the Modesto Club in a 1 P.M. game vs. the Cubs’ Quad Cities team at Mesa J.C. Or it might tell a pitcher he was to work on his bullpen, followed by wind sprints and weight training.
This particular day was a Saturday and it was my day to pitch. I had last thrown five days earlier. I figured I would pitch in some obscure minor league exhibition game at Glendale J.C. or Tempe or wherever, against a similar contingent of Brewers or Padres or Mariners. Instead I did not see my name anywhere.
“My name’s not here,” I said to my friend Dennis Gonsalves, a former Cal State, Long Beach star who had played football with Fick at El Camino J.C. He had previously pitched in the Giants’ organization. “Do you think that’s their way of telling me I’ve been released?”
“No bro,” he said. “If they release you they’d call you into skip’s office.”
Indeed, that was the way it was done. One minute you would be chatting with a guy in the outfield when Jim Perry, a former all-star with the Twins, would call out to so-and-so, “Skip wants to see you in his office.”
“Skip” was one of the minor league managers, who would start every one of these conversations saying, “This is the toughest job a manager has.”
As the player departed there were cursory words of, “See ya,” or “Good luck,” or “Nice knowin’ ya,” and sometimes, “Hey, can I get your sweatshirts before you leave?”
The player would be in “skip’s” office five minutes, then asked to clear out his cubicle and see Walt Jocketty in the trailer set up at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, home of the big league club. Walt, a genial fellow with nice blonde hair, who looked more like a golf pro, would give the player his last check, tickets to his hometown airport, and from there life as an assistant high school coach, or back to school, or whatever ex-pro baseball players become, which often consists of drinking in a bar with their buddies, regaling them with minor league stories, usually of horny small town “groupies” making themselves available to the squad.
No, Dennis Gonsalves attempted to assure me, this was not my fate. “Check the Oakland roster,” he said.
“Come on, man, I’m not pitching for the Oakland A’s today,” I replied.
But I looked at the Oakland roster sheet and lo and behold, against all odds, there was my name, pitching innings four through seven for the Oakland Athletics Major League team in an exhibition game at Phoenix Muni vs. the San Francisco Giants.
“Holy cow,” I blurted out.
“You’re in ‘the Show,’ bro,” Gonzo said.
“Holy cow.”
It was still early, maybe 8:15 in the morning. The A’s-Giants game was scheduled for noon or one. I had a car and drove straight to Phoenix Municipal Stadium. There was a payphone. I called my dad and a couple friends, telling them I was playing in the big league Spring exhibition game which would be on both the A’s and Giants radio stations.
Then I entered the stadium, and saw one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen. Sitting on top of the A’s dugout was a beautiful brunette with the most intense tan I’ve ever seen, the kind a girl can get only by laying out in the Arizona sun five hours a day for a month-plus. She was slathered in oil and wore a tiny little itty-bitty polka dot bikini.
Baseball ‘groupies’ making themselves available
I entered the dugout. There was hardly anybody there yet. Somebody was taking cuts in the batting cage. Another guy was taking infield grounders. The dugout was empty except for me and one of Oakland’s coaches. He was talking to the girl on the dugout. They knew each other.
From listening to their conversation I gathered that she was married to Bob Didier, a former Atlanta Braves catcher, now a coach or instructor in the A’s system.
“So what are you doing on the dugout?” the coach asked her.
“I’m trolling for dates,”she replied.
Trolling for dates!
“What does Bob have to say about that?”
“Bob dates who he wants to date and I date who I want to date.”
Were they swingers? Were they breaking up? Was she some kind of super-groupie?
I quickly realized this was obviously an important day for me, and I needed to get this girl out of my head, like Crash Davis in Bull Durham who has to call time out to get Susan Sarandon out of his.
I did my stretching and returned to the dugout. Slowly the 1982 Oakland A’s meandered into the dugout. They were defending Western Division champs and featured Rickey Henderson, Dwayne Murphy, Joe Rudi, Mike Norris and other top players. They also featured Mike Davis, who had played for San Diego Hoover against my Redwood team that won the national championship, as well as Shooty Babitt, a Berkeley High star we also faced in high school.
Nobody, and I mean nobody said a word to me. I did not open my mouth. Finally, at game time came the manager, Billy Martin. It was obvious that he and his pitching coach and drinking buddy Art Fowler were hung over. From scuttlebutt I figured out both had been at the Pink Pony, a legendary Scottsdale watering hole, the night before.
(On our first day in camp all players were given a typewritten list of bars and restaurants, told not to go there because those were Billy’s hangouts and he had a reputation of getting in fights with his players.)
Neither said a word to anybody, sitting wearing heavy jackets on a hot Arizona day.
Finally in the third inning I made my way to the bullpen where I had to warm up. Bullpen coach Dave Heaverlo was the only friendly face I saw that day, smiling and welcoming me to . . . the big leagues!
I warmed up and headed to the mound at Phoenix Muni. There was a near-capacity crowd, maybe 5,000 people. In the press box Hank Greenwald announced play-by-play for the Giants. Oakland had not one but two Hall of Fame announcers, Bill King and Lon Simmons.
My dad told me King handled my innings and somehow knew all about me. Either he was professional enough to do his research or just as likely he lived in Marin County, where he read the local Independent-Journal.
“Travers is a tall, lanky right-hander who pitched during the glory days of Redwood High,” my dad told me King said.
Rickey Henderson was in left field. Joe Morgan was the Giants’ starting second baseman. Frank Robinson was the Giants’ manager in the opposite dugout. Between Henderson, Morgan, Robinson, King and Simmons, I found myself pitching in a baseball game featuring five Hall of Famers. Jack Clark played in that game, too.
Shooty Babitt at shortstop recognized me and smiled. My catcher was Daryl Cias, a crusty Southern Californian always with a dip or chaw; a career minor leaguer who would play one month in the Majors in 1983 and become known as the “real Crash Davis.”
My only communication with him was getting the signs right. The announcer said, “Now pitching for Oakland, Steve Travers.” No applause.
Then a miracle happened. I pitched three scoreless innings with seven strikeouts. I had found a zone, a groove, call it what you want, but it was probably my greatest day in baseball.
