In the months since Steve Garvey, the former Los Angeles Dodgers legend turned Republican political candidate, won a surprise slot in the general election of California’s Senate race, he has continued to run a blank-slate campaign virtually free of substance and mostly under the radar.
But Garvey’s days of coasting along scrutiny-free in this election are over.
In the late ’80s, at the end of his lengthy baseball career, it was revealed that Garvey—known then as Mr. Clean, ironically—was embroiled in multiple extramarital affairs and had also accumulated a staggering amount of debt. The ’90s and early 2000s brought additional, damning reports about how Garvey was racking up more debts with his luxury-filled lifestyle. Now stuffed-away skeletons are once again falling out of his closet.
In February, the Los Angeles Times published a heart-wrenching feature about how Garvey has ostracized at least three of his seven children, including two he had during those extramarital affairs of the late ’80s. Politico recently broke the news that over four decades, the IRS and state of California have filed at least 40 liens against Garvey totaling roughly $3.85 million. And according to the Sacramento Bee, Garvey still owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid federal and state taxes that were incurred in 2011.
The Bee got its scoops from dissecting Garvey’s Senate financial disclosure report, a document required of candidates and incumbents alike. The point of the report is transparency: to inform the public of a politician’s financial situation, their potential conflicts of interest, their personal and professional dealings.
I looked over Garvey’s report too; it’s supposed to cover the year 2023. What I found was a glaring absence of required information about paid speeches and meet-and-greet appearances that Garvey—a self-described motivational speaker and prolific autograph signer—didn’t disclose. That led me to sleuth through Garvey’s social media, then I got sucked into the vortex of the internet archive website the Wayback Machine, through which I uncovered some unexpected, bizarre biographical claims that Garvey isn’t keen on discussing.
For example: Garvey says he once produced a sports-themed travel TV show, but I can’t find any evidence of it actually airing. He also claimed that in 2002 he helped bring conjoined newborns from Guatemala to Los Angeles, where they underwent an incredibly complicated, highly publicized surgery. The truth in both cases appears far more mundane. But who needs the truth? This is a big opportunity for Garvey to boost his profile, this time to a susceptible conservative audience. Given his unbelievably lackadaisical campaign, it’s fair to ask whether it’s the profile boost—rather than, you know, becoming a senator—that is Garvey’s actual motivation.
Steve Garvey announced his retirement from Major League Baseball in 1988, after a 19-year career with the Dodgers and San Diego Padres. He was a World Series champion, an MVP, someone with almost unanimous approval ratings in Southern California. A proud Republican, he had already been talking openly about a pivot to politics.
The squeaky-clean facade muddied in near-record time. In a 1989 Sports Illustrated feature, the writer Rick Reilly did his best to sum up Garvey’s entanglements. In short: during Garvey’s playing days, he cheated on his first wife with his assistant; his first wife also allegedly cheated on him, and they had a very messy divorce. His assistant then became his girlfriend. In the late ’80s, while still dating his girlfriend, he impregnated two other women, whom he blamed for not “taking responsibility for birth control,” as he put it to SI. (He doesn’t speak to the children he had with those women, according to the Los Angeles Times’ recent report.) A very brief time later, he started dating a different woman, Candace Thomas. Within two weeks, they got engaged. He and Candace are still married.
The Sports Illustrated profile detailed Garvey’s financial difficulties immediately after his career ended. “The $10 million or so that he earned as a player is nowhere to be found,” Reilly wrote in 1989, adding that Garvey owed $500,000 in back taxes and $172,000 to his former landlord. At the time, Garvey was trying to organize charity sports events, which he stunk at, to put it politely. “I’ve seen more money raised [for charity] at backyard carnivals,” a former Garvey associate told SI.
A national punchline, Garvey was forced to slink out of the limelight. He soon reemerged, correctly deducing that there will always be starry-eyed sports fans willing to overlook pervasive failings. His salve became autographed baseballs, product endorsements, and keynote speeches. He started representing himself as some sort of marketing and business guru, but his money troubles continued; he amassed millions in liens in the ’90s alone, much of which he reportedly paid down in 1998. Then more debts—and other troubles—popped up.
In 2000 Garvey was sued by the Federal Trade Commission for backing a shady weight-loss product, which he spoke glowingly about in infomercials. (A few years later, a federal judge found that Garvey wasn’t liable for engaging in false advertising, in part because he used the weight-loss product and said it worked for him and his wife. In other words, he was possibly saved by also getting bamboozled by the fraudulent supplements.)
In 2006 the Los Angeles Times published a damning report about Garvey’s attempts to live far outside his means, at the expense of others. “The Garveys drove luxury cars, shopped in upscale boutiques and traveled extensively even as they were pursued by creditors,” the paper noted. At various points, Garvey allegedly owed money to his gardener, his mirror installer, a caterer, local grocery stores, and his church. He was even sued by his own lawyers. “Do I expect to pay every debt? Do I want to? Absolutely,” Garvey told the Times. “The day I’m able to be debt-free is the day I’m going to be the happiest guy around.”
