For those who do not read our Tuesday entries on sports, please bear with us today because we’re going to talk about integrity today.  But we have to set up the discussion with some sports talk.

A few days ago I picked up a book by ESPN commentator Mike Greenberg and his associate Paul Hembekides, Got Your Number; the Greatest Sports Legends and the Numbers They Own.  It’s one of thoe “list” books—such as a thousand this or that’s to do before you die stuff.  This one lists 100 people and events in sports that are the greatest moments in the broad world of athletic competition.

Number 98 references the year 1998.  Those old enough need to think back 25 years to the dominating sports story of that year.  Let’s pause while you close your eyes and look for an answer, which I will give you after the (pause) but don’t peek.

(PAUSE)

The year 1998 was the year two men dominated baseball—Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.  The fact that they played for the Cardinals and the Cubs—two long-time baseball antagoinists—made the competition even more significant.  Throughout that long season, these two men battled to see who would set a new major league home run record.

There was McGwire, who was under incredible pressure from the beginning. It was expected he would break Roger Maris’ record of 61 homers.  McGwire had come to the Cardinals year earlier after starting the season with the Oakland Athletics.  He hit 34 home runs for the A’s and 24 more when he reached St.Louis.  58, and from the first day of the 1998 season the  Post-Dispatch headlined each home run he hit.

In Chicago there was Sosa, a power-hitter for the Cubs who had hit 33-40 home runs a year since 1993. But there was no reason to exepect what would happen in 1998.  In fact, the biggest challenge to McGwire was expected to come from Ken Griffey Jr., who had 56 home runs in ’97.

Griffey had his second-straight 56-homer year.  Sosa briefly held the record at 66 before McGwire swept past him on the way to a 70-home run season.

Many say that those two years, particularly 1998, restored the faith of baseball fans who had been resentful of the 1994-95 player’s strike and owners’ lockout.  Greenburg isn’t buying any of that, writing, “That magical season turned out to be an illusion, unworthy of being celebrated though steadfastly impossible to forget. I have heard it said that the best way to gauge whether or not a player belongs in the Hall of Fame is by asking the question: Can you tell the story of the history of the sport without him?”

Neither McGwire nor Sosa is in the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. The reason the two are outside is because, as Greenburg puts it, “McGwire and Sosa dishonored the game.”  But, he says, what they did is unforgettable.  He finds it “a tad insulting” when people say these two “saved” baseball.  He argues that such statements preclude the idea that nobody else could have saved the game because baseball is so much part of the American spirit to have gone unrescued by somebody. These two men, he says, “were in the right place at the right time.”

McGwire and Sosa, and Roger Clemens—the most dominant pitcher of his time—and Barry Bonds, who holds the career and single-season home run records—have joined Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose in the mist of fame/infamy that keeps them from having plaques in Cooperstown because their greatness cannot overcome their violations of the integrity of the game, the first three because they are suspected of using, or have admitted using, performance-enhancing drugs, the fourth because of gambling on the sport.

The integrity of the game.

Whatever the game might be.

For many years I have been invited to speak to the incoming freshman class of the House of Representatives, who gather at the capitol a few days after their elections to begin learning how to be state representatives.  I usually tell them near the end of my remarks, “Never lie to a reporter because the first time to you lie to me is the last time I believe anything you say.  Never lie to your colleagues because your integrity is really the only thing you have going for you here.”

This is a time when we must measure those in the game of politics for their integrity for if we dismiss it as the primary qualification for public office we are dismissing it for ourselves. Our public integrity must not be sold to those who would mislead us in their search for power.

There are plenty of those who dishonor that great game of politics. Integrity to them is meaningless as they place power over us ahead of service to us.  It is up to us to exercise our integrity to save ourselves and our country from those who, as Greenburg would put it, “dishonor” the game.

We must never lie to ourselves.

Because our integrity is all that we have if we are to have, or save, our state and our nation.

(Photo credit: ESPN)