It isn't a long walk. About 40 paces. From the first step of the Cubs dugout to home plate at Wrigley Field. This is the path Sammy Sosa traveled to find the most precious parts of his game, his name and his fame, and it used to be such a clean, clear stretch of real estate, back before America littered it with all the clutter of celebrity.

But then Sosa arrived at the plate, arrived in more ways than one, and he happened upon immortality while there, and the landscape changed abruptly in his flashbulb-filled wake. You can see that today, on a sunny Monday afternoon in early August, as he tries to travel this path after finishing batting practice. The only thing clear about the 40-step journey now is that it won't be easy for Sosa to make. It will, in fact, take him damn near 30 minutes.

As soon as Sosa emerges from the batter's box, his only sanctuary these days, Montreal manager Felipe Alou drapes an arm around his neck. Later, Alou will say, "Sammy is a phenomenon. He's not a man of this world. He needs to be elevated to another place. It's difficult to explain in words that kind of immensity."

But now, arm around Sosa, Alou gently guides all that immensity over to where he wants it, so Sosa can impart advice to a couple of Expo infants who need it. Sosa is in the middle of doing this when Cubs coach Billy Williams grabs his elbow and takes him over to say hello to some friends. Sosa laughs with them and begins to leave when former big leaguer Ron LeFlore puts a hand on Sosa's lower back and steers him toward a group of Australians who want a picture with him. Sosa obliges -- "Much appreciated, mate," one of the Aussies says -- and then LeFlore decides he wants his own photo too. This goes on for a good while, a smiling Sosa getting passed around from baseball person to baseball person like the bread basket at a big family's Thanksgiving dinner.

Ricky Martin is, appropriately enough, singing about la vida loca over the stadium speakers as hundreds of fans hang over the nearby railings, squealing for Sam-meeee, Sam-meeee, Sam-meeee to please come over. But Sosa is preoccupied with the cacophony that is closer. This is some of what he hears on the rest of the lurching, stop-and-go trip to the dugout:

From a father: "Sammy, you've got a young one to sign for here."

From a mother: "Sammy, I'd like you to meet my son."

From a clubhouse kid: "You got time to sign this? It's from Moose Skowron. He used to play for the Yankees, I guess. He owns a tavern now ... "

From a team publicist: "Hey Sammy, remember you have to do that thing at ..."

From a microphone-thrusting radio reporter: "The Dominican Republic is so close to the United States, so close to riches but so far from God ... "

Ask some of Sosa's teammates to describe his life in a couple of adjectives. Mickey Morandini says, "Tiresome. Bothersome. Hectic. Times 100." Gary Gaetti asks, "Can we use 'onslaught' as an adjective?" And Felix Heredia, who doesn't know much English, says simply, "Loco."

Steve Trachsel nods across the locker room, where Sosa is seated with that omnipresent cluster around him, and says, "Look over there. I've got four baseballs right here my brother wants signed, but I feel bad about asking. There's always someone next to him, needing something." Says Morandini, "I'm tired of getting his autograph. I get bombarded by so many people asking me for his autograph that I'm sure he's tired of me asking for it."

Mark Grace laughs at this, and then summons Glenallen Hill from across the locker room: "Glen, it would be all right to be Sammy Sosa for about a week, huh? That would be pretty cool. But there's no way, no way, I'd want to be him for about a year. To put up with all that abnormal BS? Can't go to the bathroom without people following you?"

Says Hill: "I don't know. I'd love to be him. It gives you the power to touch so many people. You either embrace everything about it, or it's going to be a problem, obviously, but he's got the personality for it. He likes the attention. So did Muhammad Ali. He made a mark by making it all a positive. You wouldn't want to be Muhammad Ali?"

Grace: "Not if it meant people bothering me in the toilet."

Sosa shrugs off this debate with a smile. He says he enjoys fame, enjoys the power it gives him outside the batter's box. The former shoeshine boy would never have sat next to Hillary Rodham Clinton during the State of the Union address, or raised more than six million yen in Japan for his hurricane-ravaged Dominican homeland, or received $250,000 for an autograph session, if not for this fame.

Sosa asked to be important back when he wasn't, so he's not going to complain about it now, because, he says, "I wanted this. This was a decision I made, to make this job my life. I've earned a lot of respect, and I deserve it. People hear me now when I say something, and I fought for that. I'm very proud of that. Fame puts me in a position to change things. I've been able to use it."

Sosa says he kneels by his bed at night and again as soon as he wakes, thanking God for everything he has been given, burdens included. That trademark hop he takes immediately after a baseball hits his bat's sweet spot? It remains a metaphor for everything Sosa is. He's still jumping for joy.

So the most remarkable thing about Sosa might not be that he changed baseball history.

