I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m not the most successful of the Corcoran cousins in the entertainment/media business. You may have heard of a little play called Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding? Was a hit in Manhattan for more than two decades and my cousin Joey is the founding producer. Great guy, we’re all very proud of him.
I was ready to show him a good time when he visited Austin about 10 years ago and, OK, I also wanted to show off a little. Joey may be big in the New York theater scene, but you walk by Jo’s Coffee at the right time and it’s “Corky, Corky, Corky.” Everything was going so perfect. Took him to see an especially inspired Gourds show at Antone’s, then capped the night at the Continental Club (VIP entrance, of course), where we were just in time to see an impromptu reunion of one of Austin’s alltime great bands: Joe Ely took the stage with the Booze Weasels and they did “Everybody Got Hammered.” What a fucking night! “You get to live here?” Joey said, then headed across the street to his room at the San Jose.
The next day I took him to Barton Springs, not to swim, because it was around November, but just to check it out. I was pumping up the place on the drive from Salt Lick, telling him how there’d be all these topless chicks at the pool during the summer. Maybe I was exaggerating a little. But when we were looking down at the empty pool from the fence, there were two women without their tops on, sitting on the grass. Man, I was on a hot streak.
Oh, but it got better. There was some action over at the Philosopher’s Rock and we went to check it out and saw that it was a photo shoot of Lance Armstrong. He’d won about five Tour de France titles by that time and America was acutely aware of his heroic story, recovering from cancer, which spread to his brain, to win the human Iditarod on wheels. Cuz was “wow, Lance Armstrong!” Then something entirely unexpected. “Hey, Michael,” Lance called out to me. “What’s goin’ on, man?”
Not much, just burying the nightly marrying man, thanks to you. Who’s your cousin! Who’s your cousin!
When we walked away, I acted like that kinda stuff happens to me all the time. “Yeah, I’ve been to a party at his house (actually agent Bill Stapleton’s) once,” I said. “Lance called me up at the newspaper (true) because I had written about some movie deal that wasn’t a done thing at all. He gave me his number (also true) and asked that I always call him if I was going to write something about him.”
So, yeah, I started off being a big fan of Lance Armstrong. I figured he was doping because of all the guys he’d beaten who were caught doping. And I knew that he had to lie for as long as he could. Deny, Deny, hide, hide. It was a secret that he would’ve taken to the grave if he didn’t go to back to France that one more time, like a retired thief who has to hit that bank for one last score and gets caught.
The real hero: Travis T. Tygart of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency is the man who, with the help of Floyd Landis, brought Lance down.
Showtime just starting airing a documentary called Stop At Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story which I highly recommend, though not on a full stomach. Directed by Alex Holmes, the film takes last year’s The Armstrong Lie a step further by making the viewer think that maybe disgrace and loss of revenue isn’t enough punishment for a sociopath who played dirty if that was the only way to win.
The film opens with blurred footage of Armstrong lying under oath in a disposition, and being arrogant about it. It presents testimony that Armstrong bribed his way into his first big bike racing championship and took performance enhancing drugs before the cancer diagnosis. But even worse, Armstrong bullied everyone who would stand in his way, including not only that sweet Irish journalist who quoted witnesses to Armstrong’s doping in the book L.A. Confidential, but the freaking U.S. government, which dropped a federal investigation which had a lot of dirt on Armstrong. It was during President Obama’s re-election bid and since most of the public thought chasing Lance was a big waste of taxpayer’s money, the case went away, sneakily on the Friday afternoon before the Super Bowl. The lout had some clout.
But as is so often the case, something small brought down something huge. When cyclist Floyd Landis, stripped of his Tour de France title after testing dirty, was snubbed by Lance and his new team, he broke the code of silence. Landis laid it all out, first for the feds, then the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Many more eye witnesses who saw Armstrong use banned substances stepped forward, including Tyler Hamilton and 9 other former Armstrong teammates. When there was nowhere left to hide, Armstrong sought the higher power, Oprah.
That the film has a clear objective to show Armstrong as a controlling monster is apparent in several trancey closeups of Lance looking almost unhuman, on the bike and off. His eyes are unstable, his mouth breathes in slow motion. Deception is not the main crime portrayed here, it’s abuse of power.
Why are we still fascinated by Lance Armstrong, the man who had it all and now must settle for a lot? It’s like they got novelist Theodore Dreiser, the master of immoral quests, to write a reality show. As bad as it gets we want to see worse. When it’s over, the country may get more collective pleasure from watching Armstrong’s fall than we did from celebrating his seven consecutive Tour de Fraud victories.
There’s never been a more gigantic true story of a man’s nosedive from glory in the sports world. His life, like the Tour De France, has come in dramatic stages of battle and shame, being honored and being stripped. And it happened right in our backyard.
Lance has come clean, but Austin remains in denial. A public bikeway still bears his name. And you will find almost as many people defending Armstrong- “it’s not like he killed someone”- as you will hear denouncing him. In Austin, he got more shit for overuse of water and sullying a creek than he did for duping the world.
But they’re not done punishing the bicycling thief. Stop At Nothing is a film inspired by its subject’s ruthlessness. It’s brutal, but we watch it because it’s part of the punishment. Social justice will continue to do what the feds pussied out on. This doc is the sort of consequence Lance never considered when he set out to destroy the lives of some who knew the truth.
Here’s what I wrote in 2013, the year of downfall:
“Lance Armstrong is a freaking animal who just wanted to win and so did whatever it took. It’s what you do if you’re a hardcore competitor. You don’t give a shit about your body or the possible ramifications; I know, having regularly taken a performance enhancing drug in the late ’80s that was both harmful and illegal because I wanted to be the baddest writer in town. I get the motivation. You just want to beat, no destroy all comers. Do you realize how many PEDs it takes to make us care about cycling or Dino Lee? But Lance just took it too far. The lie was more important than the lives he tore into. That’s where he crossed the line and provided the public’s piling-on point. The guy who dated Sheryl Crow is now eating crow.”
Stop At Nothing, which airs randomly on Showtime, but is always there On Demand, makes it hard to defend Lance in any way. If not a scary monster, he’s at least a supercreep.
Back in 2004, it was like Michael Jordan was calling my name. Now, it’s like O.J. Simpson. Either way I’ll keep it. You should’ve seen Joey’s face.