Juiced (8 page)

As soon as I got back to Miami that off-season, I started thinking about Esther, that half-Cuban, half-Lebanese exotic beauty I had met in February just before I flew out to Arizona for spring training. I was hoping I'd run into her at the Scandinavian Health Club, but no such luck. I was not someone to go out of my way to run after a woman, but this was different. "You remember that girl Esther I met?" I asked a Miami friend.

"You kidding me?" he said. "She's Miss Miami. How could I forget her?"

"Where does she live?"

Lucky for me, he knew Esther's address. I went by her house and introduced myself again and started talking to her. As soon as we started dating, it was all over with. I was crazy in love with her. But the thing was, she was worried about what her father would think of me.

"I can't tell my dad I'm in love with a drug dealer," she told me.

She was serious-she thought I was pushing drugs. After all, I wore expensive clothes; I drove an expensive car; I was big enough that no one would want to mess with me. I had never talked to her about being a professional baseball player. I wasn't big on conversation when there were so many other ways to spend our time together. Esther's father, who had been one of my baseball coaches in junior high school, was not about to let her move in with me unless we were married. Two years later, we had a big ceremony with three or four hundred people. That was the year I hit forty home runs and stole forty bases and was the most valuable player in the American League. The media wanted to get involved. They had helicopters in the air, trying to find us, as if we were a Hollywood couple. It was crazy, which was how things were through most of my marriage to Esther.

Dave Stewart, my teammate with the A's, had bet me that I wouldn't really marry Esther; if he lost, he had to pay for the wedding. So once we announced the date, he started getting nervous-especially as we kept inviting more and more people.

Eventually, I let him off the hook: I only made him pay ten thousand dollars.

6. The Bash Brothers

If Mark McGwire belongs in the Hall of Fame, so does
]ose Canseco.
-
JOHN WILLIAMS,
Slate magazine

Mark McGwire showed up as an Oakland A's rookie in 1987, my second full year in the major leagues, and I'll never forget what he looked like back then. I remember going down to Arizona for spring training that year and seeing this tall, skinny kid with basically no muscle on him whatsoever. He was six-five and weighed only 220 pounds.

But McGwire had one of the best-if not the best-right-handed power swings I'd ever seen in my life. I thought: Wow, this guy has technique. He proved it was a great swing when he went out that season and hit forty-nine homers. He was named American League Rookie of the Year, so he and I were back-to-back Rookies of the Year.

Mark and I were a lot different, but from his first season with the A's, we became friendly. We were never really buddies, though. One of the main things we talked about was steroids-about how to tailor your doses and cycles to achieve the best results. We had access to the best steroids; it was like shopping from a high-end catalog.

Like me, Mark was curious about what different types of steroids could do for him, and how they could make him bigger and stronger. But he needed a little time to get used to the idea of actually using them, and so far as I know, he didn't actually start using steroids until after his rookie season. So the forty-nine home runs he hit that year probably came without any chemical enhancement.

The next year, 1988, Mark and I started talking about steroids again, and soon we started using them together. I injected Mark in the bathrooms at the Coliseum more times than I can remember. Sometimes we did it before batting practice, sometimes afterward. It was really no big deal. We would just slip away, get our syringes and vials, and head into the bathroom area of the clubhouse to inject each other.

Nobody knew that much about steroids back then and nobody really knew what we were doing. As the years went on, more and more players started talking to me about how they could get bigger, faster, stronger, but at that time, as far as I know, Mark and I were the only ones doing steroids.

The media dubbed us the Bash Brothers, but we were really the 'Roids Boys. Eventually, based on all that hype, I realized that people actually believed that we were living together, that we always hung out together, that we ate together, that we slept together. "Where's your other half?" people would ask. "Where's your brother?" It was laughable the way people built up these ideas in their minds based on a gimmicky slogan.

We hung out here and there, but Mark didn't like to go out with me because the girls wouldn't pay any attention to him. They would all pay attention to me. That was mostly because of Mark.

He was never the best-looking guy in the world. He felt awkward and out of place at clubs, plus he would never talk. I was quiet, too, but compared to Mark, I was a social dynamo. Mac just didn't like to go out because it felt like he was being overshadowed.

I always had a presence, and at the time, I was the most famous athlete in the world because of the way I looked, what I did to a baseball, and what I accomplished in the game. Also, I was a rebel and a rogue, and some people liked that edge. Mark was kind of a second-level star in those years, not nearly as famous as he would become later in the summer of 1998, but even so, he had things I did not. For starters, as a white all-American boy, he was accepted in a way I never could be as a Cuban. I guess at that time in the United States of America, it was taboo to have someone like me as an all-American hero.

There was this contrast between us, and from the very beginning, they pitted us against each other as competitors. Who's better? Who's stronger? Who hits the ball farther? Who is more dangerous? Mark always hated those comparisons, even more than I did.

I think it was only through using steroids and giving himself a new body that Mark really became more comfortable with himself, and stopped being quite so awkward around other people. I was the godfather of the steroid revolution in baseball, but McGwire was right there with me as a living, thriving example of what steroids could do to make you a better ball player. Early in Mark's career, he went through the same transformation that I did. Suddenly, he was enormous. He developed these huge, muscular arms; his whole body was just massive. He kept with it and added more and more muscle mass. Later on, the year he and Sammy Sosa were both going after Roger Maris's single-season home-run record, McGwire would set the record, weighing in at 270 pounds.

In recent years, as the public has come to understand how widespread steroid use has become in baseball, there's been a lot of speculation about where Mark's natural talent left off and the steroids kicked in. The answer is that steroids gave Mark strength and stamina-but they also gave him a more positive attitude.

