Sammy Sosa’s “Long Gone Summer” was a seemingly endless joyride.
But Sosa’s later years in Chicago featured a corked bat, a smashed boombox, a premature walk-out and a memorable incident with Rick Reilly, then the back-page “Life of Reilly” columnist for Sports Illustrated.
Reilly had read Sosa’s remark that he’d be first in line for steroid testing once the players’ union approved it.
“He said: I want to be the first to be tested. I want to show everybody I’m clean,” Reilly remembered. “I was dumb enough to think he might go, like he was really serious.”
Before a June 2002 game at Wrigley Field, Reilly approached Sosa for an interview. After asking some tame questions, Reilly pulled out a 3-by-5-inch index card and told him: “I found a place nearby where you can go and get tested. You’ll get the results in a week.”
“Foam was coming out of his mouth,” Reilly recalled in a phone interview. “His eyes got the size of small dinner plates and he started screaming at me in Spanish and English. In Spanish it was something about my mother. In English it was: You think you’re my father?
“He said: ‘You’re gonna get me in trouble!’ Well, what trouble could there be if you’re clean? That really (ticked) him off. He said: ‘You’re trying to get me thrown out of the players’ union.’ “
Sosa had a point. Going rogue would not have earned him plaudits in the clubhouse.
“He screamed at me: ‘I look like this because I work out three times a day in the offseason,’ ” Reilly said. “I wanted to say: Yeah, that’s the beauty of steroids. Steroids themselves don’t make you big; they give you the energy and the drive and the testosterone to work out three times a day. I know because I have a bad allergy attack sometimes and have to go on steroids. And I get real snappy with people and have my best workouts and set personal records every time for lifting. So he was incriminating himself while trying to defend himself.”
Reilly, an 11-time National Sportswriter of the Year, wrote in his SI column then: “The funny thing is, I doubt Sosa is on steroids. He has never missed more than six games in any of the last five seasons … But plenty of people wonder: Here’s a guy who went nine years without ever hitting more than 40 home runs. In the last four seasons he’s hit 66, 63, 50 and 64. Here’s a guy who was once a skinny, 165-pound, jet-footed Texas Ranger. Now he’s a bulky, 230-pound Mr. Olympus.”
Looking back, Reilly said, he’s surprised he wrote that.
“Now we know he was about as clean as a mafia accountant,” he said.
Reilly, who also has written extensively about Lance Armstrong and President Donald Trump’s golf game, said that if he could tell Sosa something now, it would be this: “Be honest with your fans, be honest with the people who cared about you and paid big money to sit there and cheer you on. Be honest with all those people who thought they were watching a feel-good story … Say you’re sorry. You made us believe, but it was a lie.”
