"I'll Be (Dis)Honest With You" (1987)

Joe Niekro, Oliver North, and the grand American tradition of lying.

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One summer evening in 1987, less than a month after a man named Oliver North declared that he had deliberately lied to Congress out of fealty to the president, a knuckleball pitcher named Joe Niekro drew the suspicion of an umpire in Anaheim, California. The umpire picked up a baseball Niekro had just thrown, inspected what appeared to be a ritual mutilation, then ordered Niekro to empty his pockets. And in real time, Niekro’s attempt to cover up for years of lying was exposed.

Niekro was 43 years old, and over the years he had become so notorious for doctoring baseballs that Angels manager Gene Mauch told reporters after the game that “nobody ever suspected Joe Niekro (of doctoring the ball). Everybody always knew it.” And yet, even as Niekro had been caught red-handed like a Scooby-Doo antagonist—even as an emery board and a small piece of sandpaper literally came flying out of his pockets—he continued to deny he’d done anything wrong. He’d been carrying the emery board and the sandpaper, he told reporters, since he’d begun throwing the knuckleball years ago. He used the emery board to file his nails, he said, and used the sandpaper as a backup in case the emery board got soaked from his own sweat, although I personally can’t imagine many things more awkward and torturous than attempting to file one’s own nails with sandpaper.

Niekro—who would eventually be suspended for 10 games—opened his whole ridiculous postgame justification with a phrase that, in retrospect, should have given him away.

“I’ll be honest with you,” he began.

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II.

Baseball has always had its share of rogues and liars, but Joe Niekro’s blatant attempt to cheat and his sad attempt to cover it up—along with a number of other incidents of baseball players getting caught breaking the rules—struck a nerve in America that summer. In The Washington Post, columnist Tom Boswell wrote a piece headlined, “Baseball Cheating Reflects the Age.” Here is how Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Frank Dolson, upon reading Boswell’s article, reflected on the moment:

Dolson goes on to note the trouble with this theory, which is that baseball players have always cheated (and, as we now know, they would continue to cheat into the 1990s and beyond). But there are also moments when lying feels more pronounced in American culture; there are moments when it feels like lying becomes the Zeitgeist. And it now appears we are trapped in a moment where lying has become the dominant form of governmental communication. We are flooded with so many obvious and blatant fibs that is impossible to keep up with them. Evidence to the contrary comes flying through the air like sandpaper from a back pocket, and the principles responsible attempt to redirect the eye to a shiny object in the distance.

At the same time, we have become so cynical as a culture—and so cynical of institutions—that we just presume everyone lies all the time, so what difference does a single lie even make? You can even make the case that we enjoy all of this lying, if it is in service of what we believe is a just cause. It is in our DNA as Americans to celebrate the kinds of outlaws and gangsters who captured the imagination in the 19th century, and the kinds of Gatsby-esque tycoons who exemplify the dark side of the American dream in the 20th century. Even when you watch that video above, there’s a part of you that can’t help but admire Joe Niekro’s resourcefulness; it’s what won him over 200 games over 22 seasons in the major leagues.

“A pro who throws a spitball to support his family,” former manager George Bamberger told Boswell, “is a competitor.”

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III.

While the lies these days are especially harrowing and intense and anti-democratic—and while the justifications are even more cynical than Joe Niekro’s hilariously pathetic attempt to explain away the contents of his pockets—it’s also kind of comforting to realize that we’ve been through all of this multiple times before, and that we have, up to now, always survived the moment. In his column, Boswell begins with a story of a team in Philadelphia using a rudimentary sign-stealing system back in 1899, during “a time of cartels and robber barons, Wall Street skullduggery, Elmer Gantry charlatanism, and big stick foreign policy.”

It was happening again in the 1980s, Boswell wrote, as frauds like Ivan Boesky and Jim Bakker imploded before our eyes. It was happening with Oliver North, whose testimony about lies and cover-ups in the name of his own perceived patriotism foreshadowed the divide that would shear the country in half nearly four decades later, and the willingness of people to tolerate lying if it furthered their own self-interests above the interests of an American institution.

In the wake of North’s admission that he deceived Congress out of a perverse sense of loyalty to democracy, the Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko conducted an informal poll in which he asked readers whether Congress should be abolished altogether. Seventy percent said no, but twenty percent said yes, and ten percent crept even farther into Crazytown. A woman in Illinois wrote in on American-flag embossed stationery and claimed that all of Congress should be impeached and destroyed; a man in Florida declared that the president and his cabinet should take over all governing functions, and that “all liberals should be shipped to Cuba, Russia, or other communist countries.” One woman in Tulsa declared that only Congresspeople who agreed with the president should be allowed to serve; a man in Illinois, seeking common ground, asked that Congress be preserved in its current form, except to eject the “queers, secular humanists, commies and the other wrong thinkers.”

There is, Boswell wrote in his column, a voice in our heads that is so deeply and fundamentally American that it still charms and seduces us. It is the voice that assures us that under right circumstances, that which is dead wrong can be justified as perfectly all right.

“It is the voice of Joe Niekro,” Boswell wrote. “And Oliver North.”

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