CHAPTER 22
Shadows on the Wall of the Man Cave
Many ’90s men were exercising their unalienable right to artificial expansion. They popped Viagra like Tic Tacs. They slapped on Androderm—the first-ever T-patch—to help boost their flagging testosterone levels. They added enclosed porches and immense decks to their ’80s McMansions. They pulled up to the fast-food drive-through windows (for their “supersized” meals) behind the wheels of vehicular monstrosities: SUVs, Jeeps, and all-terrain gas guzzlers.
The next logical step, of course, was the Hummer. A year after the 1991 Gulf War, the “civilian truck” rolled into showrooms. Marketed as a noncombat version of the military’s Humvee, the wide-bodied, tank-tough, ominously boxy Hummer was the most muscular and martial presence on four American wheels.1 It barreled down country lanes and literally threatened any passenger vehicle in its path. The Hummer had all the grace of a Panzer division. And its absurdly inefficient fuel economy was an abomination in an environmentally conscious era.
Men, for a variety of reasons, needed to feel enviriled. Postmodern man, Freud might have argued, was becoming obsessed not only with the smooth functioning of his phallus but with the heft and loft and status of his phallic symbols.
The Hummer said Huge. It said American and Ready-for-Combat. It said Me. But when that colossus pulled into country club parking lots—and valets and caddies began to extract the golf bags—they encountered a boy toy even more coveted than the Hummer. Big Bertha, the steelhead driver, was the ne plus ultra in performance enhancement. Every scratch golfer, every weekend duffer, every man jack who’d ever swung a club felt he had to have a Big B or a Big B knockoff.
Introduced by Callaway in 1991, the outsize driver had a head the size of a casaba melon. (Bertha, so the story goes, had borrowed its name from the old German howitzer.) A tee shot made with a Big Bertha, even if the golfer hadn’t smacked it on the sweet spot, was suddenly monster-grade—and sometimes even accurate. Callaway could barely keep the clubs in stock. Within two years, the company’s annual revenues hit $255 million, leapfrogging to the front of the sporting goods queue.
Obsessive-compulsive golfing equipment became standardized. More expensive shafts, made of graphite, appeared. New balls offered “extreme distance.” Large golf-gear warehouses (forerunners to golf superstores) opened. And by 1995, Callaway came out with its Great Big Bertha, made of titanium and measuring 250ccs in volume, the size of a moderate breast implant. Bertha implied a siliconed partner, eighteen-hole arm candy.
Next came Cohibas and Montecristos. As larger cars and clubs were to roadways and fairways, cigars became the most predictable manifestation of men’s need to overcompensate. From trucker to bond trader, guys became cigar snobs. Cigars were the new, nasty after-dinner mint. Cigar bars opened in major U.S. cities. Traffic in humidors rivaled traffic in Hummers.2
The cigar served different masters. To impress other men, the he-man needed his to go big-and-long. Others used the smoke itself to delineate their turf. For the whiny infantile, the old stogie supplanted the old nip. But the cigar’s appeal, most of all, came down to the fact that men puffing in groups almost invariably turned off the womenfolk, assuring some unbreachable guy time.
A patron of the Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills told writer Kim Masters, for a 1996 Vanity Fair story on that year’s turmoil in the film industry, “Cigars are the drug of the 90s.” As Masters put it, “Cigars represent security and sharkdom, lascivious abandon and moderation, oral gratification… and the kind of past when it was the boss—not the kid agent, not the $20 million schmuck with his name above the title—who called the shots.”
Since humans started walking upright, man’s appearance and deportment, like woman’s, had been the foundation of his sex appeal. And to that end, new folkways began to accent how American men chose to display themselves in the 1990s.
Men of all classes and kinds were spending serious hang time at the mirror and adopting new tricks to alter their looks. Everywhere, guys were playing the angles. Everywhere, guys were enhancing.
Men who had rarely lifted a toothbrush, let alone a hairbrush, were using skin creams (antioxidants! beta-carotene!). They were scheduling discreet visits to the plastic surgeon. They were splashing on cologne with names like Égoïste, Polo Sport, and Swiss Army (yes, a fragrance named after a pocketknife). They were getting manicures and—unheard of!—tweezing their craggy brows. They were dyeing their temples and planting tidy rows of hair plugs. They were shaving their pates (a convenient “cover” for hair loss) or aping their girlfriends’ habits: dabbing in hair gel or calling down to the hotel’s front desk to borrow the blow dryer. They began grooming.
