Mark McGwire, America’s tarnished baseball hero, the mythical Paul Bunyan with a bat, the man who went in front of a bunch of showboating, preening congressmen and infamously said that he wasn’t there to talk about the past, finally opened up last week and talked about the past, about steroid use and about breaking the hallowed single season home run record while juiced to the hilt.
And the reaction, outside of the expected cacophony of sports press making the same arguments in an insular world, caused such uproar that you could hear a mouse whisper.
As McGwire begins to earn back some respect for finally coming around to publicly admitting what everyone who has followed baseball for the past decade already knew, the credit goes to Ari Fleischer, the man behind the curtain pulling the strings on McGwire’s announcement.
This time, Fleischer’s plan worked.
Fleischer, the former Bush White House press secretary, now runs Ari Fleischer Sports Communications, a crisis communications firm he started in 2008 that does work for the likes of NFL, Major League Baseball and in this case, the St. Louis Cardinals and their new hitting coach, Mark McGwire.
Fleischer implemented the McGwire media rollout and, so to speak, hit a home run.
This was unlike Alex Rodriguez’s calamitous performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) admission last year, in which the ego-fueled Rodriguez went in his own direction, including a softball interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons, followed by a few days of silence from the Yankees star, followed by a questionable and insincere press conference.
Fleischer did more than a few things right. He softened the ground with a mid-afternoon statement on Monday, followed by a select round of newspaper interviews.
But the big hit came that night in McGwire’s first TV interview. Fleischer chose the MLB Network, which has gotten considerable credit in its first year on air for its even-handed reporting of the game’s negative stories. The league-owned channel has fewer viewers than had McGwire kicked off Admission Tour 2010 on ESPN or on CBS 60 Minutes.
Fleischer selected Bob Costas as the interviewer, who brought instant credibility. Costas is as reputable a reporter as there is, and conducted a fair, compelling interview, not letting McGwire off the hook.
McGwire would later appear with ESPN’s Bob Ley, but it’s the Costas interview that is most referenced in the blogosphere and MSM and garnered the most attention. You can watch the Costas interview here.
McGwire detailed where he got PEDs, when and why he started taking them. Though his assertion that he only did steroids to slow down his deteriorating health and not for performance reasons is dubious, and shows either a sad naiveté or an inability to be completely honest, at least McGwire addressed his decision-making processes for cheating.
McGwire didn’t come out of the interview reinvented, but he did more than enough to satisfy many baseball fans who are long tired of the steroids story. The pundits wrote the required he-isn’t-sorry-enough columns, but there were just as many “we can now move on and put it behind us” articles.
From a crisis PR standpoint, Fleischer’s timing was brilliant and fortunate.
Announcing in early January, when baseball is as dormant as the apple trees; the day after the NFL’s team of the 2000s, the New England Patriots, got shockingly blown out of the NFL playoffs and while the news of NBA star Gilbert Arenas’ goofy gun play lingers, the timing was perfect given that the goal was to win the truth game then have the story evaporate.
And sometimes when you’re good, you get lucky. Fleischer won the burying-the-story lottery when college football’s most famous coach, Pete Carroll, bolted USC for the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and was replaced by the questionably qualified Lane Kiffin. That stunning hire diverted even more headlines from McGwire’s PED admission.
By Tuesday morning, MSM columnists started suggesting fellow suspected steroid user Barry Bonds follow McGwire’s path, Fleischer’s plan.
Fleischer wasn’t able to completely close the book on the sad McGwire saga — he’s a consultant, not a magician – but he was able to finally move McGwire into the next chapter of his baseball life, hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals.
And in doing so, he took the bull’s-eye off McGwire’s back. Sure, McGwire will have to answer a few questions again early in spring training when he returns to the game for the first time since his retirement as a player, but he won’t have to face a daily barrage from the media.
Fleischer did exactly what he was hired to do.
The first big hit of the year.
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