In the wake of the Mitchell Report, sports pundits have taken out the extra-sharp cutlery and started carving up the largest names in the game. To this I say (in my best Cartman voice): “Screw you guys!”
How many of us could exist in a constant tempest of ego, fame and wealth, yet emerge unscathed? If you offered the average person 25K to smack his or her momma, there’d be a lot of women rubbing their cheeks right now. Now think about your contemporary professional athlete. These men get paid sums of money that would make Croesus weep. Their egos are constantly stoked, stroked and inflated to the point of near eruption. Their faces appear on television, the ‘net, magazines and billboards with more frequency than any actor or politician. Sycophants and enablers orbit them like satellites. We build temples that draw worshippers by the tens of thousands. And the broadcasts of these contests draw millions of additional adulatory eyes. Yet somehow we expect these people to be above temptation; we expect these people not to try and gain any edge they can in order to stay atop their perches.
Part of what makes these guys so good is their hyper-competitiveness. The various elixirs they took weren’t magic. These guys were still in the gym from dawn until dusk. They put in work. Probably more work than their non-chemically enhanced peers. They were just willing to go further. Should everybody be forced to do that? No. But if somebody wants it more than you and is willing to sacrifice his body in order to achieve it…in a way I have an odd admiration for that kind of zealotry. It’s like my ambivalence for the Frank Lucas character in American Gangster. He was morally reprehensible, but there was a brilliant cold logic to what he did.
I don’t like Barry Bonds because he comes across as a totally self-absorbed tool who can’t see the world beyond his own nose. I feel the same way about Clemens, too. Yet I can’t condemn them for what they did. After all, it’s no less than what we demand of them. We want to see a hundred homeruns in a season. We want to see a man defy probability, time and nature. We want to see superhuman feats. But then we cry out fraud when we pull back the curtain and see how it’s all done? Please. Where were these cries for purity when we watched the hypertrophied humanoids, McGwire and Sosa send ball after ball into orbit? Oh that’s right, we were too busy cheering, cutting away from local news broadcasts to televise their every at-bat. Now we’re claiming that we were duped? We didn’t know men shouldn’t have arms with the circumference a California redwood? As a former co-worker of mine is often fond of saying: “You look crazy out here.”
This might sound crazy, but I say let’em juice. We’ve got no problem with football players sacrificing their bodies for glory and fame. We just call it the price they must pay for the eight-figure contracts and other rewards. What happens when medical science produces a steroid or drug that causes great physiological gains such as increased durability, speed and strength that isn’t deleterious to long-term health? This will happen. Bet money. So when it happens, do you still ban it? As somebody pointed out, how is this different in spirit than an elite athlete getting LASIK to give him better-than-normal vision? You can’t stop progress. You can only manage it.
Athletes will continue to evolve. And the margins are so thin that they will always look for an edge against their peers. We all know this. I just wish we’d stop pretending like they’re moral state should mirror their physical one.
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