Men were dressing, as if for the first time in their lives, to be seen. They took up accessories (the return of the man bag!). They underwent wardrobe overhauls and tried odd combos of casual and formal. Some execs even hired fashion consultants to help them modulate to business casual (pronounced “biz caj”). They snapped up catalogs and men’s magazines to study how other men dressed. These were not the Mod guys of the ’60s or the lapels-and-bells guys of the ’70s. They were, instead, Men De-crassified, with a respect for hygiene (the grunge movement notwithstanding) and a sense of personal style.
“As a gay man, I feel that fashion for men changed,” says Joel Paul, a friend who teaches law in San Francisco. He recalls his surprise at seeing billboards in the ’80s and ’90s that showcased pictures of buff male underwear models, often assiduously disrobed. “Previously you wouldn’t think that a man would look at an image of another man and say, ‘Oh, I want to look like him’—and then go out and buy that. We looked at the Arrow shirt guy in the ’60s and said, ‘That’s a nice shirt.’ I don’t remember in college in the ’70s ever talking to another man about where I bought my shoes—all that seemed to have happened in the ’90s.
“There was a shift in the way in which men, gay or straight, responded to images of other men,” he notes. “Suddenly we aspired, in a self-conscious way, to look like other men look. Some of it was the cross between advertising, fashion, and Hollywood: homoeroticism became acceptable—and not off-putting, but appealing. Having a virile guy like Marky Mark, standing in Times Square in his undergarments, made it safer for heterosexual men to acknowledge that.”
Or not. Sports-culture arbiter Brett Forrest holds an opposing view: “I would counter this by saying these images were engineered by women and gay men in ad firms. And they were foisted on straight guys, who were repulsed by them. However, while most guys didn’t find this homoeroticism appealing, the images did make them realize they had to start [getting buff and] lifting weights to keep up with the competition.”
Stay-at-home dads achieved critical mass in the 1980s. But as sex roles continued shifting, even fatherhood began to adopt its own style. The ’90s were a period, after all, when Everydad began attending Lamaze class, sharing carpool duty, slaving in the kitchen, and taking his daughter to “Y-Indian Princess” functions. Being the Perfect Dad was an aspiration. And given the healthy economy, it seemed an achievable ideal—if only Pops had the right equipment. Fathers were suddenly carrying infants in Snuglis and pouches. They were strapping kids into car seats and conveyances and jogging strollers.
One 1997 ad, for a Lauder cologne called Pleasures for Men, tapped into the fatherhood frenzy. It showed a man in a mesh sweater snoozing in a hammock and cradling a small boy to his chest. This was not your standard advertising fare: a perfectly lit photo of a sleeping man hugging a sleeping child. In fact, it furrowed many a brow. But the tip-off—that he was wearing a wedding band—removed any hint of impropriety.3 It also gave the ad a tenderness that emerged with a wave of recognition. The ad became iconic, a new way of conveying “male wholesome.” And it sold boatloads of cologne.
Then there was the man bod. Even the most idle of shlemiels was now an out-and-proud gym rat, obsessed with chiseled pecs and toothsome flanks. Men stashed the Discman in the gym bag and hit the elliptical trainer. Men and women began pushing their bodies to places somewhere between unsafe and insane. Marathons segued into ultra-marathons. Triathlons were lapped by Ironman Triathlons. Men spent so much time on their bicycles that many were complaining of “numb nuts,” prostate problems, and even erectile dysfunction. So designers came up with contoured seats—big sellers in the late ’90s—to limit the wear and tear on a cyclist’s perineum.
If a fitness freak couldn’t control his lot in life, at least he could control his physical being. And so emerged the new Six-Pack Men, to whom abs were all. And so emerged the new “Step” Aerobics Mamas (a step up from the ’80s ladies who’d sworn by Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons) in tank tops and Lycra and spandex. And so emerged new temples to the body temple. There was a boomlet in fitness centers as corporations sweetened their programs to pay for part of their employees’ gym memberships—around the time that the surgeon general, in 1990, began an initiative to promote regular exercise among older adults. Over a six-year span, beginning in 1989, there was a franchise explosion of new megaclubs: Crunch, Equinox, David Barton, Life Time Fitness, Curves for Women.
The new temples beckoned the faithful, from the Boomers to the club kids. The regular grind, the weight training, the intense focus on an exercise regimen brought nobility through self-discipline. The workout built up stamina and recharged one’s sexual appetites (except, of course, when it depleted them). And it made the gym rat progressively more appealing as a physical specimen, despite the fanny pack.
The acid-tongued movie producer Julia Phillips, in her early-’90s takedown of Hollywood’s most egregious egos, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, addressed the vanity fair of the fitness scene, commenting on the constant cruising among health club clientele:
After the tenth person gives [her male friend] Brooke the eye, he says, “People fuck you with just a glance, don’t they?”
“Welcome to the ’90s,” I reply.
“No, in the ’90s they’ll fuck themselves in the mirror,” he says.
