In spring training 1999, following his 70-homer season, Mark McGwire walked into manager Tony La Russa's office.

"How was the party last night?" La Russa asked.

McGwire sighed. "It wasn't right," he said despondently. "It was in honor of a friend of mine, but as soon as I got there, everyone wanted to talk to me. I became the focus of the party."

That really bothered Mark McGwire. "I hope that never happens again," he said.

His shy, unpretentious nature -- along with the most amazing home runs hit in major-league history -- is how McGwire will be remembered. It's corny, it's clichéd, but it's McGwire. He's the rare superstar athlete who avoided attention, who scorned individual over team, who played for the love of the game, and who stopped playing when he decided he was embarrassing himself because he couldn't play up to his standards. McGwire, and few others, would forfeit $30 million because he didn't think he could help his team.

McGwire has always been this way, not just since he became an icon, the closest person we have to Babe Ruth. In 1991 with Oakland, he asked to sit out the final game of the season because he was hitting .201 and couldn't deal with the humiliation of possibly finishing below .200. He considered quitting the game at age 28 and becoming a cop.

Now he has really quit because he hit .187 this season, struck out 118 times in 299 at-bats, wasn't good enough to start every game in the playoffs, wasn't good enough to hit above sixth in the order and wasn't good enough -- in what would have been his final at-bat in the major leagues -- to avoid being pinch-hit for by rookie Kerry Robinson, who dropped a 20-foot bunt.

That's not how we will, or should, remember Mark McGwire. We will remember him for his prodigious home runs. America is fascinated with the home run. We love home runs, their suddenness, their grandeur, their majestic arc, that slow, ceremonial trot, the inventive celebration of Big Mac and teammates exchanging punches to the stomach.

Babe Ruth's home runs saved the game after the Black Sox scandal. Carlton Fisk's STAY FAIR! homer awakened the game's audience when baseball was droning through a nondescript era in the '70s. There is nothing comparable in sports to the home run, nothing that better connects us to our American sporting past.

The home run is ours; it's what we recount when we talk ball. We mark seats in stadiums where long homers land -- the single red seat in the distant reaches of Fenway's green right-field bleachers is where one of Ted Williams' blasts settled. We point to the transformer that Reggie Jackson hit in the '71 All-Star Game in Detroit, yet we know that Kirk Gibson cleared it by 10 feet off Boston's Mike Brown in 1984.

Does anyone watch Brett Favre warm up at noon on Sundays? Does anyone care if Michael Jordan's jump shot is falling at 6:50 p.m.? Of course not. But wherever McGwire went the last few years, people knew when he was taking batting practice. "If they held BP an hour and a half after the game," Rockies third base coach Rich Donnelly once said, "everyone would stay to watch it."

In baseball history, no one hit homers like McGwire. In Cleveland, he was flipped on a pitch under his chin from Orel Hershiser. The next pitch, McGwire hit one off the Budweiser sign in left center -- a spot that no human being should be able to reach. "It was the longest homer I've ever seen," Hershiser would later say. "About halfway there, which was about 400 feet, it just picked up speed. I've never seen anything like it."

At the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park, McGwire put on perhaps the most remarkable power display in baseball history. Homer after homer after homer, none more remarkable than the one that hit the lights above The Wall in left. Another time, also at Fenway, he hit a home run that disappeared as it went flying way over the net beyond The Wall. The ball traveled down the street and smashed through the windshield of a car. As it turned out, the car's owner had locked his keys in he vehicle and had no way of getting them out until McGwire's missile landed.

Name a ballpark, any ballpark, and McGwire surely hit a ball there that no one will forget. At Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, Diamondback players couldn't wait to tell anyone who cared to listen how McGwire hit one in BP out of the stadium in left center, a couple of hundred feet above the field. He hit it through the Miller Lite panel, which was open that day.

No one will ever forget Nos. 60, 61 and 62 during those five days in September 1998. The whole ballpark was there just to watch him hit a home run. And, almost on cue, he did.

That season, those homers, and also those hit by Sammy Sosa, helped save the game. McGwire, naturally, wanted no credit. McGwire, naturally, said Sosa was the MVP that season.

Utility man David Howard, a former teammate of McGwire with the Cardinals, remembered another homer that McGwire hit that year. He was in that zone, the one that only he goes into, the one that makes him oblivious to all that's happening around him.

"So, he hits a home run," Howard said. "He comes back to the bench and sits next to me. A couple of pitches have gone by and he's still in that zone. He looks at me and says, 'How many guys were on base for that homer?' I looked at him and said, 'Dude, that was a grand slam!' "

Home runs and humility, a unique combination today. We're going to miss that big guy.

Tim Kurkjian is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and a regular contributor to Baseball Tonight. E-mail tim.kurkjian@espnmag.com.