A few days later I again pitched in a “big league” game, this time a B squad contest on the practice field beyond the right field fence at Phoenix Muni. I struck out Rob Deer of San Francisco twice in another scoreless outing.
I pitched 15 innings in Spring Training, 1982, allowing zero runs.
When camp broke up I was assigned to Modesto of the Class A California League. Since I had a car and a couple days to report, I drove to L.A. and celebrated with Brad Cole, living in Santa Monica.
I arrived in Modesto and found myself sleeping on the couch of an apartment with Juan Cruz, an infielder from the Seattle area, John Hotchkiss, a third baseman from Riverside, and maybe one or two other guys.
The season started and I sat in the bullpen. Look up the 1982 Modesto A’s on baseball-register.com, and you will see one of the greatest teams in the history of professional baseball. Led by an old school manager named Pete Whisenant, who drank Wild Turkey in the morning, in the first 10 games of the season their pitching staff threw as best as I can recall nine complete games and one game where a closer got the last out. At least half the wins were shutouts, the team ERA below 1.00. This was the “Billy Ball” era and no team featured more complete games than the A’s. That culture filtered down to the farm system.
All I did was throw batting practice every day. I never so much as warmed up to pitch in relief, and neither did the other relievers. Finally Brad Fischer, Whisenant’s coach, pulled me aside and told me, “Obviously we don’t need 11 pitchers. We’re sending a couple pitchers down to be replaced by some bats. The organization wants you to go home and report in a month to Medford, Oregon.”
So I drove back to Marin County. I remained hopeful but in my gut I knew I was nearing the end. Going from Modesto to Medford was not a promotion. At one point I called the A’s equipment manager, who let me drive over to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum and grab some old sweatshirts and sliding pads. Some names like Bando and Jackson were written in ink on them.
Then I reported to Medford, of the summer A Northwest League. The June draft had just been held, and Medford served as a mini-camp to sort out what to do with new signees, and whether or not to release players already in the organization, like me.
I had a really nice sweatshirt that the equipment manager had given me, but a pitcher from the state of Washington named John Christensen stole it from my cubicle when he was released.
I was in Medford about seven to 10 days, but saw things I still could not believe. We all lived in a motel across the highway from the stadium. One day I was walking across the parking lot when a shiny pink Trans-Am came tooling by. In the passenger seat was a hot teenager. Driving the car was a hotter teenager, wearing a flaming pink bikini top. She was almost as tanned as Mrs. Didier back in Phoenix.
I inquired and found she “belonged” to a black kid named Horton, the son of ex-Indian Tony Horton, nephew of former Tiger Willie Horton, a good friend of Billy Martin who managed Detroit in the early 1970s. The word was out that the Horton kid was not talented but was there as Martin’s favor to the Hortons.
Young Horton had a little entourage, maybe three or four black players from the inner city. They were all “blinged out” and looked like pimps. It may sound racist to describe them this way, but it was what it was. None could play ball worth a damn.
A day or so after spotting the two chicks in the Trans-Am I left my motel room to meet Dennis Gonsalves for lunch. There I spotted a long line of my teammates outside Horton’s door, winding down the stairs to the parking lot. There were many more African-Americans in baseball in those days, and the A’s tended to sign a disproportionate number of them. Virtually all the players in line were black and Latino players from the Oakland-Berkeley and Los Angeles areas.
I suspected what was going on but was curious. I spotted a guy in the “line,” a six-foot, 10 inch ex-San Jose State basketball player named Mickey who I had befriended by giving him rides. “What in the wide, wide world of sports is goin’ on here?” I asked in my best Slim Pickets imitation.
“We’re gonna ‘pinch a bitch,’ baby,” said Mickey. It was a gangbang.
“Excuse me,” I said, edging to the door. “I’m not taking your place, but I just have to see this with my own eyes!”
I opened the door, and saw pure debauchery. The two teenage girls were displayed, legs spread, on the bed, wearing lingerie and heels. About four or five Oakland A’s farm hands were having their way with them, while a few more waited their turns. Overseeing the whole operation like a porn director was Horton’s kid. Then I spotted my friend Greg Robles, a first baseman from San Jose State who I had played against in college and in a summer league in Canada. The blonde who I had seen driving the car was on her back, another teammate penetrating her while she blew Robles. Her face was glistening from male effluence that had been shot on her by previous participants. That was when Robles saw me.
“Hey Travs,” he exclaimed. “Come on in, and get a blow job. It’s free.”
Now I am no prude, but I do believe in God. What I saw in that room was beyond the pale, and as a lawyer’s son I also knew how easily something like this could go sidewise and end up a crime scene. I departed the premises where I found Gonzo, describing the action.
“You were smart to get out of there, bro,” he said.
Just how smart was demonstrated a half hour later when I returned to the motel. Every cop car in Medford was in the parking lot, lights going, sirens blaring. There was Horton’s kid, being “frog walked” to a squad car in handcuffs, along with all his “bling team” and maybe five or six others.
It was statutory rape. Both chicks were under 18. On top of that, several of the players had signed big bonus contracts, buying expensive sports cars and getting multiple unpaid speeding tickets driving to Medford.
Later I heard one of the girls was the daughter of the Mayor of the Medford. I am not sure what happened, but I think the case got dropped so the girl’s reputations would not have to be sullied in court and in the papers. Horton and his mates were all released by the club. I did some Google research and found what may have been the Mayor’s daughter appearing in some local stage productions. Hey, southern Oregon is the home of a great Shakespeare festival. She liked being center stage, that’s for sure.
Jose
At some point during my stay in Medford, I was shagging in the outfield with Dave Weatherman when he pointed out a young player.
“That’s Jose Canseco,” Dave said to me. “He’s from Miami. Supposed to be a helluva prospect.”
In my memory, Jose was not much taller than six feet, and was not buffed. Nothing I saw seemed out of the ordinary, but some of the players were talking about his skills, which included speed and power.
