Authors: Jose Canseco
An awful lot has changed in the sports business in the past twenty years. Back then, media competition was nothing compared to what it is now-and believe me, as a player, you notice the difference. The competition among the media now is just savage-so what happens? Reporters make stuff up. I'm not saying they do it all the time, but I know from painful experience that sometimes they do. I've sold millions and millions of newspapers and made some media people's careers, but a lot of what they wrote was a pack of absolute lies.
I was created by the media. Back in the 1980s, I was like a rock star. Everywhere I went, I had to have bodyguards. I had it all: the body, the personality, everything. I was Hollywood. When most fans thought of me, they didn't think of me playing baseball; they thought, "He's dating Madonna," or "He's got a great ass." Forget about how I played on any given night; I knew my role was to give the media and the fans what they really wanted-which was to be colorful and larger than life. And the media could always be counted on to magnify everything I did.
I always answered questions honestly and spoke from the heart, but I never got the feeling the reporters understood me (most of them probably weren't trying that hard); most of them were happy to present me as a caricature and a clown, partly because it was what their editors wanted. And it sold papers.
Part of it was that most of these guys just didn't understand where I came from. Miami Cubans have come a long way in the past twenty years, but when I was first making my mark in baseball, there was still a lot of quiet racism. I'm talking about people who don't even know they're racist, but who make easy assumptions based on little or no knowledge of a person's background. Sure, I'll say it: Latinos aren't dead fish. We like to talk, and sometimes we like to yell. That's just how we communicate. Believe me, to us, long silences seem a lot more awkward than a few flat-out shouts now and then. But whenever my first wife, Esther, and I were overheard yelling at each other, you can bet your life some reporter would write it up as if we'd been swinging at each other with machetes.
The most glaring example of the double standard that I faced as a Latino, compared to the treatment the Ripkens and McGwires of the world received, was a column Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post published on me in 1988. Boswell apparently decided that I was the player he wanted to make an example of as a steroid user, but he offered no evidence-and he never explained why he was singling me out and saying nothing about Mark McGwire, even though Mac was bigger than I was.
Why? No one cared about what good-boy McGwire was doing-or they didn't want to know. But I was always made out to be the bad boy, so I was treated differently. The rest of the media jumped on me; hey, it was fun. But it was twelve years after Boswell called me a steroid user before anyone made any serious claims in print about McGwire and steroids.
So why did I care about being exposed that way? Well, for one thing, Boswell cost me a million-dollar endorsement with Pepsi. The deal was all lined up: There I was, Jose Canseco, a big Cuban kid all set to be pitching Pepsi on TV. But when Boswell's article came out, Pepsi took a walk. Snap your fingers: that's how fast Boswell pulled that million bucks out of my hands.
After the Pepsi deal fell through, so many endorsement opportunities went with it. Once the rumor went around that I was on steroids-though nobody presented any smoking guns-I was persona non grata. I wanted to sue Boswell, but in the end, it just didn't seem worth my time.
Soon after that, we were in Boston for the playoffs, and something funny happened: All around me, I heard the fans start chanting: "Steroids! Steroids!" When I heard that, I paused a moment to think about how to respond. Then I just turned sideways, flexed for them, turned the other way, and flexed again.
The crowd went nuts.
Looking back now, I realize that it all came naturally to me, being an entertainer. But in a lot of ways, I was pretty stupid about the media. To put it simply, I didn't understand how powerful the media were, and how important they were to a player's career. Maybe that's not so surprising, since I think a lot of individual sportswriters I've dealt with over the years have also tended to lose sight of how powerful the media are, how much influence they have over shaping a player's public image. I was never close to Albert Belle, but there's another guy who got a raw deal. No doubt he did some stupid things, like back in 1996 when he got mad at a Sports Illustrated photographer and threw a baseball at him. Not a good move. I never did anything like that. But here's the thing: Just ask yourself how the media would have reacted if Ripken or McGwire had done such a thing. They would have called it a joke: Ha-ha, funny-funny, that ol' boy sure does like to clown around.
