More Bad News for Mark McGwire

It's a stretch along I-70 that welcomes people to downtown St. Louis, like a welcome mat, really. A first impression. And the Missouri Senate has voted unanimously to take down the signs showing its honorary name and change that stretch to Mark Twain Highway. It had been this:

Mark McGwire Highway.

So at least the government is hitting the right Mark now.

I'm sure there is some good lesson in this, but my first thought is this:

One of America's great literary figures is Plan B to a cheating baseball player. Somehow, this is a cross between an insult to Twain and straight comedy.

"When a person cannot deceive himself, the chances are against his being able to deceive other people,'' Twain once wrote.

You see how timeless he was? It's as if he said that right after McGwire's testimony in Washington at the steroid hearing.

The road had been named after Twain, and then was switched in 1999, the year after McGwire hit 70 home runs.

That's 70 more, after all, than Huck Finn ever hit.

Now that McGwire has finally fessed up about the obvious, that he used steroids, imagine how embarrassed the state government feels about drooling over an athlete.

Of course, they were surely embarrassed already. In the years that McGwire declined to admit anything, he wasn't deceiving himself. He wasn't deceiving other people.

State Sen. Ryan McKenna, who was in on changing the name from Twain to McGwire in the first place, proposed removing McGwire's name.

"Having been one of the people who carried that bill, I do have a sense of regret that I moved it forward,'' he told reporters. "We basically wrote the final chapter in a book that wasn't written yet.

"I think the legislature should take, and I personally should take, this as an example to not name roads after people while they're still alive.''

Yes, the dead have difficulty embarrassing themselves later.

But this isn't about naming roads. It's about a lesson over why we shouldn't turn athletes into heroes and gods. Tiger Woods has been giving us daily reminders about that, too.