No, the most remarkable thing about Sosa might be that baseball history hasn't changed him.

Now, as for the rest of us ...

***

Once upon a second time, the fairy tale doesn't feel as fresh. Sosa and Mark McGwire are doing it again, as if someone had just placed a bookmark in baseball last summer. But the sequel is a little stale because, well, how much do you remember about your second kiss or your second car? There were at least 14 books published on Sosa-McGwire within three months of the 1998 season, so what was required reading a season ago feels only redundant today. The McGwire-Sosa story hasn't changed much, mind you, and neither have the main characters, but we've changed plenty, and so has the way we view their game. Sosa hit a home run the night Alou was talking about his immensity, giving cheering Cubs fans what they came to see, even though the Cubs lost. It gave Sosa 41 homers with two months remaining.

Remember when Fred McGriff led the National League with 35 homers, way back in 1992? Remember when hitting 50 used to be such a landmark that ESPN broke into coverage to show Cecil Fielder doing it? Lou Gehrig, Hank Aaron and Joe DiMaggio never hit 50 in a season, but after that Aug. 2 home run -- followed by No. 42 two days later -- Sosa was on pace to finish in the mid-60s again. The Chicago Tribune, either bored or spoiled, reported the home run in the eighth paragraph of a story on page 3 of the sports section.

Baseball is founded on numbers more than any other sport, and Sosa and McGwire have taken a bat to its historic foundation. But diluted expansion pitching and homer-friendly new ballparks and tightly wound balls can't diminish the fact that 40-plus home runs in early August is, in any era, a lot.

"This whole home run thing doesn't feel the same," Gaetti says. "It's all we hear about, every day, wherever we go. It's everything we see and read and hear. It's who we are now. To see the home runs themselves, that part of it is still impressive, the sight of the actual thing, but that's the only part of this that is still pure."

The home run is fast food for a society of short attention spans. It is Titanic in three seconds instead of three hours, a loud Nintendo explosion in the middle of a game of chess. It is the closest that something as slow as baseball can come to the X Games and MTV, and it is the reason Sosa shines like a diamond in a dumpster in sports-starved Chicago, so much larger than his teammates and his team and even his game. He isn't a Cub. He's a Beatle.

"We're just supporting actors here," Mark Grace says. You can see that as Sosa arrives at the ballpark, puts his boom box next to his locker and blares salsa music until it drowns out all the rap and country playing elsewhere in the room. Says Morandini: "It's the 105th game, and it's the same song. We turned it off once, and he had the ass all day. He threatened us, saying that whoever did it should never do it again. Nobody ever did it again."

Yeah, it's Sosa's world and the rest of the Cubs just revolve around it, occasionally asking for autographs. The Chicago post office has come out with an envelope featuring Sosa's picture, and he has his own greeting card, and the fan mail is stacked knee-high at one of his three lockers. Sosa hasn't taken any liberties with this power yet -- manager Jim Riggleman calls him "the team's hardest worker" and "the guy who gives me the least problems" and "the easiest superstar to deal with in baseball" -- but Sosa is surrounded by reasons to lose perspective.

"I've met so many famous people because of the home runs, people who ask to meet me even though I've always wanted to meet them," Sosa says in Spanish. "Let's see. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sylvester Stallone. Charlie Sheen. Denzel Washington. Hugh Hefner. Donald Trump. Trump is my friend in full. Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton. Jesse Jackson. Tim Robbins. Oopie -- what's her name? The woman with the hair? Oopie ... Goldberg! Who else? Michael Jackson. God, so many -- people who have just wanted to thank me, for how I've behaved, for how I've grown. They're more surprised that I haven't changed than they are about me hitting 66 home runs. People appreciate and love me more because fame has not gone to my head. Did you put Donald Trump in there? If you don't put him in, he'll kill me."

Sosa is at his locker, getting dressed for tonight's game, shaking his hips and singing with the salsa. He may be the happiest Cub in history, which is saying something for a franchise whose shortstop was once Ernie Banks. A radio reporter comes over and asks about a future in movies. Sosa says, "I've had offers to do a couple of lines, but I haven't forgotten that I'm a baseball player, not a movie star." He is one of the few people these days who knows the difference.

There is a line forming at his locker now, as always, a line of people who have a question or a request or want-just-five-minutes-please, and a lot of the people have kids they want Sosa to meet. Across the room, Jeff Blauser shakes his head and says, "Everyone in this locker room would tell you that he handles all that a hell of a lot better than they would."

Later that night, Sosa left the top step of the dugout and walked those 40 steps toward the place that made him famous. He swung as hard as he could and the ball whistled over the wall and the fans of Chicago stood up and cheered. Hardly mattered at all that the Cubs were still in last place.

O

This article appears in the August 23, 1999 issue of ESPN The Magazine.