Well, he should know.
Men were pampering and styling and toning and remaking themselves because they could. The frisky financial markets and an economy on autopilot boosted discretionary spending. Advertisers treated the male-consumer marketplace (along with all sports-related media) as perpetual trade shows. And all of the dollar signs aligned. If women were shelling out billions in the name of beauty, then what of men, in the name of vanity?
In 1994, a U.K. writer named Mark Simpson, in the Independent, came up with a label for the surge, mixing pop psychology, sexual nuance, and linguistic flourish. For an article about a men’s fashion-and-style installation in London, curated by GQ magazine, Simpson visited the five pavilions that made up what organizers called “It’s a Man’s World—Britain’s first style exhibition for men.” And there, undeniably evinced, was a new cult in full flower. He dubbed it the cult of the “metrosexual.”
Simpson defined the metrosexual as “the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city [and constituting] perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade.… Metrosexual man is a commodity fetishist: a collector of fantasies about the male sold to him by advertising.” In the previous decade, in Simpson’s estimation, the metrosexual “was only to be found inside fashion magazines such as GQ, in television advertisements for Levis jeans or in gay bars. In the Nineties, he’s everywhere and he’s going shopping.”4
GQ, as it turned out, was the ideal host for the exhibit. Like many of its British-bred mates (The Face, Arena, FHM, and, to some degree, Dazed & Confused, as well as Esquire and Details in the States),5 every ad and editorial page communicated a crucial subtext. “The ‘heterosexual’ address of these magazines is a convention,” Simpson believed. “[It was] there to reassure the readership and their advertisers that their ‘unmanly’ passions are in fact manly.” And these publications were rewriting the book on the male gaze: “The metrosexual man contradicts the basic premise of traditional heterosexuality—that only women are looked at and only men do the looking. Metrosexual man might prefer women, he might prefer men, but when all’s said and done nothing comes between him and his reflection.”
Men were becoming more discerning in their material choices. They were becoming more attuned to consumer cues. They were becoming more conscious of how they arrayed themselves publicly and how that display prompted a reaction in terms of social radar, peer envy or allegiance, workplace respect, and sexual allure. And many of them sounded nuts when fussing about all of this in public places. The zenith of consumer parsing to impress one’s peers, West Coast Division? Steve Martin’s character ordering coffee in a chichi eatery in the 1991 film L.A. Story: “I’ll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon.”6
And the virility gods said: Let there be Rogaine.
Just as men were going on a shopping binge, pharmacies were beginning to stock the miracle of miracles. Minoxidil, the vital ingredient in Rogaine, had been created to help control high blood pressure. But many men in the early trials for the drug began to go Rapunzel. Soon there was an FDA-approved topical solution for slowing down hair loss and spurring hair growth. Rogaine, with a major marketing infusion in 1989, began to take the nation by scalp. Here was the follicular parallel to the bodybuilding crazes of the Depression (thank you, Charles Atlas) and the 1950s (ditto, Jack LaLanne). Men whose thinning manes and comb-overs had somehow shunted them to the social sidelines were now out and about with unbridled vim.
In Hollywood, meanwhile, beards and bellicosity were to ’90s moguls what mustaches had been to ’70s macho men. “In the early Nineties,” producer Brian Grazer has noted, “there was a group of young, successful producers doing loud, aggressive movies. They were themselves loud and aggressive—they were ‘yellers.’… And many in this same group wore beards. Bearded, aggressive men, producing aggressive movies.”7
Some men went the other way entirely: full cue ball. In the 1980s, according to the Independent, “a shaven head became part of the new gay code, a rejection of the old moustache-and-leather look.” Straight culture followed suit. The undressed skull implied a manly security—a comfort with a form of public nakedness. It conjured emperor. It conjured monk. It said: I am such a singular and pure presence—such a manly man—that I don’t need hair to prove it. (Remarked Michael Rooney, the first publisher of ESPN The Magazine—launched in 1998—apropos of his buff chest, “Hair, after all, doesn’t grow on iron.”) The bullethead became a chapeau for the tycoon, the banker, and, most visibly of all, the athlete (e.g., MJ, Shaq, and Sir Charles, not to mention Mark Messier and, in time, Cal Ripken Jr., Barry Bonds—and Andre Agassi, who got tired of futzing around with his wig). It also compensated for the dreaded Boomer yarmulke: the receding hairline and male pattern baldness.
And oh how they futzed with the locks they did have.