Eventually I was shipped to Idaho Falls of the Pioneer League. This was one of the lowliest spots in organized baseball. A Mormon town with no bars outside a Holiday Inn that was usually closed by the time our games were over. No girls, no action. Fairly cold even in the summer. Long road trips to Canada, where at least in Calgary we found bars with girls in them, including one famed lass known far and wide as “sticky Vicky.”
I knew I was at the end of my road. By the time I reported to Idaho Falls my torn rotator cuff was barking, but it was here where I came to be a teammate of Jose Canseco. He was 17 years old and played 28 games with two home runs and a .263 batting average. Back then he played third base. Weatherman was also on the team.
I did not see it but there is a story almost as crazy as what happened in Medford. Unlike most minor league towns, crawling with “local talent” just begging for attention from pro ballplayers, Idaho Falls had very little of that. There was, however, a young lady who sat in the stands at all the games. She dressed very prim and proper and was dubbed “the librarian.”
Somehow, “the librarian” was talked into attending a party at a large home where a bunch of the players lived a few blocks from the ballpark. She sat there quietly while the players circled her like a hawk, drinking beer. Finally one of the guys sat down next to her and they started kissing.
This broke out into full blown sex, at which point the rest of the team started in. At first shocked, as the story goes she smiled and let out all her inhibitions, having sex with a large number of Idaho Falls A’s.
One of those players was having his way with her from behind. Standing behind him waiting his turn was 17-year old Jose Canseco. As the story goes, he kept tapping the guy on the back, asking when he was going to get his turn. The guy kept putting him off saying, “Give me another minute, man.” After a few minutes of this, Jose lost control and ejaculated all over his teammate’s back.
This of course was met by uproarious laughter, leaving Jose red with embarrassment. The next day the manager of the club, Keith Lieppman and his top coach Grady Fuson (the guy who tells Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, “F—k you” in Moneyball) held a team meeting and leveled “kangaroo court” fines, namely on young Jose for failing to “hold his own” with “the librarian.”
Jose Canseco (center, bottom) and Idaho Falls A’s teammates in 1982
By season’s end, I had been released. I had left all I had on the field, giving baseball 100 percent of my love and effort. I would not become a Major Leaguer, but my original hopes and dreams, to play college ball on a scholarship and get a shot in pro baseball, had been realized.
As for Canseco, there is more to tell but I understand that while standing in the on-deck circle one day in the big leagues, somebody in the know yelled out, “Hey Jose, how’s ‘the librarian?’ ”
Jose is said to have almost snapped his neck off turning to the stands to see who had yelled that.
Big Mac
I returned to college for two years at . . . you guessed it, the University of Southern California. I was an older student, not unlike military veterans who go to school on the G.I. Bill. Mickey Meister was still pitching in the program, and through him I met and befriended numerous Trojan baseball players. One of them, Terry Marks, became my roommate. Terry was a scrub pitcher for coach Rod Dedeaux but had signed to play in the Giants’ organization. Released by San Francisco, he was like me finishing up his education. I introduced him to his eventual wife, Cecile. Terry would become the president-CEO of Coca-Cola’s North American operations.
On my very first day Mickey invited Terry and I to a fraternity party. There I found myself next to about 12 USC baseball players, not to mention an awful lot of hot girls. One of those players was Mark McGwire. He was the talk of the program.
Already known as “Big Mac,” he had grown up in Claremont, near Pomona east of Los Angeles. One of his teammates, Randy Robertson, was in his first year as a pitcher at USC. McGwire was in his second.
He had been a star pitcher-third baseman at Damien High School, but had also played golf, even taking one year off to do that. He was drafted by Montreal but accepted a scholarship to USC, where in his freshman year he mostly pitched in a back-up role but also showed offensive skills.
Coach Dedeaux was nearing the end of his great run. It was obvious he was not the same man who had guided Troy to 11 national championships, but he had one last stroke of genius. That was his decision to switch McGwire from pitcher-third baseman to full-time first baseman. In the summer of 1982, he sent him to play for the Anchorage Glacier Pilots in the Alaskan Collegiate Summer League. Dedeaux gave the Anchorage manager explicit instructions, which were to play McGwire at first base, not on the mound. As for Big Mac himself, Dedeaux told him to concentrate on making contact, not power.
The result was that McGwire led the Alaskan League with a .435 batting average while refining his defensive skills around the bag. Power came naturally with his great size and strength. Suddenly entering his sophomore year he was seen as the top collegiate prospect in the nation.
In my two years at USC, I went to every single baseball game with Terry Marks, and most of the road games if played in the Los Angeles vicinity. Terry, a former pitcher named Phil Smith and I also became graduate assistant coaches in the program, handling the Spartans, the junior varsity program.
I lived in the Regal Trojan Arms, a student apartment complex near campus. I became good friends with Craig Stevenson, the USC third baseman. Every Thursday night he hosted a viewing party for the TV show Cheers. McGwire never missed. I became good friends with him. He was a cheerful, gregarious yet reserved guy, extremely ambitious, and very guarded. He liked to have fun and drink a few beers, but was careful not to do anything stupid.
He lived at an apartment on Ellendale where Mickey Meister roomed with my old pal Kevin McCormack. McGwire roomed down the hall with Randy Robertson. They would play card games. Once I tried to talk the group into making a road trip to The Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, where a Doors tribute band was playing. There were no takers.
In the fall of 1983 McGwire moved into the Regal Trojan Arms a few doors down from me to room with Craig Stevenson. School had already started when he arrived late after spending the summer playing for the U.S.A. National Team, which included a trip to South Korea. I was in his room when he unpacked his bags, displaying all kinds of swag from South Korea and U.S.A. Baseball.
I will never forget how neat his bags were. His room was flawlessly kept, everything clean and folded. He was very together, very controlled, leaving nothing to chance. The way he lived his life was part of a holistic approach to baseball, in which everything he did was to benefit his career.
Another night at an apartment near campus several USC baseball players sat around drinking beers when the girlfriend of one of them swung by with her friend, a beautiful blonde who had apparently modeled for Playboy. Everybody repaired to the nearby 502 Club, a local sports bar; jaws dropping, mouths drooling at the sight of these two smoking hot girls, both playful and provocative.
Finally everybody went back to the apartment, where one of the players took his girl to bed, only to have all the other guys surround the bed and cheer him on. One of those players was Mark McGwire.
