From East Germany with Love
“Do you want to know the terrifying truth? Or do you wanna see me sock a few dingers?” - Mark McGwire
“Dingers! Dingers!” - Springfield Townspeople
With Barry Bonds getting closer to 755 home runs and Jason Giambi agreeing to talk to George Mitchell, today seems like a good time to color some pixels about steroids. After all, a celebrity (sort of) is going in front of a blue ribbon panel. It’s the media equivalent of finding a twenty in your pants - it doesn’t happen that often but when it does you want to make it last that much longer.
Allow me to set the stage. Inne ye olde tymes sports were a celebration of the purest humanity. Strength and speed against strength and speed, winners won on the merits of their skill and dedication, losers shook their hands, and all was right with the sporting world. Today we live in the debauched ruins of that fine time, sports, and by extension all of us, have been debased by endorsement deals, advertising and grotesque free agent contracts. I’d keep going, but bullshit is beginning to bubble up from my keyboard.
Steroids must be serious, they were mentioned in a State of the Union address for cryin’ out loud. The big tip off, for me at least, was neither the size of Barry Bonds head nor the deterioration of Mark McGwire’s complexion. It was when the relatively benign, often hilarious tendency of athletes to try getting ahead with chemistry migrated from the sports section to the front page. Any issue making that leap usually has the awful clattering of moral outrage to thank.
Sports columnists puffing up the sacrosanct nature of record books is one thing, dangerous and appealing drugs that, gulp, teenagers might be using is quite another. To protect the children we must now rise up in outrage and demonize steroids, cast suspicion on successful athletes, and add another layer of guilt and irony to some of our favorite pastimes. Count me out.
Steroids are just another one of the many ways that science in general and biochemistry in particular are changing the world we inhabit. They are a fact of life as surely as anti-depressants, recreational drugs, cholesterol medication and dick pills. At the moment we’ve chosen to treat them as a threat, something that must be combated with an eye towards eventual elimination. This is the exact kind of stupidity that leads to ever scarier warning labels on cigarette packs and delusional organizations like The Partnership for a Drug Free America.
Testing is the only real weapon against performance enhancing drugs. At best it is deeply flawed and at an inherent disadvantage. The people using drugs, hormones, pixie dust and whatever else for an edge know what they’re doing. The users will always be ahead for the simple reason that they know what the testers are looking for, while the testers do not know what the users are using. Try playing all your cards face up on the table some time while the other guy keeps his hand close. See where that gets you.
Testing serves a purpose because it puts cheaters in jeopardy for cheating. Pitchers are not allowed to put foreign substances on the ball, batters are not allowed to use corked bats. Those things are against the rules. You can break the rules but by doing so you tacitly acknowledge that you understand the penalties: a tarnished reputation (including any past glories) and suspension from play. For cheating of any type, at any competition, at any level, those seem like appropriate penalties. Why on earth do we need to involve the law?
Once it becomes illegal two things happen immediately and they’re both bad. One, the financial stakes of cheating rise immediately, and that kind of money attracts all sorts of trouble. Two, anyone who is cheating has an increased incentive to keep cheating until caught red handed.
If steroids were legally available to all but understood to be not allowed in organized competition the price would plummet. The only real market that I can think of would be body builder types who want beach muscles and maybe the odd guy doing manual labor. But they are illegal and that means that there is money to be made by concocting newer and less detectable versions. That money comes from athletes with no other options and goes to criminals and mad scientist types who would otherwise need to seek gainful employment. If they get arrested they will be replaced by others because the demand remains unaddressed.
The incentive for self-policing amongst competitive athletes would also go way up if steroids and the like were legal. A guy on a high school football team that’s cheating might not be well liked, he might even be hated, but would a teammate really turn him in knowing that the consequences could include jail, questions about where they came from, and getting caught between the police and guys who might be scarier than the police? If turning that guy in meant he got kicked off the team and banned from sports for a year the other players would be far more likely to drop a hint or two to someone in authority. (It also opens up playing time, don’t underestimate that.) The players are the only ones who ever know what’s really going on in a locker room, in any sport. They are the only hope of enforcement.
Instead of doing that, we’ve gone down the usual path of demonization. That means motivational speakers, consultants, and youth oriented advertising firms will get to suck the tits of various levels of governments. It leads to dishonesty and scare tactics on the part of authority. The idea that a teenager, reflexively belittled in most adult minds as just a kid, is capable of making coherent decisions is lost almost immediately.
The central message couldn’t be simpler: winning at sports, even ones as lionized as baseball and football, is insignificant next to becoming a healthy adult.
Just tell them that, honestly and simply, and let them make their own decisions, which is what they’re going to do anyway. Don’t make expensive, computer generated television commercials with crumbling Adonis statues. The most obvious message of that commercial is not that steroids grind you up and leave you as dust. It’s that steroids get you that Adonis body in the first place.
High school students[1] might be doing something that’s bad for them. I am shocked. I’d also be willing to bet that pretty much everyone over the age of nineteen has regrets about some of the things they did or didn’t do when they were teenagers. The same way people over the age of twenty-nine do about their twenties, and so on throughout the decades of life.
There are adverse, long term effects from steroid use. They probably vary greatly depending on the specific drug, the quantity involved, frequency and duration of use, and a whole host of other factors: gender, genetics, nutrition, stress (sport related and otherwise), overall levels of fitness and health, etc. I could go on, but it’s best summed up in a single word: life. Some will use chemistry as a means to improve athletic performance, some of them will benefit and get away with it, others will benefit and get caught. A final, unfortunate group will screw themselves up, possibly permanently, up to and including death, for little to no real gain. That’s life, and if the medical consensus is that the risks far outweigh the benefits, that’s fine with me. Go out and tell the people. But don’t moralize, don’t preach, and don’t be surprised when, a few years from now, the problem is worse.
A brief endnote on Barry Bonds:
Bonds has always denied using steroids and for all I know he’s telling the truth. Nobody really believes him, but let’s think about it for a second. For all we know, sometime in the mid-nineties Bonds changed up his workout routine and diet. He started hitting the weights with abandon and upped his protein intake radically. His body, which one way or another is at the far right side of the bell curve for athletic ability, responded. That appears to be his story.
There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that he is lying and that is the general opinion. I have no practical experience with steroids and I’m not a big baseball fan, but I don’t like basing my conclusions, in any subject, on something that thin. Regardless there are only two possibilities. Either he is telling the truth and has been the target of a massive, if uncoordinated, smear campaign or he is lying and is the target of a massive, if uncoordinated, public outrage. In either case, harping on him all the time is a really dumb course of action. Believing his denials costs us nothing while attacking him just makes him more defensive and less likely to fess up. He’s a man, and if he has been lying he’ll have to square that with himself someday or die a disillusioned fool. That will be far more punishment to him than anything the sporting press can do.
[1] Because that’s not shocking enough anymore we’ve thrown middle school students as well. Come to think of it, that goes for a lot of things. Epidemic of oral sex anyone? Paging Dr. Phil.