When rap star Snoop Dogg showed up at the MTV Music Awards with straightened hair (one year with curls, one year shoulder-length), “his ‘manhood’ and sexuality [were] not called into question,” observed Ingrid Banks, the author of Hair Matters. “Like other younger black males who are straightening their hair, wearing braids and cornrows, and barrettes and rubber bands… Snoop’s image is still seen as masculine.” In many rap videos, beaded or braided hairdos that previously might have been considered feminine passed, instead, as masculine. Banks writes, “[Rap video] characters’ masculinity and sexuality… are never questioned because they are gangstas and thugs.”8 (“With the violent slayings of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur,” says writer Lucia Brawley, executive producer of the World Cup of Hip Hop competition, “so too died the notion that ‘thug life’ was the only avenue to express masculinity in hip-hop. In 1997, Sean Combs—then known as Puff Daddy—instantaneously transformed hip-hop’s image from gangsta to entrepreneur, wearing debonair attire and ultimately creating his own fashion line, Sean John.”)
Male peacocks strutted their stuff in the ’70s. Wall Street titans in the greed-fueled ’80s were known as “masters of the universe” (Tom Wolfe’s phrase, from 1987’s The Bonfire of the Vanities) and “Big Swinging Dicks” (chronicled in Michael Lewis’s 1989 exposé Liar’s Poker). By the ’90s, the hankering for the big stick and the long ball was nowhere more apparent than in the realm of spectator sports. And a captivated audience became enamored of a burgeoning television network. ESPN, launched in 1979, had grown into an entertainment and sports-news powerhouse. Sport—and sports talk—could now be consumed twenty-four hours a day, turning what had essentially been radio chat or water-cooler bull into a continental conversation.
The network became the nation’s male bonding frequency. Once or twice a day—especially when SportsCenter’s nighttime hosts occupied their anchor chairs—guys’ biotic clocks turned to ESPN. So essential was the network to a plurality of American men that it actually exerted a more compulsive tug than porn. According to Bruce Feiler in an essay for the New York Times, ESPN and its ancillary units were “a 3D juggernaut of television, radio, print and digital [assets, under the Disney corporate umbrella] that arguably constitutes the single greatest cultural force in male identity today.”
All sports, like all politics, had forever been local-local. You played against guys in the ’hood; you rooted for hometown teams. But ESPN and ESPN2 (along with large regional networks like Chicago’s WGN and Atlanta’s TBS and TNT) made pro sports part of a national backdrop. With more men feeling more isolated, they could at least forge a gender-wide connection through the ebb and flow of the American sports calendar. (Female sports fans would join in too.) No matter which beer tap you drank from, no matter where things stood in the standings or the cycle of a sports season, you knew about the big play, the big game, and the changing fortunes of the big-name gladiators who numbered in the hundreds. “You knew the drift,” says marketing analyst Tim Zahner, “so you could connect with another guy—a total stranger. Sport has narratives and you can plug into the conversation. You’d watch the analysis on ESPN and you pretty much knew what you were talking about.”
True enough. But ESPN’s ulterior allure, insiders insist, was gambling. With the rise of rotisserie leagues and fantasy sports and round-the-clock betting, fans were tuning in for one reason above all: to see if they were up or down on the day.9
For many viewers ESPN became a nightly event because of one man: Keith Olbermann, on SportsCenter. Every evening at 11 sharp (10 Central), while cohost Dan Patrick riffed on the events of the day, Olbermann could be seen venting the antiestablishment anger that was simmering inside his audience. His presence was dark, vituperative, and irresistible. He bit the hand of all three institutions that fed him: professional sports, the medium of television, and ESPN itself (along with its executives). According to one of the network’s former producers, Bill Wolff, “The guy who made ESPN a household word, the guy who made ESPN mean something in the market to everyone, was Keith Olbermann.… Watching him in the mid-’90s was… appointment viewing: What was Olbermann going to say that night?”10
In terms of casual apparel, the audience was already cribbing a lot of its sartorial advice from the sports world. Guys wore basketball shoes at all hours. They wore sweats or tracksuits or team jerseys when they were out running errands. They wore T-shirts with… anything. Their style, such as it was, often matched that of teens in the street. Adolescents and twenty-somethings during the ’90s favored ballcaps turned sideways or backwards. And in line with late-’70s and ’80s trends in rap and hip-hop, they added heavy chains and bracelets, earrings and studs, even dental grills. Jeans continued to sag so baggily that underwear became outerwear, prompting politicians to call for an outright ban on low-hanging pants.11
There was a rash of incidents, beginning in the late ’80s, in which teens killed other teens merely to take possession of their high-end clothes or high-top sneakers. Kids were committing murder over jackets and shoes. Certain sneakers, for example—Air Jordans, most of all—conferred status and therefore power. And teens, to be accepted or revered or feared, were making fashion statements that were entangled with greed, desperate need (for signs of economic aspiration and personal expression), and the unrealistic material aspirations that were being peddled to them in ads. By 1996, Bill Clinton in his State of the Union address would go so far as to throw his support behind school uniforms “if it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets.”
