Turk Wendell still is living life his way. That means he’s the most interesting guy in the room — at least on those rare occasions when he is confined indoors.
Wendell is baseball’s Jeremiah Johnson. He runs his own hunting and fishing camp called Wykota Ranch, a 200-acre spread in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado with seven ponds along with meadows, rolling hills and Ponderosa Pines. He remains devoted to bow hunting, even making his own bow, and refers to his place as a “redneck country club.”
“It’s pretty much a self-sustaining operation. I put up a thousand bales of hay every year, and I planted 100 acres of crops,” said Wendell, who like Robert Redford’s title character in the 1972 western, is a mountain man at heart. “I raise pheasants, quail, chukkar and Hungarian partridges. I got chickens, goats, homing pigeons, a couple dogs, pigs. I got bass fishing, trout, crappie and bluegill, walleye, Northern pike, catfish. In the fall I do some guiding of big-game hunting.”
He also traps. “I’ve made fur coats for my mom and comforters for my kids,” Wendell said.
There was a four-year stretch when Wendell averaged 73 appearances. Before every game he would run five to eight miles. He said he never has had a sip of alcohol or tried tobacco. “I just love life,” Wendell said.
And he hates steroids.
“I love people who say, ‘Well, it wasn’t illegal in baseball.’ Dude, it’s illegal in life.”
“When Mark McGwire said he wished he had never played in this era, that [ticked] me off because he had the same choices I did,” Wendell said. “He didn’t have to take a shortcut and cheat like that. If he feels that badly about it, give the owners back the money that he took from them.
“I have a lot of respect for Mark, I think he’s a great individual. … But the bottom line is that he cheated. He cheated the game. He cheated the players he played against. You’re cheating your wife and your family because you’re probably not going to live as long as he would have. He cheated history.
“This whole drug testing thing is a bunch of [nonsense],” Wendell added. “The union sent out a two-page letter when the drug testing was implemented, about all the drugs they were testing for. In the letter it said, ‘We will not be testing for HGH.’ What the hell is that telling everybody to do? If you are going to cheat, you are going to do that.”
He said it’s ridiculous for players like McGwire and Alex Rodriguez to claim they did not know what they put in their body.
“Like A-Rod saying he wasn’t sure, it was a loosey, goosey era. C’mon dude, you know what you’re doing,” Wendell said. “And to say it was the pressure to perform every day, well, I had the pressure to perform, that’s why I worked my [butt] off.
“And then for them to say everybody in the era is guilty because even if you didn’t do it, you didn’t say something about it. What am I going to do? If I’m playing for the Cubs or the Mets and some guy on my team just hit a home run that I suspect of doing steroids, what am I going to say, ‘The reason we won today is because so-and-so hit a home run because he’s on steroids right now.’
“What is that going to do for me? I ain’t ever going to be able to find a job.”
Wendell said he has deep respect for the men and women of the U.S military, and has made three trips to Iraq and Afghanistan to visit the troops.
“It was so inspirational that when I came back from Iraq the last time, I went to enlist,” said the former reliever. He was 42 at the time, the top of the age limit. Wendell is color blind, so he said he would have been placed in a support position, not an active combat role.
“I told them I’m a really good shot, and I’d rather take the spot of some young kid that’s got a life to live,” Wendell said, but he couldn’t sway the Army.
Wendell said he also believes there should be a worldwide draft in baseball, and told former union president Donald Fehr just that.
“These kids are coming over from Japan, Cuba or whereever and they’re giving them $30 million and they’ve never set foot in a minor league facility and they’ve just [robbed] every kid in Triple-A that’s competing for that spot.”
“[Fehr] said, ‘Well, we have to bring that up in the next contract negotiations.’ I said, ‘Geez, thanks for the lip service.’ ”
Wendell doesn’t offer lip service. He speaks directly from his heart.
kevin.kernan@nypost.com