It seems Garvey isn’t yet the happiest guy around. He’s still in debt, and he’s still very much signing autographed baseballs and giving speeches (and he’s on Cameo). He’s not exactly on the level of a Hillary Clinton, but he’s prolific; in the mid-2010s alone, we’re talking a 2014 keynote speech for “public fleet professionals,” a 2015 speech and meet-and-greet at a workers’ compensation industry conference, a 2016 address at a plumbers convention, and a 2017 Napa visit for an annual event for petroleum packaging professionals.
“Garvey is a skilled motivational speaker, captivating audiences worldwide with his insights on leadership, teamwork, and integrity,” his official Senate campaign website reads.
Considering all these speeches and meet-and-greets and public vows to get out of debt, I was surprised to see Garvey list zero honorariums—or payment for an article, speech, or appearance of more than $200—on his 2023 Senate disclosure report. The report names just a handful of income sources: $486 from “GEP Talent”; $5,000 from Fox Television; $22,688 from Topps trading card company; $93,700 from a marketing company called IPG DXTRA; plus an MLB pension and some other retirement funds. (A spokesperson for IPG DXTRA told the Sacramento Bee the organization paid Garvey “on behalf of a client of ours for an appearance Mr. Garvey made at a sponsored sports event. At no time was Mr. Garvey an employee of our company.”)
Political candidates (as opposed to in-office politicians) are allowed to make money off speaking fees and meet-and-greets, so long as they don’t discuss their own political campaigns or solicit campaign donations. There’s no evidence Garvey’s speeches and meet-and-greets have veered into the political realm. But there’s plenty of evidence he’s done multiple paid speeches and meet-and-greets since January of last year, none of which was properly spelled out on his disclosure report.
Through social media posts that tagged Garvey, I identified seven meet-and-greets and speeches he gave in 2023 alone. Three of the seven event organizers confirmed to me that they paid Garvey for his appearance; the other four didn’t respond or declined to comment, though it would boggle the mind if they didn’t pay Garvey. Among the seven: two casino stops, one of which was at Oklahoma’s Choctaw Casino in December; two meet-and-greets, one in San Diego and the other in Las Vegas, at an IT systems conference and a consumer protection attorney conference, respectively; an autograph signing at a Southern California sports memorabilia shop, whose owner told me over the phone he paid $5,000 for Garvey to make an appearance in October; and a keynote speech for a California medical group’s senior expo in November. Garvey declared his candidacy on Oct. 10, 2023; at least three of his appearances occurred after he started running for Senate.
On top of the paid in-person appearances are Garvey’s Cameos, which also aren’t specifically noted on his disclosure report. Garvey appears to be an enthusiastic Cameo user, charging $149 a pop. I counted 38 reviews of his Cameos (all satisfied customers, for what it’s worth) between 2023 and March 2024. Shortly before Super Tuesday, a reporter at the Guardian sent a message to Garvey’s Cameo account, asking if Garvey was willing to make Cameos while the candidate was running for U.S. Senate. “Hi … Yes,” was the response from Garvey’s account, which came in the night before the primary election. Garvey’s Cameo page has since been changed to “temporarily unavailable.”
Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel at the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that the best-case scenario here is that Garvey incorrectly lumped in his honorariums with income sources like Topps or IPG DXTRA. “We should know the source of the organization,” Canter said. “I believe you have to be more granular when you’re dealing with honoraria.”
That’s the best-case scenario, though. What’s much more likely is that Garvey just submitted a report claiming he did not collect a single dollar of honorarium in 2023. Whatever the case, Canter told me, Garvey needs to amend his report as soon as possible or he “exposes himself to liability.” Speaking generally, she noted, there are civil and criminal penalties for incomplete disclosure reports.
On April 3, Garvey campaign spokesperson Matt Shupe responded to my questions about Garvey’s disclosure report with a statement that read, “Like many Americans, Steve has not yet filed his 2023 taxes and therefore does not have a complete picture of his income, once he does, he will amend his financial disclosure, if that is needed.” The campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment after that.
Let’s set aside the fact that Garvey is probably the last guy who should be dillydallying on his taxes. The whole point of a financial disclosure form—which Garvey got a 90-day extension on, by the way—is to tally up your finances on a totally different timeline than hitting up the IRS by April 15. And, as Canter countered, Garvey’s “financial portfolio is not complex. It’s pretty simple compared to everything I’ve seen. He has very little in the way of assets.”
In a somewhat normal political age, Garvey’s money troubles would make it even more important for him to specify his income sources and paid appearances. He owes it to California voters to show he’s finally got his ducks in a row.