Many young men who had never been to a tattoo parlor in their lives began displaying ink openly and expansively. Tattoos were partially an attempt to brand oneself, literally. The tat became a ’90s statement of commitment and permanence in a world where everything was in flux. It displayed one’s distinction from the established order, marking him or her as “apart,” or, in fact, “belonging” to a cohesive group of “others.” By decade’s end, though, so many men and women had tattoos that they would become played out as a sign of rebellion.
Among the most visible full-bod tat adopters were pro basketball stars. The Philadelphia 76ers’ Allen Iverson, for one, excelled at body art and helped infuse hoops with hip-hop style. Then there was the sport’s clown prince, Dennis Rodman, a defensive standout for the Detroit Pistons and the Chicago Bulls, whose tats and dye jobs were signatures. By the end of the decade, more than a third of the NBA’s players were reportedly sporting ink.12
Though Rodman was the most outré example, the athlete-as-exhibitionist and nonconformist had begun to replace the strong, silent sportsman (an attitude that persists to this day). More jocks were less reluctant to express unpopular opinions, indulge their vanity, or display their emotions—joy, defeat, anger, swagger—on the field or off.
At the same time, when star athletes stepped out at night, many of them were tricked out, their raiment a reflection of their escalating salaries, endorsement contracts, and cross-media deals. “The ’80s and ’90s were a low point in sports style,” men’s fashion authority Jon Patrick, founder of The Selvedge Yard blog, would tell Forbes.com. “Players wore over-the-top six-button suits, big jewelry. It was very gangster, not in good taste.” And yet. For many an influential sports icon, taste mattered—especially as the lines began to blur between the worlds of sport, music, and fashion. Nightclubbing models and starlets in the ’90s would never have shown up on the arms of certain players (baseball’s Derek Jeter or basketball’s Shaquille O’Neal, for starters) had these gents not stepped up their style game.13
Soon all hell broke loose. Casual Friday seemed to come out of nowhere… or, more accurately, out of the Pacific Northwest. The trend was partly a manifestation of the Silicon Valley youthquake that was powering the dot-com economy. Adults, subconsciously, were aping slovenly-chic Gen Xers—some of them the underlings who were writing code or the pimply-faced CEOs who were raking in VC funding for their digital start-ups.14 The casual look was an offshoot of grunge culture and the Seattle alt-rock scene that was echoing out across the land on serious reverb. Everywhere, young people, turned off by the pretension and pandering of material culture, were donning wool and cotton, often outsized or ragged or mismatched: super-long shorts, lumberjack shirts, alt-band Ts, ironically patterned skirts and dresses collected from thrift shops—paired with shit-kickers (work boots for the out-of-work). Marc Andreessen, who had conceived of the Internet browser while a student making $6.85 an hour—and then made a nifty fifty mil the day Netscape went public in 1995—would crack, in rascal fashion, “Got my Armani suit on today.” Translation: “I’m in jeans, a sport shirt, and hiking boots.”
“By the mid-’90s you had the high-tech boom and investment bankers [along with] Wall Street coming back from the setback [of the late ’80s] and you had dress-down Fridays,” says Ken Aretsky, who at the time was running New York’s ‘21’ Club, where a jacket was required. “It became dress-down every day. Suddenly guys were coming in like they’d just taken out the garbage. You had a generation of twenty-five-to thirty-year-olds making millions of dollars—guys who looked like shlumps [buying] $10,000 bottles of wine.… Pishers. You have this generation [that] think[s] every woman is available to them. [For these young] guys in ’96, ’97, it was all about money: ‘If I had money and I wanted to be with that woman,’ they felt they had that right, that access, that power.… It was always more of a transaction. You were giving something to get something.”
Older Boomers, moreover, were looking for any way to bond with kids like their young coworkers (not to mention their own kids)—and personal style provided a shortcut. Many were mimicking the man-boys now calling the shots at Hollywood production companies, the junior account execs in advertising, and all their crunchy cousins out west. Men at Work, in short, were dressing like Boys at Play. I remember “taking a meeting” one afternoon in the ’90s and pitching a TV-show idea to a young-geek producer. He wore a T-shirt, pressed blue jeans, and pricey kicks. And for thirty minutes he sat on a couch hugging a pillow and rocking rhythmically. I felt like I’d been teleported to middle school, blazed on Red Bull and Ritalin.
ESPN was symptomatic of another cultural shift: the era of the Male Spectator. More and more guys liked to watch.
Battalions of men in the ’90s would set up media rooms in their homes to accommodate their larger TVs with their growing smorgasbord of satellite and cable channels. Armed with multiple remote controls, guys would install killer sound systems and gaming consoles and personal computers. On nearby shelves sprouted whole libraries of VHS tapes, music CDs, and CD-ROMs. Such entertainment centers became more generally known as “man caves.”