That was tame compared to what happened to her friend, described as the “Playboy blonde.” At first she had sex with a player, but then most of the guys came in and had their way with her.
This was a scene not unlike what I had witnessed first in Medford, Oregon, then repeated in Idaho Falls, Idaho when Jose Canseco could not “hold his own,” splattering over the back of one of his teammates.
I can honestly say that just as I refrained from joining the activity with the A’s, I did not participate in this 1983 event at USC. I can also state that Mark McGwire did not participate, either. He was too self-contained, too aware of the stakes of the game to involve himself in something like that. That man was a Boy Scout.
As for the girls, all I can say is they were willing, happy and energetic participants. A similar event occurred in the same apartment later involving the daughter of a USC sports coach. I did not participate in that event, either. The voice of my lawyer father was always speaking to me, not to mention the voice of God.
In 1983 McGwire led the nation in home runs while playing strong defense at first base. The Pacific-10 Conference in those days was the best in the nation. Arizona State, Arizona, USC, UCLA and Stanford were all powerhouses, none more so than ASU.
The Trojan-Sun Devil series were knockdown, drag out brawls. First there was a nasty rumor regarding the Arizona State coaches wife. It got so bad that a banner was flung over the parking structure above right field addressed to him reading, “WHERE’S YOUR WIFE?” I knew the stories because I had played with Arizona State players in the minor leagues.
The Sun Devils featured two star players, Oddibe McDowell and a freshman sensation, Barry Bonds. This was the beginning of the Bonds-McGwire rivalry. Bonds was of course the son of Giants great Bobby Bonds, and had been a superstar at Serra High School in San Mateo, near San Francisco.
He turned down the Giants’ offer after drafting him in 1982 and took his Godfather Willie Mays’s advice to play college ball. It took no time whatsoever to realize the kid was one of the best players in the nation, potentially even more than that.
McGwire would hit a 450-foot homer over the left field fence, but the Dun Devils would claw back with hits by McDowell and Bonds, with Bonds stealing bases. Terry Marks and I would called Barry “Bail Bonds” because his dad had several drunk driving arrests. In the end, ASU was just a little bit better. Bonds would make All-American before being drafted by Pittsburgh in 1985.
McGwire had an even better year in 1984, setting the college home run record and being named National College Player of the Year by The Sporting News. He then played in the Los Angeles Olympics before signing with Oakland.
Randy Johnson, coach Rod Dedeaux, and Mark McGwire with the 1984 United States Olympic team
That USC team was loaded. Besides McGwire, they featured a hard-throwing left-hander, Randy Johnson, and a catcher named Jack Del Rio, who was just as good in baseball as he was in football.
I walked through my graduation ceremonies in 1984, and would see McGwire at USC games played in February before heading to Spring Training. At Jackie Robinson Field in 1986 I told him, “You’ll be called up to ‘the Show’ by September if not before.”
Big Mac just laughed.
“Don’t laugh,” I said. “I’m serious. You’re ready for the big leagues.”
Indeed he was called up at the end of the 1986 campaign.
Canseco had probably grown four or fives inches and put on 20 pounds of muscle from the time I knew him in 1982. 1986 was when he hooked up with McGwire, winning Rookie of the Year honors. In 1987 McGwire set the all-time rookie home run record of 49 and was also Rookie of the Year. The “Bash Brothers” were born.
During these years, McGwire and I stayed in touch. I attended a number of A’s games and would speak to him near the dugout before the game. I occasionally wrote him - remember letters? - and he would occasionally write back. When in Anaheim I would call Big Mac at his hotel and he would call back and always leave tickets at will call. Once at the Big A I brought my wife and our baby daughter Elizabeth. Somewhere is a photo of Mark McGwire holding Elizabeth in uniform next to the dugout.
In 1988 Canseco had his best year, hitting more than 40 home runs with over 40 stolen bases, becoming the first 40/40 man, and earning the self-given sobriquet, “the greatest player in baseball.” He won the Most Valuable Player award, but in game one of the World Series in Los Angeles, Oakland clung to a 4-3 lead with two outs and nobody on base. Super-closer Dennis Eckersley was within one out away from sure victory, but somehow managed to walk Mike Davis; the same Mike Davis whose game-ending walk-off double for San Diego Hoover beat my Redwood team 11 years earlier.
In 1991 I was the bullpen coach for the University of California. That was before the Bay Bridge Series. Oakland manager Tony LaRussa invited us to the Oakland Coliseum to play the A’s in a final tune-up before the regular season.
As we came into the dugout McGwire saw me wearing a Cal uniform.
“What in the world?” he exclaimed. We shook hands and the Cal players were impressed that I knew him.
Before the game, we all crowded around the batting practice to watch the “Bash Brothers” take B.P. McGwire and Canseco hIt bombs, but so did the other A’s. They were still a great team, coming off three straight World Series appearances.
The highlight of B.P. came when Canseco got into a heated home run battle with Dave Henderson. Henderson would blast a 400-foot shot only to have Jose, wearing no sleeves, pump one 450 feet, then do bicep poses exposing his utterly massive build.
Jose Canseco showed off his massive biceps during batting practice before playing the University of California in 1991
I introduced myself to him and told him we had been teammates at Idaho Falls. He was nice and pretended to remember me.
Dave Stewart, still in his prime, started that game for Oakland. He had just developed a fork ball that spring and used it at great length against us. The 1991 Cal Bears were an awesome offensive team, easily one of the best in the country that year, but our guys had no chance against Stewart. They would slump on the bench talking to themselves after Stew made them look silly for seven innings in a 4-0 shutout win.
That night I worked out at Club Sport, a high end fitness center serving the posh Blackhawk section of San Ramon. Who walks in? Jose Canseco and his beautiful bride Esther, wearing spandex workout togs. Wow. We spoke a few minutes.
In 1991 McGwire had a terrible season. It was explained to me by his old friend from Claremont Randy Robinson that after divorcing his first wife, an ex-Trojan bat girl, Big Mac hooked up with another girl from USC, said to be a real stunner.