But this is not a normal political age. And Garvey doesn’t seem to think he owes much of anything to California voters. He was allergic to taking a political position during the primaries, which I originally assumed was part of a strategy intended to hide his right-wing views from Californians. I now believe he fully just doesn’t care. After all, he was happy to coast on a nefarious advertising strategy organized by Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, now his opponent in the general election, whose campaign repeatedly touted Garvey’s conservative bona fides to consolidate the GOP base—and help Schiff knock the other Democratic Party candidates out of the race. (California has a jungle primary, in which the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the general.)
That plan worked, and Schiff got his desired opponent. I’m sure even Garvey was surprised. Since then, he has taken one single public stance: that student protesters are terrorists and should perhaps be tried as such. That’s Garvey’s big stand. He’s otherwise barely campaigning. And he just skipped the California GOP convention.
Garvey’s next financial disclosure form (separate from the amended form it seems he needs to submit) is due in August. Things are bound to be even less normal by then.
Garvey has got a stellar sports résumé. He still holds the National League record for consecutive games played. He was a 10-time All-Star, he won four Gold Glove awards and two NLCS MVPs (in addition to the NL MVP in 1974), and he made it to the World Series five times.
Other résumé items, advertised on the many websites that promote his motivational speaking services, seem on much shakier ground. One website, AAE Speakers—which works on behalf of event planners, not the speakers—used to include an assertion that Garvey “was part of the effort to bring the famous Guatemalan conjoined twins to UCLA Medical Center where they were separated.”
That line refers to an intensive and risky 22-hour surgery, undertaken in 2002 in Los Angeles, to separate twin girls from Guatemala who were conjoined at the skull. Their story and survival—the twins are now in their 20s—had been a media sensation. I was intrigued: Maybe Garvey’s effort there was something that comes up in some of his motivational speeches. But the detail was deleted from the AAE Speakers website sometime after November 2023, shortly after Garvey declared his Senate candidacy. (The speaking fee on the site was also updated; it jumped from $10,000–$20,000 to $30,000–$50,000.)
The same claim about the twins is still up on Garvey’s 2009 California Sports Hall of Fame page. And again on a few other websites advertising Garvey’s speaking services. All of those sites note that Garvey’s alleged efforts in assisting the “famous Guatemalan conjoined twins” came as part of his role on the “board of directors” for the neurosurgery department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Garvey is actually a longtime member of UCLA neurosurgery’s board of advisers, a distinctly less involved position than being a board director. The advisers “generate philanthropic support for the department,” a UCLA spokesperson wrote to me.
The spokesperson did confirm that Garvey had joined the board of advisers in 2002, the same year the twins were flown to UCLA for the surgery that separated them. But when I asked whether Garvey had been “part of the effort to bring” the twins to Los Angeles, the spokesperson said that the “procedure occurred more than 20 years ago, and we have been unable to ascertain definitive information necessary to address the topic.”
Previous write-ups from other reputable sources indicate that a charitable organization called Healing the Children, which has since branched off into another group, Mending Kids, had been instrumental in raising funds and arranging travel for the twins. I cold-called the founder and former director of Healing the Children, Cris Embleton, a 79-year-old retiree living in California. She patiently listened, then said of Garvey: “I have no recollection of his involvement in any way, shape, or form.”
When I asked members of Garvey’s campaign what was going on here, they did not directly answer my question or provide corroboration to back up his claim. Instead, they quite broadly denied having penned any controversial biographical details that might appear on unaffiliated speaking-fee websites. “Steve has been a celebrity for 50 years, so it should be no surprise that there are many websites, none of which are owned or operated by Steve or his campaign, that have put out incorrect information about him over the years for their own financial gain,” Garvey campaign spokesperson Shupe wrote.
I believe that Garvey and his people aren’t personally changing the text or speaking fee rates on unaffiliated booking websites. (AAE Speakers ignored many requests for comment.) But Shupe’s statement still hit me funny. Where did this claim about the “famous Guatemalan twins” originate?
It wasn’t the only odd biographical detail about Garvey floating around the internet. I was also perplexed by a separate claim, repeated on many of the unaffiliated booking websites and touted on Garvey’s current Senate campaign website, that he was the executive producer of a mysterious-sounding TV show called The International Sportsman. There was a long-running show on ABC called The American Sportsman. But The International Sportsman? As far as I can tell, there’s no archival footage of the show. Nothing on Garvey’s IMDB either.
The same claim showed up on a 2016 Securities and Exchange Commission filing for a Pete Rose–backed baseball academy venture, which highlighted Garvey as part of the venture’s advisory board. (The filing noted that Garvey was The International Sportsman’s co-executive producer “in conjunction with FOX Sports Network,” and that Garvey’s wife co-hosted the show.)
