This will seem strange in a week which saw Ken Starr sent a report to Congress in 36 boxes on President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, but the name which grabs most Americans was Mark McGwire.
He has become a genuine American hero by setting a new record for home runs in a season. We are talking baseball.
Baseball for a non-American must be approached cautiously. It has rules of a complexity which can bewilder even the most devoted fan. That is why a good proportion of those who go to baseball games spend the time drinking beer and eating hotdogs which can be purchased inside the stadium, leaving the finer points of the game to the experts. I recently sat beside a fan who was shouting his head off but when I asked a few questions about plays that puzzled me, he seemed just as puzzled.
There is a certain resemblance to rounders which gives Irish people of a certain age a start in trying to grasp the fundamentals. In rounders, coats were put down to mark bases. The bat was a hurley stick, the pitcher lobbed a tennis ball and each team counted up its "rounds" of the bases.
But back to Mark McGwire. Affectionately known as "Big Mac", he is a 6 ft 5 in redhead with a goatee, weighs 250 lb and plays for the St Louis Cardinals. He has hit 62 home runs this season, which is not yet over, and has thus broken the previous record of the late Roger Maris which has stood for 37 years.
Poor Maris was reviled back in 1961 because he broke the record of the revered Babe Ruth. If the record was to go, the fans wanted the popular Mickey Mantle to do it, not Maris.
A home run is baseball at its purest and most exhilarating. It means the batsman, or slugger, hits the ball out of the playing arena into the stands, or bleachers. He canters around the four bases to complete his "run" like a lap of honour while the crowd goes wild. The pitcher sulks and the batter's team-mates crowd around giving high fives.
It is some feat to hit a home run as it means connecting the centre of a round bat with a small ball thrown at 90 miles an hour. That is why the home run record ranks as the supreme achievement for American sports fans.
"It is in our collective genes. The home run is still America's great signature sporting feat," gushed the New York Times as McGwire went into the record books.
A correspondence has begun over "the metaphysics of a home run". Mr Allen Bodner writes that in all sports there are rules, limits and physical boundaries but "only in baseball is a player rewarded for exceeding them - by hitting one `out of the park'. It is the combination of power and defiance by metaphysically `breaking the rules' in a sanctioned manner that grips the imagination".
Others hail baseball as "the remembrance of our pastoral past", while "football is based on the mythology of our industrial present". Basketball is "the metaphor for our information-entrepreneurial future".
Meanwhile back in the physical world, the excitement over McGwire's feat has been heightened by the race with his big rival, Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs, who is also heading to break the home run record and could yet pass out McGwire by the end of the season. Sosa is a relaxed, humorous young man from the Dominican Republic who has generously applauded McGwire for breaking the old record ahead of him.
Americans have been thrilled to get away from the Starr report to see the two rivals compete for the record and still be able to joke together and stay friends in spite of the huge pressures.
For McGwire it is truly an annus mirabilis. A few years ago, he went through a difficult divorce, his baseball game was way down and he had to overcome a nervous breakdown. He considered retiring from the top league.
Now he is transformed. He gives credit to "the man upstairs" for his home runs and often points skywards to confirm it. He adores his 10-year-old son who often serves as batboy for his team and has won over the Maris family even as he took away its late father's record.
He gives $1 million a year from his winnings to a fund in St Louis to assist sexually abused children. The only slight blot on a glorious year was the discovery by a journalist, prying in his locker, that he takes "andro", a muscle-building product to raise testosterone levels.
It is classified as a dietary supplement rather than a drug and can be bought over the counter. It is banned by the Olympic Committee but not by the baseball league. McGwire has defended his use of "andro". He was doing "nothing wrong" he pointed out.
Just now he can do nothing wrong.