A lot of great baseball players, from Ty Cobb on down, have been jerks. I can understand that. Sometimes, players need to maintain their intensity on the field by being intense off the field. But white guys who are that way get called gritty and tough and a real competitor. If it's a black guy or a Latino, then the white media reports on the player's difficult side as if it's proof positive that he's a bad person.
I learned too late in my career about the importance of the media, not only when it comes to endorsements (thank you, Tom Boswell) but also when it came to negotiating a long-term contract. When you're working on building a serious long term commitment with a team, you've got to be extremely careful about how you treat the media-instead of bitching and complaining and trying to belittle reporters. McGwire used to call reporters "faggots." I think he thought that was clever. And, like me, he never grasped why they didn't understand him better.
It sounds obvious enough, but it has to be said: More reporters need to stop for a minute and keep in mind that baseball players, even the richest superstars, are just human beings with families and emotions, just like anybody else. Some days you feel like laughing. Some days you feel like crying. Different individuals are always going to have different opinions; some people might have different opinions from day to day, or even hour to hour. You can't be a happy-go-lucky guy all the time-not if someone in your family is sick, or you're having family or financial problems. At some point, you're going to say something you shouldn't have said, and then you get jumped on. I don't think you can really judge an individual on one instance. You have to know them over the course of years-just like you would a family friend or coworker-and watch how they act under different circumstances.
Reporters are always talking about objectivity and fairness, but who are they kidding, anyway? Everyone knows the media can portray an event however they want to, positively or negatively. They have that power, that degree of control. They can make your career, if they like you, or they can destroy you. I'm not saying that the reporters who covered me wrote only bad things about me. In August 1990, Rick Reilly did a big piece on me for Sports Illustrated that tried to knock down a few of the false assumptions people were making about me.
"Jose Canseco is the subject," Reilly wrote, "and San Francisco Examiner columnist Bill Mandel, a man who has never met him, offers this: 'I'm from New York and in New York there is a word for guys like Canseco, and that word is schmuck.'
"Okay, so if Canseco is such a schmuck, why does he spend so much time at the Miami Youth Club, playing basket ball with the kids, staying for their spaghetti dinners, donating hundreds of pairs of sneakers at a time?
"If Canseco is such a schmuck, why is he so deeply involved in the Make-a-Wish Foundation, which fulfills the fantasies of dying children?
"If Canseco is such a schmuck, how come he paid for a kid with leukemia to be flown from Sacramento to Scottsdale, Arizona, for the A's spring training?
"If Canseco is such a schmuck, how come he drove to Pleasanton, California, to raise money for a paralyzed kid called J.O. by signing autographs for four and a half hours?
"And if Canseco is such a schmuck, why did he give his brother a house and a brand new Porsche 911 and his father a new Cadillac?
"Jose Canseco is a baseball virtuoso, an athletic flower that blooms once a century. We know this because he mentioned it the other day."
That article was published back in the day when people still read Sports Illustrated the way they watch ESPN now-as the be-all and end-all of sports reporting. I wish some of Rick Reilly's good vibes toward me had caught on. But Reilly was the exception to the rule. The truth is, too many reporters and analysts really don't know what they're talking about. The public may assume everything they read or hear in the media is the truth. But half the time, these reporters or journalists don't do their homework. Way too often, they're basically misquoting an athlete, or relying too much on opinion and emotion.
Having had a good close look at the media during the seventeen years of my major-league career, I've come to the conclusion that when a reporter or journalist uses his own opinion, he's slipping into the danger zone. It's too easy to go overboard, instead of just telling the truth about an actual incident the way it really happened. To me, the mark of a good reporter is not confusing one's own emotional feelings toward an athlete-or toward a race or a color or a creed-with the facts. It's a shame, because some of the reporters out there are racists, and if you give these people free rein, they can destroy an athlete. Does that sound paranoid to you? Time to grow up. Anyone who tries to claim that not one out of a thousand media personnel is racist, is speaking out of pure ignorance. There's racism everywhere in this world, in any profession. Why should the media be different?