Apparently she was not faithful to him and it hit McGwire hard. He had a lousy year in 1991 and the A’s lost the division to Minnesota. According to Canseco, it was around this time that he introduced McGwire to steroids. Canseco candidly admitted he started in on steroids in the minor leagues, a year or two after we had played on the same 1982 Idaho Falls club. Canseco had worked out in a gym where he met weight lifters who had access to steroids, and claimed he took them to fulfill a pledge to his dying mother, to become “the greatest player in the world,” which he wrote in Juiced came to happen in 1988.
While McGwire never admitted to Canseco’s story about first doing steroids administered to him by Canseco in a bathroom stall, he did admit to Bob Costas in a tearful 2010 TV interview that he did indeed do steroids.
Labeled a liar by the baseball establishment after the 2005 Senate hearings, Canseco’s allegations proved to be largely true over the next few years. There is no reason to believe he lied about McGwire. McGwire’s own brother claimed Big Mac did steroids, even though Mark “disowned” him after that.
1992 was the year McGwire’s body changed. He lifted weights at USC and in professional baseball. He was always a big man with immense power, but it always looked natural. In 1992 he began to take on the appearance of a behemoth, as Canseco already had become.
McGwire had a huge comeback, hitting 42 home runs to lead Oakland to a division title, but the club was upset by Toronto in the play-offs when Eckersley again gave up a two-run homer to blow a key game, this time against Roberto Alomar.
It was during this period, the early 1990s, that I would see McGwire around town. On occasion he would be a “celebrity bartender” at Johnny Love’s in San Francisco, a swinging place where Stewart and many other A’s, Giants and Warriors hung out.
I would also run into McGwire in Walnut Creek, usually at a place called Crogan’s. He was a man about town, enjoying the ladies. His new physique seemed to not only increase his production on the field, but gave him confidence, including with the girls.
But around 1994 something changed with McGwire. That was the year I opened up an ill-fated sports agency with a partner. It was a long shot that we could land McGwire as a client, but where in the past he would return my phone calls, he no longer did.
I contacted people like Craig Stevenson and Randy Robertson. Craig had literally been Big Mac’s best man at his wedding, his former roommate and teammate at USC. He told me McGwire had a whole new set of friends, not even teammates really, but mostly “gym friends,” and that he too did not get returned phone calls. He and Robertson, a friend since Pony League at age 14 as well as at Southern Cal, were reduced to calling his agent in vain attempts to reach their old friend.
Terry Marks, a teammate and friend, by now a high-ranking corporate executive with massive pull at Coca-Cola, was frustrated that he too was ignored by McGwire. He sent him some memorabilia by certified mail with return-postage paid asking Big Mac to sign something for his son, but it was ignored.
Stevenson’s admonition that McGwire seemed only to have “gym friends” by now rings true in light of later developments. He continued to blast massive homers as his body became more and more gargantuan, although he did suffer strange injuries, the kind attributed to steroid use. It seemed obvious he was on them. To those who spent any time in the gym and know how hard it is to put on muscle mass, there was no doubt.
Obviously in 1998 in St. Louis McGwire and Sammy Sosa set baseball on fire, reviving its popularity after the 1995 strike (which was the death knell of my sports agency). I, along with numerous old USC friends like Stevenson, Robertson, Marks, Mickey Meister and others, spoke often of him but nobody had heard a word from the man in years.
McGwire on his way to baseball immortality with 70 homers in 1998
Finally in 2001 I was a sports columnist with the old Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner. I was at Pacific Bell Park when the Cardinals came in to play the Giants. I entered the visiting club house and headed straight for McGwire. When he saw me there was a hint of recognition in his face. When I said hello and asked if he remembered me, he winced, putting on a veneer of humanity barely concealing some kind of inner demons.
I spoke to him for a few minutes and began to mention some of the old USC gang, what people were doing, where they were living. By this time Terry Marks was the president-CEO of Coca-Cola’s North American Division.
“That’s just not a part of my life any more,” he said.
I have rarely heard anything so sad. This was a former USC All-American, a legend of Troy. These were teammates, classmates. I had hung out with all of them many times, watched Cheers with them in Craig’s apartment on Thursday evenings, drank beer with them at the 502 Club, yet he had hardened his heart to all of it, in favor what, gym friends?
Compare this encounter with one I had that same year with with McGwire’s old teammate and my classmate, Randy “the Big Unit” Johnson, who I knew far less well than McGwire. I was in Phoenix working for the Examiner when I saw Randy in the Diamondback clubhouse. I approached and asked, “Do you know who I am?
“Of course I do,” he said.
I then conducted an interview with him. At one point I asked if I could sit in his swivel sofa in front of his locker. He said sure, so I asked him questions sitting down while he stood up, going through mail.
Then teammate Mike Morgan approached me. “Can I get you a sandwich?” he asked me.
“No, thanks.”
The Matt Williams came by.
“Can I get you a beer?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” I again said, before addressing Johnson. “Your teammates are giving me crap for sitting in your sofa.”
“Don’t you worry about it,” he replied. “Us Trojans stick together.”
The Pac Bell encounter was the last I saw of Mark McGwire. As if disgusted with himself, McGwire retired after the 2001 season, leaving millions of dollars on the table.
In 2010-11, after coming clean to Bob Costas, I inquired whether he would be interested in writing a book, a tell-all or some kind of memoir, with me. I would call his agent and be treated like a peon. I sent him a signed copy of one of my USC books with a letter, only to have it returned to sender.
Looking back I think he realized he had broken the record through immoral means. At heart a good Catholic and Boy Scout, he knew he had cheated and it gnawed away at him. This was why he did not wish to speak to old friends like me, much less Craig, Randy, Phil or Terry, but instead with his “gym friends,” as Craig called them.
There have in recent years been some McGwire sightings at USC, as he returned at the urging of the school, but I still have not heard from Stevenson or Randy or Phil Smith or any of the others that he has reached out to them.
Some years ago an associate of mine wrote The Bash Brothers. All the above-named ex-Trojans gave him of their time and memories for the book, but Big Mac did not. He remained an enigma of baseball.
