On the Eve of History?

It is the night before the Belmont.

California Chrome apparently is still scheduled to run for a Triple Crown tomorrow — unlike the last horse to win the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, I'll Have Another, yanked at the last minute, to the frustration of horse racing fans.

I'll admit it. I would like to see a Triple Crown winner — not the way some folks do, the ones who say they want to see one more Triple Crown winner before they die, but because I think it would be good for horse racing. And I like horse racing.

Forty years ago, the great Secretariat ended a 25–year Triple Crown drought. He breathed new life into his sport, and there were two more Triple Crown winners (and nearly a third) before the decade ended. The drought is much longer this time, and California Chrome is the 13th horse to win the first two jewels of the Triple Crown since Affirmed won the last Triple Crown in 1978.

It has been noted often that attendance at America's tracks has been declining for years — and suggested that even a Triple Crown winner won't be enough to bring those patrons back. The longer fans stay away, the harder it is to bring them back. It isn't impossible, as baseball demonstrated after a strike wiped out the 1994 World Series, but it is difficult to achieve.

Maybe too much time has passed. That happens in sports — and in life. There are windows of opportunity; when they slam shut, it is awfully difficult to open them again. Baseball was fortunate to have two charismatic players, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, dueling to set a single–season home run record in 1998. Their battle brought fans back to the ballparks, but attendance had been down in the years since the strike.

I have often wondered if baseball had reached a critical point when the McGwire–Sosa home run race captured the public's imagination. If the McGwire–Sosa duel had not materialized, would baseball have remained America's pastime?

Team sports are different from individual sports, though, and a horse is, after all, an animal, not a person who may be able to use his charisma to get back in the public's good graces. Animals have no real charisma — at least none of which they are aware, just the charisma that is generated by a picture or video.

I don't know if winning a Triple Crown can reverse horse racing's fortunes. I get the feeling, though, that, with California Chrome, I have seen this before, and I really expect to see the same kind of outcome tomorrow as we have seen nearly a dozen times since 1978.

This is how it generally seems to play out. A horse wins the Kentucky Derby (OK, that happens every year; nothing special about that, right?), but there are doubts about the horse that persist until he wins the Preakness two weeks later. Most of the time, the Preakness win is convincing enough that the questions about the horse disappear, and momentum for the two–time winner starts to build.

The horse looks great in training and is greeted with lots of hesitant–yet–hopeful hype when he arrives in New York. Now, that kind of attention has been known to turn many an athlete's head. But an animal doesn't have human emotions and can't feel the pressure of high expectations. As time passes, the conventional wisdom becomes the horse is a lock to win. Confidence begets overconfidence; overconfidence begets a belief that it will be different this time.

But it never is.

There are all kinds of ways for this to happen. I thought I had seen them all — until I'll Have Another was pulled out the day before the Belmont in 2012. When that happened, I figured that I hadn't seen them all.

It could be a repeat of something we've seen before. Smarty Jones faded in the stretch in 2004. War Emblem broke badly in 2002 and never recovered. In 1998, Real Quiet looked like he would win it, then lost at the wire. Big Brown, so dominating in the first two races in 2008, was eased out of the money in the third.

Or it might be something new — or, at least, something we have not seen in a long time.

So, in spite of all the enthusiasm about California Chrome, put me down as skeptical.

Perhaps I am wrong. Frankly, I hope I am. It would be nice to see a Triple Crown winner. And I am sincere when I say it would be good for horse racing. I do believe that.

Well, we'll find out in 24 hours.

By the way, if you're looking for something to kill some time between now and post time, USA Today reprinted a Belmont Stakes horse name generator that apparently originated in the Reno Gazette–Journal.

Give it whirl. My Belmont Stakes horse's name was Reno Prince.

The Race to Break Maris' Record

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There are two things I will always remember about the summer of 1998 — the worst heat wave in nearly 20 years that gripped most of the country and the duel between St. Louis' Mark McGwire and Chicago's Sammy Sosa to see who would break Roger Maris' 37–year–old single–season home run record.

(Maris, as baseball historians will tell you, broke Babe Ruth's single–season home run record in 1961, but he benefited from the fact that baseball seasons were 162 games by then, not 154 as they were in the Bambino's day. And for many, many years, Maris' record had an asterisk next to it in the record book because it was not achieved in 154 games.)

The home run chase made that summer of '98 memorable. Well, the heat wave did, too. It was the worst heat wave I've seen since 1980. But the McGwire–Sosa duel was truly riveting. If one had to stay inside because it was so miserably hot outside, watching SportsCenter for the latest update in the home run chase was worth one's time. And there was almost always a daily update.

In hindsight, one must wonder if the '98 home run chase would have happened at all if not for steroids.

In fact, McGwire did concede at the time that he used an over–the–counter substance that had been banned by, among others, the NFL — but not (at that time) major league baseball.

(McGwire was slipperier on his use of other substances.)

So my feeling is that the '98 season should have an asterisk next to it — or maybe it would be more appropriate to have a little syringe instead — in the record books.

