LITTLE ROCK — What if there was a pill you could take to lose 50 pounds overnight? Or one that allowed you to instantly start speaking French or to play the piano? What if there was a pill to make you smarter?
You’re in no moral peril. Those pills don’t exist. But suppose they did. Would you be tempted to make yourself better?
I would. Even if there were risks involved in their use. Even if they were illegal. I would weigh the potential damage against the potential reward. I would consider how much I stood to gain, and how serious the consequences might be were I to be caught. I would think about society’s prevailing attitude toward these sort of drugs.
I might take them. If they were cheap enough, available enough. I don’t know that I would care so much that they were technically illegal, if I lived in a culture where petty laws were routinely ignored. It’s illegal not to wear a seatbelt. It’s illegal to drive over the speed limit. It’s illegal to smoke marijuana. There are laws and there are laws, and some laws are more honored in breach than in observance. (And, to be clear, Shakespeare wrote that he meant some laws are better broken than observed—not just that some laws are hardly ever observed.)
I might engage in a little civil disobedience, I might bargain like Faust for some genuine, painless improvement. It depends. Like the old joke goes, I’m just haggling over the price. I’m no better than Lance Armstrong or Barry Bonds. I am a cheater in my heart.
I suspect some of you might be more willing to listen to my arguments now that I’m making them on behalf of Armstrong than you were when I was making them on behalf of Bonds. I don’t know either of these guys, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that neither one of them is an especially nice person to be around. I think there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they’re both narcissistic jerks.
You might not agree with that, and I might not be right, but I’ve spent enough time around gifted athletes—around enough “winners”—to know that most of them aren’t very nice people. There are exceptions, but I am inclined to believe some of the nasty anecdotes I’ve heard about these guys. And I’m very much inclined to believe that both of them deliberately and systematically used performance-enhancing drugs to make themselves better.
Now, there are some important differences between Bonds and Armstrong. Even if he is a jerk, Armstrong is an inspiration to millions, and a world class do-gooder. He has contributed a lot to society and he ought to be given credit for the good he has done, and the millions he has raised for cancer research. I have worn his yellow bracelet myself—I have a Livestrong golf shirt. I think it is possible for a jerk to be an admirable citizen.
And I don’t know what Barry Bonds has done. I’m sure he’s given money to charity—maybe he’s given a lot of money to charity. But he’s not exactly the face of philanthropic service. He doesn’t care what you or I think.
Now I know there are people who want to believe Lance Armstrong when he suggests that he’s never done anything hinky with chemicals. I think those people are naive, but God bless
’em.
What I would suggest is that a lot of us are willing to give Lance Armstrong a pass for doing whatever he did because we understand that he was immersed in a sporting culture where it was virtually impossible to remain clean and remain competitive. You could argue that Armstrong—and every other world class competitive cyclist—used chemistry in self-defense. I don’t know that every cyclist was doping, but an awful lot of them were. Probably most of them were. Maybe nearly all of them were.
Enough of them were to make it a condition of competition, no matter what the rules said. And the powers that be either couldn’t control it, or were complicit in the way the sport was conducted. In any case, if you wanted to be a world class cyclist, you had to be prepared to do certain things that you might not want people to know about.
It’s not that Armstrong is excused because everyone was doing it—he’s excused because everybody was doing it and everybody knew everyone was doing it and nobody really cared that much. Aside from the occasional show trial for someone stupid or careless or unlucky enough to get caught, the cycling world has been rolling dirty for decades.
You could say the same for most other games. Steroids didn’t magically enter the game in 1993—I bet
there were baseball
players who used
anabolic steroids in
the 1970s.
I certainly knew steroid dealers (and steroid users) when I was working out at the Baton Rouge YMCA when I was in law school. (No, I never used their product—though I did purchase some DMSO from one of them after I hurt my shoulder.) Pete Rose hung out with a guy who sold steroids when he was manager of the Reds.
I don’t have any more numbers than you do, but I believe a lot more players used steroids in the late ’80s and early ’90s than most people suspect. Hell, Randy Velarde used steroids. A lot of guys you never heard of used steroids.
And I think it’s plausible to believe that Barry Bonds only started using steroids after he saw that markedly inferior ballplayers like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were doing incredible (and incredibly lucrative) things under the obvious influence of steroids.
And nobody cared. Not the fans, not the mandarins of baseball. Not Bud Selig.
Not until Barry Bonds started doing it, and made a mockery of the game. Because Barry Bonds isn’t the sort of person who should hold those kind of records. Because people don’t like him.
I even remember sportswriters saying that it was a good thing that Alex Rodriguez (also reputed to be a jerk) would eventually break Bonds’ records. I’ll say this again, probably not for the last time. We get the sort of sport we deserve. We don’t care about PEDs in football—hell, a lot of us don’t care about traumatic brain injuries in football. And we only care about PEDs in baseball because the wrong person broke some “sacred” records. We don’t care about PEDs in cycling because we don’t really care about cycling—we just liked it when the cancer survivor Lance Armstrong stuck it to those sniffy Europeans. USA! USA!
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Read more at
blooddirtandangels.com
Perspective, Pages 74 on 09/02/2012