Many of McGwire’s USC teammates spoke to Dale Tafoya, but McGwire remained silent
As for Canseco, despite being Vindicated, the name of his follow-up to Juiced, he burned too many bridges. He was blackballed from the game, first before he could reach the magic 500 home run club that generally is seen as entrance to Cooperstown, then after the Senate hearings.
By the time of further investigations demonstrating Jose told the truth, his personal life was such a mess that nothing seemed to matter. Despite two best-selling books, he went bankrupt. At one point he lived in the Encino area next door to the mother of my good friend Jake Downey. He was the A’s post-game TV analyst for a year and was good at it but managed to say the wrong thing to somebody and got fired from that job.
He divorced Esther, dated Playboy Playmates, married one, divorced her, only to see his daughter pose for Playboy too. He still has his pension so he survives but is persona non grata in baseball.
Jose Canseco dated and married Playboy models and Madonna just to name a few
Bonds
Which brings us to the trifecta of the steroid era, Mr. Barry Bonds. A college rival of McGwire’s and Randy Johnson’s, he had blossomed into a star at Pittsburgh before signing a mega-free agent salary with San Francisco in 1993. Over the next years he broke Canseco’s 40/40 homer/stolen base records several times, and surpassed the likes of Willie Mays and others to become baseball’s first 400/400 man (career homers and stolen bases).
By 1999 he was a total superstar and had he retired then, a lock for the Hall of Fame, but the spotlight was no longer on him. Ken Griffey, a more ebullient and accessible star, was more popular and just as good. The previous year, all eyes were on McGwire and Sammy Sosa as they chased Roger Maris’s 1961 record of 61 homers. Big Mac finished with 70 homers. Sosa hit 66 and won the MVP award in leading the Cubs to the play-offs after a tie-breaking win over Bonds and San Francisco.
But Bonds was a hated figure in baseball, not even popular in his home town of San Francisco. Sports Illustrated ran a hit piece on him, titled “I’m Barry Bonds, and You’re Not.”
Reportedly, after the season Bonds expressed displeasure with “the white boy” McGwire, grabbing the spotlight away from him. After all, he was undoubtedly the greater all-around player but nobody cared about that.
So before the 1999 season, Bonds began juicing. He was a guy with a line drive swing good for 35-40 homers a year, playing in a pitcher’s park, Candlestick. By 2000 his body was drastically changed. It was the same change seen in Mark McGwire beginning some eight years earlier. Not just his body, but his head was bigger, an absolute giveaway of steroid use.
In 2001 the confluence of my place as the “Forest Gump of baseball’s steroid era” came to be. In fact, that was the year I re-acquainted myself with Dodgers catcher Chad Kreuter. I actually wrote an article calling him the “Forrest Gump of baseball,” because over the years it seemed he was always in the photo when historic events occurred. These included being behind the plate when Nolan Ryan threw a no-hitter and again when he recorded his 5,000th strikeout. Then he was behind the plate when Bonds hit his 73rd home run in 2001.
I had known Chad since he was 14. He had played at Redwood High after me, then we would run into each other when I was at USC and he played for Pepperdine. I later became good friends with his father-in-law, USC baseball coach Mike Gillespie, and when Chad got that job in 2007 I hosted a couple of dinners for his team courtesy of the USC Alumni Association.
I was a recently minted columnist for the Examiner, oddly and technically a “colleague” of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, who did not come into the office or even live in San Francisco, but whose “Hey, Rube” column ran opposite mine on the front page.
I covered Spring Training, hanging out with Barry Zito and Jason Giambi when they were utterly surrounded by the hottest girls I had ever seen seen at Axis-Radius in Scottsdale, but there was a veritable Berlin Wall around Bonds.
Finally the regular season began and Bonds hit his 500th homer, a walk-off to give the Giants victory over the hated Dodgers at Pac Bell Park. Oddly, only his son met him at home plate, his team waiting in the dugout. At the press conference afterward, I attempted to introduce myself to him. Bonds acted as if I was Patrick Swayze in Ghost, literally unseen by others as if non-existent.
But I wrote a great piece about him for the Examiner, comparing the positive reaction of San Francisco fans - heretofore either non-plussed by him or outright hostile - to the reaction of Giants fans to Willie Mays in 1962. At first their allegiance was with the San Franciscan Joe DiMaggio, but eventually they came around to Willie.
In researching the piece, I interviewed both the late, great Mays and Willie McCovey. Neither expressed even the slightest hint of humility. Mays said, “You can’t compare Joe to me,” as if to say I literally could not make the comparison between Mays and DiMaggio. Willie was that much better, according to him. McCovey sounded the same way, stating that not only did Tom Seaver not deserve to beat him out for 1969 MVP, but “I shoulda won it over Bob Gibson in ’68.”
All Gibson did was set the modern MLB mark with a 1.12 ERA in ’68, while Seaver dominated McCovey’s Giants in head-to-head match-ups on his way to 25 winsand the World Championship. Willie Mac’s Giants finished in second.
But in my column about Bonds I brought up other superstars who overcame their hometown fans’ initial negativism until it became worship, namely Mickey Mantle in New York and Ted Williams in Boston. The next time I was at Pac Bell, Bonds’s “assistant,” Steve Hoskins told me Bonds had read it and was impressed. This got me an introduction. I had the perfect ice breaker.
“Barry, I’m good friends with your roommate from Arizona State, Charles Scott,” I told him.
Well, that opened the door wide open. Suddenly I found myself given an invite into the closed sepulcher that was Bond’s dressing cubicle. It had a huge stanchion in front, providing natural blockage between Bonds and anybody - writers, teammates, anybody - who happened to attempt an approach. A giant big screen TV hung overhead, available only to Barry and whoever was in the cubicle, where Barry sat half-dressed on a giant barcalounger. He was utterly massive, just like Canseco and McGwire.
In that cubicle was Bonds, Hoskins, his personal trainer Greg Anderson . . . and now me.
Veteran San Francisco sportswriters like Bruce Jenkins, Scott Ostler and John Shea would observe this and ask, “Who the hell is this guy?” None of them were on speaking terms with Bonds. Whether Bonds hated them more, or they hated Bonds more, was an open question.
