This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between.
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I.
Fifty years ago, the best young player in baseball was a first baseman who so embodied the archetype of the All-American athlete that he inspired a stream of breathless hyperbole in his wake. “He began helping old dolls across the street when he was a toddler, contributed to the Salvation Army out of his childhood allowance and has never walked past a tin cup in his life,” one newspaper columnist wrote of him in the summer of 1974.
This came at the same moment that America was reckoning with its own compromised morality, and as Steve Garvey of the Los Angeles Dodgers evolved over the course of a single summer from a part-time player to a first-rate talent, he also became a nostalgic totem of a pre-1960s America. He was likened to fictional characters like Frank Merriwell and Jack Armstrong and described as “a guy who looked he just jumped off the Wheaties box.”
Garvey’s success was so surprising that his name wasn’t even printed on All-Star ballots that summer. So a write-in campaign began, driven at least in part by Garvey and his own family. Garvey landed a spot and became the MVP of that All-Star game, before winning the National League MVP Award at the end of the season. His career, undeniably brilliant and dully consistent, would carry on like this for years; he would eventually break the National League record for consecutive games played, gritting his way through illness and injury. He once got through an entire season at first base without making a single error.
Garvey was held up as an impossibly faultless exemplar of traditional American values in an uneasy era for the country—so much so that a junior high school in Lindsay, California, shed its namesake of Abraham Lincoln and named itself after Garvey. One Dodger-hater wrote to The Los Angeles Times about his puzzlement over his own admiration for Garvey:
II.
Over time, the cracks in the facade began to show. In 1979, Garvey got into a wrestling match with teammate Don Sutton after Sutton disparaged his image in the press. Garvey was not well-liked in the clubhouse (to be fair, Sutton wasn’t always well-liked either); one of his teammates said Garvey was essentially friendless, a guy who felt more comfortable hanging out with the coaches than the players, and who tried so unbelievably hard to project a pristine public image that his teammates literally wanted to punch him in the face. A writer once said Garvey ran as if he was trying to keep his jersey from wrinkling.
A decade later, in 1989, when his ex-wife published a scathing book about the dissolution of their marriage, the whole Steve Garvey facade had come crashing down. Garvey’s womanizing and string of paternity suits became a regular punchline on late-night talk shows and even at the Academy Awards. A bumper sticker read, HONK IF YOU'RE CARRYING STEVE GARVEY'S BABY. A bishop at the University of San Diego, where Garvey served as a trustee, called him a sociopath.
In a 1989 Sports Illustrated profile, Rick Reilly detailed how Garvey often seemed to be lying to himself by play-acting as a character straight out of a storybook; even Garvey’s own children often found him entirely devoid of any actual emotion. (His ex-wife says he once inscribed a birthday card to his daughter: “Happy Birthday, Best Wishes from Steve Garvey.”) Garvey appeared to be a man who had spent his life prioritizing image over substance, and 50 years later after he first arrived at a position of prominence, very little seems to have changed.
III.
It is possible, if you don’t live in the state of California—or even if you do—that you might not know Steve Garvey is running for a seat in the United States Senate. Dozens of ex-athletes have attempted to transition into politics, some of them driven by noble aims (Jack Kemp, Bill Bradley) and some of them spurred by more self-serving motives. But what sets Garvey’s Senate run apart from all the others is that I’m not sure what it is about at all. In fact, it seems entirely devoid of a purpose beyond the name of the candidate himself.
It’s not just that Garvey is running as a Republican in a deep-blue state in perhaps the most polarized era in modern American history; it’s that he doesn’t even seem to be trying. He speaks in aphorisms that mean absolutely nothing; he won’t even express a definitive opinion about the standard-bearer of his own party. It’s as if he’s running just to say he ran, because this is what he always appeared destined to do when he was younger. It’s as if he’s trying to fill out the gaps in his own story.
There’s something kind of sad about this. But it also feels like a telling metaphor for modern American politics at a moment when celebrity has outweighed substance. Best as I can tell, Steve Garvey is running for office because of his own hollow conception of fame. I don’t know if it makes him happy to be running for Senate; having read Reilly’s piece, I’m not sure if Garvey even has a conception of his own happiness. His campaign, to date, has reflected the cynicism of modern American politics—a zero-sum quest driven entirely by name recognition that’s entirely devoid of a soul.
"I guess I make people mad,” Garvey told Rick Reilly back in 1989. “There's an inherent skepticism in the world…I was an idealist. I thought. ‘I'll go out and help everyone. Why wouldn't they like me?’ When I signed with the Dodgers, I was sure that was the only team I'd ever play for. When I got married, I was sure it would be to one woman the rest of my life…”
It is odd, the way Garvey’s career has bracketed these two deeply jaded moments in American history, from Watergate to now. For a while, it appeared Garvey stood above it all, and then his own hypocrisy rendered him a punchline. Maybe it’s cynicism; maybe it’s naivete. But either way, it’s as if he’s trying one last time to will into truth his own hollow fiction.
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Garvey. Father of our Country. Great read. I make that comment about any mention of Garvey.
Adam Schiff will make a great senator.