But it doesn't, and it probably won't so 1998 will stand as the year that McGwire broke Maris' record. McGwire was eclipsed three years later by Barry Bonds, who has his own unanswered questions about steroid use, but 15 years ago today, McGwire was on his way to wrapping up the home run–hitting season of a lifetime.

("These long–ball extravaganzas were putting fans back in the seats," Greg Stejskal wrote recently in the New York Daily News, "but the cost was the integrity of the game.")

McGwire hit 70 home runs that year. No one before — and only one man since — hit that many home runs in a single season. (That year, in fact, Bonds hit slightly more than half as many home runs as McGwire.)

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That summer, I was working for a trade magazine that served the imprinted sportswear industry. Part of my job was attending trade shows in different parts of the country, and I recall attending a show in Chicago. Exhibitors at these shows were often regional representatives of licensed sports products, and major league baseball was a hot (pardon the expression) commodity in Chicago that summer.

At these shows, I would walk around the hall and sit down to interview exhibitors who caught my eye. As a former sports editor, I was particularly interested in these sports licenses. Major league baseball had a crippling strike a few years earlier, and there had been talk that baseball's popularity was on the decline.

The McGwire–Sosa home run derby was the first thing to breathe some life back into the sport. It was baseball's goose that laid the golden egg.

And the exhibitors were all too eager to talk about McGwire and Sosa — but none, that I can recall, had any interest in talking about steroids.

If they were concerned that I might quote them on the subject in one of my articles, they worried needlessly. I only asked because I'm a sports fan, and I like baseball (although not as much as I did when I was a boy).

Maris' record finally fell 15 years ago today, about three weeks before the scheduled end of the season. McGwire had broken the record in far fewer games than it took Maris — or Ruth, for that matter. That should have raised some red flags.

But, like the exhibitors I spoke to that summer, no one wanted to talk about steroids. Not the teams' management or coaches or players — or fans, for that matter. They wanted to talk about all the home runs, not the steroids that even a casual observer could conclude had made them possible.

The thought of steroids definitely crossed my mind in the summer of '98, but, as I say, I never found anyone who was interested in talking about that angle.

Perhaps now those people have learned that there is a frightful price to be paid for ignoring an approaching storm. It's like ignoring a persistent toothache, hoping it will go away. (In the words of writer Aldous Huxley, "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.")

But then I remember — that's the kind who never learn from the past.

Locked Out

NFL fans, don't kid yourselves.

This breakdown in labor talks was an inevitable moment.

It was bound to happen. It was like that week before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, when people stood transfixed for days, watching as it meandered across the vast Gulf of Mexico and only began taking steps to protect themselves — or get the hell out of there — when the storm was practically on top of them.

The NFL and the players bought themselves a few days to dream about a miracle. When one did not happen, they were forced to do what they should have done earlier.

I feel somewhat vindicated by Don Banks of Sports Illustrated, who writes, "Here's wishing they would have saved us all some time and skipped the explanations of what went wrong, or why things broke down once again."

It's all public posturing.

And, really, who can blame either side? They're only mimicking what they have seen their national leaders doing, and they've all been guilty of it. No one is blameless.

Everyone points fingers and assigns blame — and nothing gets accomplished.

Well, they went through their week of pretending that they were making progress, but they really weren't. Now, they have to get down to the hard work, and the pressure will just increase as the days go by. The NFL draft is supposed to be held next month. Players should be going through offseason conditioning programs and drills. In a few months, training camps will be scheduled to open.

Fans will be increasingly impatient — until an agreement is reached or the NFL does what major league baseball had to do 17 years ago and cancel the season.

That didn't really work out too well for baseball. The 1994 World Series was canceled and the start of the 1995 season was delayed, leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth that lingered for a few years and didn't go away until the home run duel between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1997.

That gave baseball a shot in the arm — until it was revealed that McGwire, probably Barry Bonds and possibly Sosa hit hundreds of home runs in their careers (especially the late 1980s, the 1990s and the early 2000s) with the artificial assistance of steroids.

Since those revelations, America's pastime has been steadily losing fans.

The same fate awaits NFL owners and players if they don't get over their greed and resolve their differences.

It might be worse. The economy wasn't great in 1994 — but it was a lot better than it is today. Unemployed fans may not be as sympathetic as they were then.

For that matter, fans were a lot more sympathetic four decades ago, when athletes were virtual slaves to their teams and had no control over their professional lives.

But today many fans see all professional athletes as overpaid prima donnas and all team owners as greedy.

The NFL's most recent experience with a work stoppage as nearly a quarter of a century ago. Much has changed in that time. Tom Landry was still coaching the Dallas Cowboys. Joe Montana was still playing for the San Francisco 49ers.

That lockout was modest compared to what may be in store for the NFL in 2011. The players' strike lasted less than four weeks. Three games were played with "replacement players," and one game was canceled.

It was often treated as a gag. The replacement teams were given funny nicknames, like the Chicago Spare Bears, and fans seemed to embrace legitimate pro football when it returned.

But there doesn't seem to be much that is funny about this situation.