The psychological effect of steroids is very dramatic. Using steroids properly can do wonders for your confidence. You look good. You're big and strong. McGwire was a twitching mass of muscle, and he had great technique. If that combination doesn't help you feel confident, I don't know what will.

The mind is a very powerful thing; if you convince yourself that you're a great player, and you have the basic ability, you're going to be a great player. You can have the perfect body for baseball and perfect ability, but if your brain is telling you "You have no chance!" you're not going to be successful. For Mark, steroids helped send his confidence level sky-high.

McGwire was a good twenty pounds heavier than I was, but guess what? For some reason, where McGwire was concerned, nobody ever mentioned steroids. What was going on? McGwire was already being groomed for superstardom. Baseball has always been on the lookout for players who could be packaged and marketed as all-American heroes, and McGwire was perfect for that: a big, awkward redhead with a natural home-run stroke. As all of us in baseball knew, McGwire was an untouchable. He was so protected by the powers that be in the game, it was incredible.

No media outlet would even think of calling him into question, because there's no way they'd ever get an inside source.

To McGwire's credit, he was a little slow to understand what it was all about. I remember one time in the late 1980s, we were all sitting down together in the A's clubhouse talking about something that had appeared in one of the papers, declaring that Mark McGwire was the all-American boy and the all-American athlete. We mentioned it to McGwire, and I looked at him to see what he would say.

"Jose, I didn't want to be labeled like that," Mark told me. I think he meant it, too.

"Mac, you know what?" I told him. "Now you're protected. You're protected by America. Nobody is going to touch you no matter what you do wrong." It started to sink in with him that I was right.

"It's great to have that kind of backing by America," I told him. "You are set. You can never do anything wrong. You could rob a bank while raping a cheerleader and nothing would happen to you."

That's how the system works. There are some players who are protected by the system, and other players who the system abuses and takes advantage of, hanging them out to dry and turning them into scapegoats. It's disgusting the way baseball really works sometimes.

Walter Weiss, the shortstop who became the A's third straight Rookie of the Year in 1988, after me (1986) and McGwire (1987), once told me a story about the day when Mark and Walt were racing their cars after a game at the Coliseum, and this old lady was driving along really slow, and they forced her off the road. But what happened? Where was the media frenzy after that?

Nowhere. After all, this was Mark McGwire, the golden boy, so everybody covered it up-the organization, the police, the media, everyone.

Just imagine how an incident like that would have been handled if I had been involved. That was the pattern throughout our entire careers. Whether it was on a personal or professional level, you never heard the media breathe a bad word where it came to Mark McGuire. Everything was whitewashed. Meanwhile, my divorce was on national TV. That was how the deck was stacked, and Mark knew it and we all knew it: He could do no wrong, and I was always going to be the subject of controversy.

Think about if for a minute. How much of what people think they know about me goes back to the image of me portrayed in the media? How much of that feeds on itself, with people assuming they know what I'm like, and turning that into new controversies that convince more people that I'm all these bad things people say I am? Where does perception start and reality end? When does perception create reality?

The truth is, no one wants to face the fact that there was a huge double standard in baseball, and white athletes like Mark McGwire, Cal Ripken Jr., and Brady Anderson were protected and coddled in a way that an outspoken Latino like me never would be. The light-eyed and white-skinned were declared household names. Canseco the Cuban was left out in the cold, where racism and double standards rule.

Let's be honest: Back in 1988, no one wanted a Cuban to be the best baseball player in the world. Maybe it's different today, because there are so many great Latino superstars out there. But in 1987 and 1988, who were the great Latino ball players? There was only one; it was just me.

And when I became the first player ever to hit forty homers and forty stolen bases in one season, I was hands down the best player in the world. No one even came close. But who wanted a Cuban to be the best player in the world? Imagine doing something that had never been done in a major sport like baseball. I remember at the beginning of the 1988 season, the media guys asked me if I had any goals for the upcoming year.

"Well, I plan on doing the forty-forty-stealing forty bases and hitting forty home runs," I told them.

They laughed at me. I couldn't understand why. "What's so hard about it?" I asked them.

"You know, no one's ever done it before," one of the reporters told me. So what? I thought it was no big deal. "Well, I have the ability to do it," I said. "So why not do it?"

People always cite that example to prove I was ignorant. But who had the last laugh? I knew something the reporters didn't. I knew that all my hard work, and the right combination of steroids, had already made me a much better athlete than I had been before. I knew I was far beyond what any of them could conceive of in terms of my body and its capabilities.

Already by that point, I had become much faster, and even though I was up to 235 or 240 pounds, I had learned how to move that weight quickly. I incorporated technique with explosive speed, and I had enhanced my muscle-twitch fiber to be able to move much more quickly. Also, I knew that steroids would improve my stamina and keep me strong and explosive throughout the long baseball season. I incorporated all of that and did the forty-forty.

"That was great," my father finally said, but mostly he told other people that, not saying it to me directly.

The double standard began to kick in that year, at least when it came to media coverage. We won our division and went to Boston to play the Red Sox in the American League Championship Series, which we ended up sweeping. But suddenly you heard a lot of talk in the media: Oh, Canseco had this forty-forty year because he's doing steroids-Oh, he's an obvious steroid user.

I remember one time Harmon Killebrew was doing commentary for a game between the A's and the Twins. When I came up to bat, he said: "I saw Canseco in the minor leagues and I've never seen a player change so much so drastically." What a joke. How about McGwire? He went through an even more dramatic change than I did-you could see that just by comparing him in his rookie year with the As, when everyone saw him, to how he looked a few years later. But nobody even cared what McGwire was doing.

He used to hide behind big, oversized shirts, but McGwire had the largest arms in baseball-twenty-one inches, and forearms like you wouldn't believe. But no one ever made an issue of it.