The term “man cave,” in fact, was coined in 1992 by Joanne Lovering in a column for the Toronto Star. (Coining pop-cult phrases, by the way, became a nervous tic among 1990s culture critics.) Lovering had originally applied the term to a basement or garage with a workbench where a man could tinker for hours among his power tools, a “cave of solitude secured against wife intrusion by cold floors, musty smells and a few strategic cobwebs.” In many cultures, men had traditionally been granted a retreat where they could decompress, recharge, and gain perspective. But in the entertainment age, the man cave soon came to designate a multimedia hovel where a household’s papa bear could hibernate with a few bros and a few brews, switching back and forth between games.
And what were these cave dwellers watching? They were watching the World Wrestling Federation. They were watching motocross and monster trucks and what would become the leading U.S. spectator sport, NASCAR, a riot of speed, noise, burning rubber, and logos. They were watching pro football and hoops and college sports of all kinds, with audiences that seemed to grow exponentially. They were watching, on any given weekend, a dozen or more professional or amateur sports, whose seasons, as if goosed along by global warming, seemed to lengthen a little bit each year.15
Part of the reason for the audience upsurge was the tech boom. Production values had gone through the roof. Slo-mo. Dazzling graphics. A surfeit of stat-men whispering in commentators’ ears. Added cameras covering each play in parallax. And on-field correspondents with greater access to players and coaches. “A lot of people would have previously planned to attend a game with friends,” recalls Brett Forrest, a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine. Come the ’90s, they often preferred buddies and beers at home “because it was more convenient and, ultimately, a fuller experience. At the game—before the age of handheld devices—they missed out on all the replays, stats, and analysis, feeling a bit empty.”
On the other extreme, there was… extreme. As if to take enhanced behavior to its loftiest level, males found refuge in a broad category called extreme sports. Many of the men and boys who gravitated to it were avowed couch jockeys. But countless others, in their free time, were whitewater rafting. They were snowboarding and rock climbing, inline skating and mountain biking. They were playing paintball. Or they were getting their serotonin surges through a new slate of truly out-there outdoor activities: paragliding and big-mountain skiing, street luge and spelunking and bungee. ESPN was covering all of this and more. The network would begin televising its X Games in 1995 after network execs, as Time magazine would note, realized they were “missing out on ad dollars that could be coaxed from finicky flannel-wearing Gen Xers.” Pushing the limits and breaking the norm had become the norm.16
Through it all, sports fans, as in years past, were imagining themselves in their idols’ cleats. But they were taking it further. They were wearing uniforms with the names and numbers of their favorites. They were paying large sums to go on golf outings where they could tee up with genuine jocks. They were attending baseball fantasy camps (which first became popular in the ’80s among nostalgia-prone Boomers) and actually taking the field with former stars. They were emulating. And they were not just identifying with the undisputed icons (the lyrics of Michael Jordan’s 1991 Gatorade commercial insisted that every kid wanted to “Be Like Mike”) but with heroes whose legacies would be tarnished, not burnished, by the passage of years.
Bill Clinton, the First Golfer, was caught taking extra mulligans (and lots of ’em).17 Slugger Pete Rose was caught cheating on his taxes (and went to prison for it, having already been banned from baseball for gambling). Boxer Mike Tyson took to fighting dirty, famously removing his mouth guard and taking a chomp out of the ear of his opponent Evander Holyfield (not once, but twice). Basketball’s Latrell Sprewell put his coach P. J. Carlesimo in a chokehold (and was banned from the NBA for much of 1998).
Then, too, more athletes were using banned substances. And in increasing numbers they were arrested for spousal abuse, bar brawls, drunk driving. College recruitment scandals mounted, along with revelations that mystery donors were providing gifts and money to teen athletes. Even the betting habits of Michael Jordan himself would become the object of journalists’ speculation. Men were seeing a pattern: many superjocks were really their fans’ larger selves, forever playing the angles, gaming the system, and trying to find an edge. Men were struggling to understand how their old, out-of-phase lives fit in with all the new rules, the lax limits, the shifting moral playing field.
It was going to be one of the biggest days of my son’s young life.
Early that morning, in September 1998, I roused him from sleep, told him I’d already packed his bag, and explained we were heading for the airport.
“To Chicago?” he asked, sleepy-eyed but smiling. “To see Grandma and Grandpa?”
“Yes,” I said, “and not only them.”
“To a Cubs game?”