Then I was approached by Bruce Macgowan, a lanky, ebullient KNBR sports talk host who by chance had also attended Redwood High. We became immediate fast friends, and he told me that Jenkins, Ostler and others all came to him asking why Bonds let me, a complete newcomer, into his inner circle.
“That’s just the point,” I told Bruce. “It’s because I am a newcomer, from L.A. I have no baggage with Bonds. Trust me, give me time and Bonds will find a reason to hate me too.”
In the mean time, Bonds was hitting home runs literally at a record pace. After putting on a late-May performance for the ages in Atlanta, I told him, “You’re gonna break McGwire’s record.”
“I think so too,” he said.
“I want to write a book about it,” I said.
“Definitely,” he replied.
Hoskins gave me his personal contact information and told me to contact Barry through his office in San Carlos, where they had grown up together.
I went home and wrote up a book proposal and sent it to Bonds via Hoskins.
Hoskins quickly called me. “Barry would like to do a book with you,” he said.
I could not believe my good luck. The greatest athlete on the planet was giving me authorization to write his book. It was incredible.
I was invited to meet Barry in Hoskins’s art showroom in San Carlos. He was a talented lithographer, specializing in prints of Barry, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Joe Montana and Dwight Clark. The meet was scheduled for 10 A.M. on the day of a Giants’ night game.
I showed up on time. No Bonds or Hoskins. I walked across the street to a Starbucks, ordered a coffee, and called Hoskins’s number. No answer. Finally, stood up, I had lunch, then left. I arrived early at Pacific Bell Park, and as I entered the home clubhouse, Bonds saw me.
“Man, I’m really sorry,” he said. “I had to enroll my daughter in pre-school and when I got there they said I had to do it on the Internet. So I had to drive back home and hassle with my computer for a couple hours.”
I don’t know how true that was, but I have to say, I liked Barry at that moment. Here was a real person dealing with real dad issues. He did not have some man-servant or assistant handle his daughter’s enrollment, he did it.
So we had the meeting scheduled for San Carlos in Barry’s spacious cubicle. I told them I would put together a book proposal for agents and publishers, and that I was confident an authorized Bonds book, whether autobiography or biography, would draw a hefty advance.
Barry could be two people. One day he was your best friend. The next day he did not recognize you. Then Hoskins mentioned the sum $2 million. I knew I could not get $2 million for a Bonds book, and it was then that I began to worry that perhaps I had oversold the value of this book. But I stayed optimistic.
Within a short time I had attracted an agent, Mel Berger of The William Morris Agency in New York City. This was the big time, for sure. Berger was considered one of the top two or three literary agents in the world. He had my proposal and after we spoke he agreed to take on the project.
I told Bonds and Hoskins we were in good hands with a world-class literary agent. We continued to work together, usually at the stadium. Once Bonds looked up at his TV only to see Roger Clemens of the Yankees brush a hitter back.
Bonds used foul expletives in stating that if Clemens tried that with him he would kick his ass. My legend continued to grow. Word got out that Bonds had agreed to do a book with me, the newcomer. Macgowan would tell me what the other media people were saying, which sounded mostly like jealousy, but he was happy for me. Others were in awe of what I was doing. It was rarefied air, and it was not to last.
A week passed when I heard back from Berger. “Literally nobody in the publishing industry wants to do business with Barry Bonds,” he told me. Nothing I said could persuade him otherwise, and that was that. He was no longer Bonds’s agent, and therefore no longer mine.
I was back to square zero.
Over the next month I continued to see Bonds at the park and speak to Hoskins when the Giants went on the road, but eventually I was forced to admit that I could not deliver the high-priced book deal I thought Bonds would attract. It was mid-season and it was obvious he was likely to set the single-season home run record, seemingly a delectable morsel for any book publisher, but he appeared to be blackballed.
I did not really try with smaller or even mid-level publishers, as I knew they could not meet Barry’s monetary demands; certainly not the $2 million Hoskins spoke of. There was Knopf, Simon & Shuster, Random House, Doubleday; these and a few more were the big houses that had that kind of money to spend.
But the Internet had cut into the profits of newspapers, magazines and books. It was not as bad as it is today, but unless you were Hillary Clinton or as one New York literary agent told me, “Amber Frye who had an affair with Scott Petersen,” accused double-murderer of his wife and child, big in the news at the time, one could forget big advances.
The Amber Frye reference really frosted me. A blonde bimbo and masseuse having an affair with a married man could draw the big dough, but Steve Travers combined with the star power of Barry Bonds could not.
By the end of July I spilled the beans to Barry. There were no offers in the hopper. Suddenly his entire demeanor changed. I was no longer his friend, no longer invited into his cubicle, no longer a person.
It was over just like that.
However, I had spent the better part of two months with him and had valuable research and quotes from the man, not to mention his teammates, manager Dusty Baker, his associates and other members of the media. I had a book, for sure. If he broke Big Mac’s record I had a big book. Nobody was going to give me $1 million in advance, but I could write a best seller that would make a lot of money on the back end.
I contacted Sports Publishing L.L.C. out of St. Louis. Tim Tessalone, USC’s sports information director, had put me in touch with them when I worked in Los Angeles. They contracted me to write Rod Dedeaux’s biography, but after a few chapters they switched gears and told me to make it a book called Great College Baseball Coaches, with 20 chapters on the best college coaches ever: Angie Garrido, Cliff Gustafson, Mike Martin, Skip Bertman, and others. That was a far different book than a Dedeaux bio in which the subject lived in the same city as I did, and the school offered me carte blanche use of their files to research him. The project got ixnayed.
But they remembered me and after some negotiating agreed to publish my Bonds bio. No, they did not make me rich, but they liked what I was doing. When Bonds hit his 71st and then 73rd home runs, they agreed to put all their resources into it.
After 9/11, Bonds had helped spark a revival of American normalcy in the country. That was a large part of the book’s appeal. But the steroid question was already hanging over the project. I got a call from Skip Bayless, then with the San Jose Mercury-News (he later hosted a big ESPN program).
“Bonds is on steroids and you gotta get to the bottom of it,” he told me.
