Monday was a pretty rough day. First, Mark McGwire, one of baseball’s most powerful batters of all time, appeared on Bob Costas’ show on the Major League Baseball Network to announce that, indeed, he had used steroids in 1998, the year he broke the home run record.

I was shocked.

I had no idea there was a Major League Baseball Network.

Earlier on Monday, Brooklyn had lost one of its own. Joe Rollino had been struck and killed by a mini van as he went for his morning walk in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Mr. Rollino, Puggy to his friends, was 104 years old. Others called him Mighty Joe Rollino, for he had made a name for himself as a strongman. Not just any strongman, but, as an elloquent obituary in the New York Times points out, possibly pound for pound the greatest strongman to ever live. Frequently, he would swim in the water off Coney Island, at one time holding an eight year streak of swimming every day ( in 1974, the story goes, he braved a 6-degree day to go swimming.) Louis Scarcella of the Coney Island Polar Bears, a group that braves the cold waters all winter long, said of Joe: “He was known as the Great Joe Rollino, and he was great. You knew he was great just by standing next to him. He just had that humble confidence and strength. It shined.” A new member of the Guru community mentioned that he had once met Mr. Rollino a couple of years ago, when he was the ripe young age of 102, and his handshake was extraordinary powerful. He skipped red meat, alcohol and cigarettes. And of course, he had his daily walks.

I’d like to think that’s the way Mighty Joe would want to go: hit by a car during his morning walk while still feeling powerful.

McGwire? What can you say about him? He had a great start to his career, winning the Golden Glove in 1990. But then he had a couple of less-than-stellar seasons and, who knows, maybe he figured juicing would set him up for better performance, more accolades and more money. They say he and Sammy Sosa saved baseball from all the negativity of the strike a few years before. But at the end of the day, both he and Sosa will make it into the record books with asterisks next to their names. Sure, great achievements. Would they have been great players if they hadn’t juiced? Sure. For me, they would have been marginally better if they had avoided years of denial and simply admitted what they had done.

But they did, Blanche, they did use the juice. And then denied, denied, denied.

So a tip-of-the-hat to Mighty Joe Rollino: the Strongest Man in the World.

Sometimes strength is measured simply by integrity. And Mr. Rollino, 104 years old, shined.