Sam, age ten, was a Chicago Cubs fan, like his dad. His idol was his namesake, Sammy Sosa, the Cubs’ Dominican-born outfielder. Sosa at the time was locked in a heated home run derby with Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals. For months they’d been racing to overtake Babe Ruth’s mark of 60 homers in a single season (set in 1927) and Roger Maris’s 61 (the gold standard that had stood unchallenged for thirty-seven summers). Now both Sosa and McGwire were on the threshold of sports history.
For years, Major League Baseball had been in a funk. Its fan base had gone gray as young people were flocking to basketball and football. A strike-shortened 1994 season had disillusioned millions. A general malaise had set in due to many factors, including stratospheric ticket prices, scalpers’ markups, games televised way past kids’ bedtimes, and the owners’ shift to stadium skyboxes (to accommodate corporate profligacy). Yet earlier that week—on September 7 and 8—the Cubs and Cardinals had met head-to-head. And the nation tuned in, via TV and radio, to catch the buzz. The daily drama of a pair of bulked-up hulks tearing the stitching off the Rawlings had added a nostalgic crackle to the national pastime.
Throughout August and into September, McGwire vs. Sosa caught on as one of the classic rivalries in American sports, with echoes of Palmer vs. Nicklaus, Ali vs. Frazier, Bird vs. Magic. The race got giddy. Fans began to wonder if the men had secretly corked their bats—or if the league, in a bid to enliven the game, had “juiced up” the balls. All the more remarkable was the fraternal tenor of the contest. As the press covered each game, each brute went out of his way, day after day, to be deferential. They genuinely seemed to like each other.
On September 7, McGwire had tied Maris’s record. On the eighth, he’d stormed into the record books with his sixty-second four-bagger. Sosa, however, was nipping at his heels. The twenty-nine-year-old Cub—two parts cheery mascot, three parts cocky—had inspired the city of Chicago, and his native Dominican Republic. Fans took to plastering Dominican flags on cars, in bars, in classrooms. My son, Sam, had a Sammy poster on his bedroom wall, a Sosa action figure, and three Cubs caps.
But now had come the coup de grâce, as far as my son was concerned. As a Vanity Fair editor, I had arranged to have Sosa and McGwire photographed, separately, for the magazine’s annual Hall of Fame portfolio, a collection of portraits of American culture’s yearlings. And on September 13, Sam would be on hand at the ballpark for the Sosa photo shoot.
We arrived that Sunday morning and walked up the box-seat ramp into the wide basin of Wrigley Field. Even from the darkened tunnel, below field level, we were beckoned by green: the emerald outfield, the walls clad in ivy. The place was empty, save for the grounds crew, some ushers, two members of the Cubs’ PR staff, and photographer Peggy Sirota, along with her two assistants.
Sammy Sosa arrived in a white muscle shirt, cut off at the rib cage, the better to expose his abs. Like the day itself, he was all sunshine and blue sky. He signed a baseball for the younger Sammy and kibbitzed a bit (preferring Spanish to English): “Winning games is more important,” he declared, insisting that a World Series for the snakebitten Cubs was a far grander prospect than a home run title. Then he got in his batter’s stance, in the gleam of the morning, and, click, flexed his bare biceps for the camera, click.
That Sunday in September turned out to be not only one of my son’s childhood highlights, but the most charmed afternoon of Sosa’s career. With two strokes, he hit numbers 61 and 62, surpassing Ruth, then Maris, as the Cubs edged the Brewers in a ten-inning nail-biter, 11–10. “Goodbye Babe, so long Roger,” read that night’s posting on the Associated Press wire (remember newswires?). “With tears and sweat running down his face as he sat in the dugout after his second triumphant tour around the bases, Sosa came out for three emotional curtain calls, [later saying,] ‘I don’t usually cry, but I cry inside. I was blowing kisses to my mother.’” (She was watching the game in the DR.)
The season would close with McGwire on top, having logged an astonishing 70 home runs, to Sosa’s 66. Heralded as Sports Illustrated’s twin Sportsmen of the Year, they would appear on the magazine’s cover, their heads wreathed in garlands, like Greek gods.
Then the dark mass descended, as though a shadow on an X-ray.
In 2003 Sosa was ejected from a game for using a corked bat. That same year, he would test positive in a league-mandated drug screening. In time, he and McGwire would appear before Congress during an investigation of doping in Major League Baseball. And come 2010, an apologetic McGwire, his voice cracking at times, would admit he’d used steroids during that storybook summer of ’98—and had done so intermittently for a decade. He confessed to taking human growth hormone as well.18 (Sosa denied he had ever “taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs” and to this day has never admitted doing so.)
The bomber boys of ’98 would now be branded with one of the most damning asterisks of all sports records. And by the time the dust and rosin settled, their reputations had tanked. When tallying up the twenty-five leading home run hitters in baseball history, the two of them—and a handful of others, including Barry Bonds—would be dogged by accusations of doping in the ’90s and 2000s.