“I agree he probably is, but how do you suggest I do that? The people who would know are close to him like Greg Anderson. Bonds kicked me to the curb after I didn’t come up with $2 million. None of his crew will talk to me.”
It was published in March of 1982 and immediately sold out its first printing. I did book signings from Santa Rosa to San Jose, from San Rafael to Pleasanton. I was on national TV, national radio, reviewed in all the major papers. I dare say I was almost a celebrity. It made several best seller lists.
But a funny thing happened. After we sold out the first printing, the publisher told me they were holding off on the second printing until the player’s came to terms with the owners and agreed not to strike in 2002. Coming up on the first anniversary of 9/11, the idea of a bunch of spoiled, overpaid ball players going on strike while firefighters and cops and soldiers fought the War on Terror seemed a bridge too far.
This was not the first, or the second, but the third time Major League Baseball players had screwed me. The first was in 1981, when a week before a draft in which Boston said they would pick me 10th and give me between $10,000 and $12,000, they had struck. The Commissioner cut the draft in half and said only first round draftees would get big bonuses. St. Louis paid me far less than I was worth and when I tore my rotator cuff - through their negligence, by the way - instead of sending me to the Kerlan-Jobe Clinic, as they would have done had they more invested in me, they tossed me aside like a farm animal.
In 1994, having landed Al Martin, Bonds’s replacement in Pittsburgh, as our main client heading into arbitration, the union struck again. That was the end of negotiations for Martin and the sports agency folded. It was Jerry Maguire without the happy ending.
Now this. The two months Sports Publishing dithered without re-printing Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman, coming in the middle of Bonds’s second straight MVP season in a year the Giants played in the World Series, cost me well over $100,000.
Finally the players avoided a strike, and the book went into multiple re-prints and paperback. As it was I made enough money to live on for two years.
I never spoke to Barry Bonds again. I spoke to Charles Scott and another of Barry’s friends, Derrick White, who told me Bonds did not have much to say about me. Eventually he moved to Tiburon in Marin County where I live. I know many people who have seen him riding his bike over White Hill from Fairfax to San Geronimo, stopping at The Good Earth across the street from the gym I train in every day. I, however, have had no Bonds sightings.
Finally my friend Brad Beedle, a limo driver, gave him Barry Bonds: Baseball’s Superman to sign, which he did without any fuss.
***
It started in 1982 when Dave Weatherman spotted Jose Canseco while we shagged in the outfield at Medford, Oregon, then continued on to Idaho Falls later that summer.
Then it got further impetus when I attended a frat party at USC in which Mark McGwire, fresh off leading the Alaskan Collegiate Summer League in batting, was also in attendance.
Finally it became a trinity of the steroid era, me it’s Forrest Gump figure, when I had my strange Barry Bonds odyssey in the spring, summer and fall of 2001, resulting in what Spitball magazine said was a finalist for the Casey Award as Best Baseball Book of 2002.
In 2003, after publication of my book, the district attorney of San Francisco decided to go after Bonds on steroid allegations. Why did this happen?
An FBI investigator named Nowitzki who happened to live near BALCO, the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative located on the peninsula just south of San Francisco - where Bonds also lived - decided to use the power of his office to investigate. He used subpoenas to get into their books and dug through their garbage. While it is possible I could have dug through their garbage, as Skip Bayless would have had me do, I did not have subpoena power.
Then some weird coincidences began to occur. Playboy magazine did a piece on Nowitzki and BALCO. It was written by Marc Hershon, who had attended Redwood High with me. Playboy had approached me with a large sum of money to do the Playboy interview with Bonds, which seemed a no-brainer when he and I were working on the book. When the book deal did not materialize to his liking and he dropped me, so did my nice payday from Playboy, which now went to one of my high school classmates.
Then the Bonds trial started in the 2002-2003 off-season. Who was assigned to the court beat? Two little-known San Francisco Chronicle writers named Lance Johnson and Mark Fainaru-Wada. Fainara-Wada was another Redwood High graduate.
Normally considered an unattractive newspaper beat, suddenly the courthouse was a sensation and these two were like Woodward and Bernstein covering the daily doings of the sensational Bonds trial.
It gets weirder. In March of 2004 I got a call from a man who identified himself as a literary agent in New York City. The “publishing industry,” he told me, “was trying to place a writer on ‘the big steroid book.’ ”
This, not the original Bonds autobiography, indeed was attracting million-dollar offers. I was, the agent said, “the man to write it.”
I spent a couple months working closely with this guy, putting together a book proposal, when suddenly he “ghosted” me. No return of phone calls, texts, e-mails, letters, nothin’. What happened is they had placed a writer on the “big steroid book.”
That writer, or writers, were Lance Johnson and Mark Fainaru-Wada, the Redwood man. That book became Game of Shadows, one of the biggest books of all time. It brought in millions for Fainaru-Wada, earning he and Johnson a trip to the White House to meet President George W. Bush.
As for Bonds, he blamed everything on racism.
Bonds used his son as cover, called everybody racist, and became a punch line
As for me, I have no complaints. Mark is a good guy and I do not believe in jealousy. I hit the jackpot when Pete Carroll (another Redwood Giant) ushered in a dynasty at my alma mater of USC, and wrote five or six books about Trojan football history that all sold well and made me famous on campus.
Obviously I still write in semi-retirement. It was a good run. It was fun and I brushed next to an awful lot of celebrities in sports, politics and entertainment. A great, wild ride.
But my strange and weird association with the three principal figures in one of the great controversies in the history of sports - Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds - remains unique in my life and in the annals of sports journalism.
Steven Travers is a former screenwriter who has authored over 30 books including the upcoming Best Sports Writing Ever. He is a USC graduate and attorney with a Ph.D who taught at USC and attended the UCLA Writers’ Program. He played professional baseball, served in the Army JAG corps in D.C., was in investment banking on Wall Street, worked in politics, lived in Europe, and was a sports agent before finding his calling as a writer. He has written for the San Francisco Examiner, L.A. Times, StreetZebra, Gentry magazine, Newsmax and MichaelSavage.com. He lives in California and has one daughter, Elizabeth. He can be reached at USCSTEVE1@aol.com or on Twitter @STWRITES.