The only supporting evidence I could find of the show’s existence was a 1992 blurb in the Hollywood Reporter that The International Sportsman was slated to air beginning in late March of that year on Prime Ticket, the precursor to Fox’s regional sports networks. (Today it is known as Bally Sports.) But a spokesperson for Bally Sports ignored my pleadings about whether The International Sportsman had ever aired. Garvey’s spokesperson Shupe also did not respond to questions about the show.
The answer to where the Guatemalan twins and International Sportsman résumé items had come from turned out to be simple.
To Garvey’s credit, he (or someone in his circle) was an early adopter of the internet and promptly snatched up stevegarvey.com in 1998. According to the Wayback Machine, there wasn’t much to the site at first; it offered Garvey’s motivational speaking talents and teased a future project: “Steve is currently working on a daily radio commentary show featuring his thoughts and opinions on a topical subject effecting society today.”
Stevegarvey.com remained basically untouched through February 2003. The site went out of commission for a bit, then sprang forth in September 2004 as “the official website of baseball legend” Steve Garvey. It was run by NOPA Sports, a booking agency that repped Garvey. He endorsed the agency at the time. And his updated website got a biography page.
“As a father of seven children Garvey understands that in the ever-changing world we live in there is a great necessity of being a man of honor, integrity and quality,” the biography reads. Two sentences later, word for word, is a line that says Garvey was “part of the effort to bring the famous Guatemalan conjoined twins” to Los Angeles, coupled with the (incorrect) assertion that Garvey was on the UCLA neurosurgery “board of directors.”
The claim about the twins remained on stevegarvey.com until the latter half of 2006. In the summer of 2011, Garvey’s biography was changed to add the International Sportsman tidbit, and mentions of UCLA neurosurgery’s “board of directors” were quietly removed. Other details about International Sportsman included that it allegedly featured “top named entertainment and sports personalities co-hosting with his wife of 22 years Candace Garvey.” Also: “The show has visited Ireland, Monte Carlo, Singapore, Alaska, The Homestead Virginia, Deer Valley Utah, Kona Hawaii, and other world-class destinations.”
Stevegarvey.com then languished, a relic of the early 2000s internet, through 2023. It has since been reborn as a snazzy-looking homage to Garvey’s soon-to-be failed Senate run. In the end, the many unaffiliated bookings websites just pulled biographical details from Garvey’s official website and of late are perhaps scraping the internet for new Garvey details.
I reached back out to the members of Garvey’s camp and pointed out the unfortunate flaw in their original statement about “incorrect information” coming from sites that are not coordinated with him or his people. I again asked how exactly Garvey had helped those Guatemalan twins and about the TV show he constantly cites on his résumé but which appears to never have aired. And I followed up on whether he plans to collect more speaking fees this year, as he runs for Senate. The campaign didn’t respond. Nor did it respond when I followed up again a month later, repeating my same questions and requesting any updates on his tax returns. As of May 28, he hasn’t submitted an amended Senate disclosure form.
Garvey’s failure to properly disclose his honorariums is, absent an immediate amendment, a big deal. The other stuff is admittedly small-bore: I don’t discount the possibility that Garvey maybe donated some signed baseballs as part of a UCLA neurosurgery fundraiser in 2002. Or that his beloved TV series exists in DVD form somewhere.
But it’s definitely funny to see a campaign cover for—and clean up—a politician’s inflated résumé in real time. There’s almost something relatable about it. Many people exaggerate their bona fides or personal stories to get jobs. The obvious difference is they’re not famous former pro athletes who believe that, on account of being a famous former pro athlete with a nickname that aged like milk, they’re entitled to become a senator from California, a state with a population roughly equivalent to that of the entire country of Canada.
This race is for the seat previously held by Dianne Feinstein, one of the more influential senators in modern American politics! There are—or at least were, before Garvey and Schiff advanced to the general election—real stakes here.
No longer. Garvey is perfectly content water-skiing well behind his opponent, catching waves while sporting a blank stare and a dull smile, until November. That’s when Schiff, a centrist like Feinstein, with boatloads of cash on hand and national name recognition thanks to his prominent place in Trump’s first impeachment, will cut Garvey loose and crush him. And Garvey won’t care. He got to cross off a bucket-list item and own a couple of libs (Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee) en route to a landslide defeat, and he’ll have received a whole lot of press in the process.
Indeed, as far as Garvey is concerned, the only meaningful outcome here is that he’ll likely be more in demand for his next motivational speaking circuit—and able to charge a lot more for his appearances. Maybe Garvey will also increase his Cameo fee when he inevitably unfreezes his account.
All he has to do is keep his head down and continue ignoring requests for comment from the press. As a reward, he can add “general election Senate candidate” to his résumé. I look forward to reading all about it on the next stevegarvey.com redesign.