My son, now twenty-eight, renders his verdict, with benefit of hindsight: “I remember looking at Sammy Sosa’s rookie [baseball] card and thinking, ‘How did this skinny little kid become this muscle-bound guy?’ I’m sure some people thought all these guys entering the MLB were suddenly ‘blowing up’ to three times their normal size. But to most of us, the objects of public concern lag by four or five years. We see that in hindsight.
“At this point in my life, I basically assume that success and power drive the world. I fully recognize that we live in a competitive society and that when we get to the highest levels, all the mechanisms we have to check our competitiveness are self-imposed.”
For two of the great sports figures of the ’90s, evidently, raw talent somehow hadn’t been enough. Their manhood had required amplification—one that would appear genuine at the moment but would end up proving, in its way, artificially magnified. Performance, enhanced.
McGwire’s disclosures, while unsettling, were hardly staggering. Complicit trainers, teammates, and wingmen had long been suspected of providing athletes with steroids. Nor was it a shock that pro sports produced superheroes with biceps of clay. When a system is ingrained with owners, teams, and players who are committed to eking out every last competitive edge, what other outcome might one have expected?
Most deflating, though, was the fact that the McGwire-and-Sosa Show, now tainted, was a metaphor for a win-at-any-cost culture.19 America had arrived at a juncture where fair play was devalued. As with the all-too-popular junk bonds from the decade before (really risky, burdened with debt, and offering potentially high yields), junk power—if it contributed to victory—had turned into a reliable yardstick of success. Why not gin up the game, so the reasoning went, if it made the contest more entertaining for the fans and more lucrative for the players and profiteers? Performance, enhanced. Ends justifying means.20
American sport, we had learned, was for winners. And integrity in sport, like chivalry or chastity, soon became an archaic ideal. The ’90s, after all, was the Amplified Age. It was the age of implants and avatars… Cialis and cyborgs… tribute bands and Civil War reenactors… securities fraud and “creative accounting”… counterfeit products and antique reproductions… stop-action animation and CGI… reality TV and virtual reality. Who knew that just weeks into the new decade—in February 1990—Adobe would roll out Photoshop 1.0, inaugurating the era of computer-manipulated imagery and forever nixing the notion of a photo as a rendering of an actual place in a lost slice of time?
Despite the fiction explosion in the Amplified Age, the depreciation of that home run race had been especially hard to swallow. American memory had looked kindly on a contest that evoked earlier summers of streetcars and Cracker Jack and the parable of he-men swatting homers. How could something that had seemed so apple-pie pure prove to have been so half-baked, microwaved, and laced with additives?
My son, Sam, takes it all in stride. He now insists that these later revelations “have not diminished at all my enjoyment of the day—or the era. Like many childhood memories, it wasn’t what it was.” His conclusion: “I learned a lot from the disillusionment of the steroid era. Now, when the squeaky-clean Disney character Hannah Montana becomes the sexualized performer Miley Cyrus, I’m not surprised. I’m rarely surprised. The lesson is: look deeper. If it looks like a pig, it’s a pig.”
It was only a matter of time.
Along with Michael Jordan, two other megastars ascended in the ’90s, soon to dominate their sports. Cyclist Lance Armstrong would earn his first of seven consecutive Tour de France victories after battling back from testicular cancer. And Tiger Woods, at twenty-one, would become the youngest golfer to win a modern major,21 taking the 1997 Masters by a record twelve strokes.
We all know, alas, how those high-flying Icarus boys fell to earth.
Armstrong would be exposed in a doping scandal that would forever shatter his reputation. And golfers everywhere would watch the news reports, slack-jawed, to learn how Woods’s darkest hour would play out: on a driveway in front of his house in a tony subdivision of Windermere, Florida.
Tiger Woods and his wife, Elin Nordegren, sometime before or during the groggy morning in question, had some kind of confrontation. (It may or may not have had to do with the fact that Woods would soon be linked to an array of women, some bearing voicemails and text messages from him.) That morning, for whatever reason, Woods would slide behind the wheel of his Cadillac Escalade and travel no more than a five-iron’s distance from his front door, after plowing into a median strip, some hedges, a fire hydrant, and, at last, a tree.
Nordegren would smash in the windows of the vehicle. Police would be summoned. She would tell authorities that the car doors had been locked and that she’d wanted to extract her husband, who was trapped inside, semiconscious. One or more paramedics on the scene were described in police-released reports as suspecting some kind of domestic dispute, yet neither Woods nor Nordegren has ever been accused of domestic violence.22
Whichever, whatever. Her instrument of choice that night was a golf club. And Poor Tiger got the shaft.