What reporters need to understand is that the public has only one vehicle for learning about these players, and that's through the media. The media is notorious for misquoting individuals, and for writing whatever they want, especially if they can't get interviews. But it's the public that suffers, by getting confused between opinion and fact.
I'll give you an example. Everyone remembers the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, which struck the Bay Area the day we were supposed to play game three of that year's World Series against the Giants. We were down on the field when it hit, around five in the afternoon, and I remember leaving the ballpark with my wife Esther. We were in my Porsche, driving back to the Blackhawk area in the East Bay; I was still wearing my baseball uniform, because the clubhouse was blacked out, so we couldn't change back into street clothes.
I was low on gas, so I stopped at a gas station, but it was the only one open at that time and there was a long line of people waiting for gas. We waited there about half an hour, and when it was our turn, Esther told me she wanted to pump the gas.
"Listen, you'd better stay in the car," she told me. "You're dressed in full uniform, and there are people all over the place. If you get out, who knows what's going to happen? People are going to get out of their cars. They're going to want autographs. It's just going to make matters worse."
So she got out and pumped the gas herself. Makes sense, right?
Not so fast. Esther pumped the gas, and we left, but what we didn't notice is that there there were a few media people there. So the next day, in the paper, all you heard was: "Jose Canseco, the male chauvinist pig, makes his wife Esther put gas in the car." You hear about Girls Gone Wild. They ought to call it Media Gone Wild.
Here's another example of how the media can twist things and turn everything around. I'll call it the Case of Jose Canseco, Famous Gun-Toting Maniac. It all started with another episode that happened in 1989, the year after I made MVP. During spring training, I cracked the hamate bone in the heel of my left hand. It's a small bone in the hand; you really don't need it, but it's very painful if it breaks. So I had surgery to repair it, and for a while I had to wear a cast.
Late that April, Esther and I drove over from the East Bay, in the modified candy-apple red Jaguar I had at the time, to have the bone checked and make sure it was healing properly. We pulled into the parking lot at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, way up California Street in Laurel Heights, and the whole thing was empty. It was a Friday; there wasn't a single car in sight.
Esther and I went into the medical center; I had a magnetic resonance imaging test, and they told me everything was healing fine. But as we were heading back out to the parking lot, four or five police cars pulled up, two of them unmarked, the others squad cars.
"Is this your car?" one of the policeman asked me.
"Yeah," I said.
"Well, you're under arrest," the policeman said.
"Under arrest for what?" I asked.
"For carrying a gun on campus property."
It was true that I had a gun, a 9 mm automatic pistol-but it was registered. It was something I felt I needed for my own protection, and for the protection of my loved ones, because by that point I was very much a public figure. There were all kinds of wackos out there ready to take a run at me and steal some gold or do something worse.
To me, the real question wasn't what I was doing with a gun. It was, how did the cops know about it? And what was wrong with it, anyway?
Well, the answer was pretty revealing. I kept the gun in a pouch underneath the front seat of my car, and when I stopped to park the car, the pouch slid forward a little. After we left the car, apparently, someone was walking by and checking out my Jaguar-with its "40-40" license plates-and as they were snooping around, they caught a glimpse of the pouch. So they called the police, and before you knew it I was being interrogated by the FBI. All for a completely legal gun that no one would have known was there if it weren't for somebody snooping by.
But that didn't stop the media from blowing the whole thing out of proportion. When the San Francisco Chronicle wrote the story up, they didn't just lead the sports section with it; they stuck it right out there on the front page of the whole newspaper:
CANSECO ARRESTED
LOADED PISTOL IN HIS JAGUAR