Posted on Fri, Dec. 14, 2007 10:15 PM
Pro athletes are no different from the rest of us.
They’ll self-medicate over the objections of doctors, spouses, parents, law enforcement, Bud Selig, George Mitchell and self-appointed, hypocritical, never-touched-the-field guardians of baseball’s records book in the media.
At the end of the day, after spending 20 months and Alex Rodriguez’s salary to tell us what we already knew — Roger Clemens and a bunch of other major-leaguers are accused of improving their play and physical fitness chemically — the Mitchell Report avoided making every obvious point except the most important one:
There’s too much money to be made, and we’ve been too conditioned to seek solutions in a bottle, to fix the American sports drug culture with testing and punishment.
Oh, Bud Selig is going to try. Emboldened by his desire to win the approval of “the media guardians,” the tiny sports reporters who believe burning Barry Bonds at the stake will cleanse Babe Ruth’s soul, Bud is ready to lead a war on drugs.
Never mind that his lack of leadership ability is the most dangerous weapon of mass destruction baseball has ever faced. Never mind that there is indisputable evidence across America — from the ’hood to the ’burbs — that you can’t win a war on drugs. Wars destroy lives.
But that’s where we’re headed. Bud wants some of that tough-guy publicity that has made Roger Goodell a hero to NFL fans and sportswriters. Bud fails to realize that absolutely no one would’ve been shocked had Brian McNamee testified that Selig and other owners personally injected their players with steroids.
Goodell passes as Clint Eastwood because we don’t believe Goodell ever went strip-clubbing with Pacman Jones or moonlighted as a personal trainer for Michael Vick’s pit bulls.
Selig and his peers are nothing more than unindicted co-conspirators. They’re as honest and untainted as your typical politician.
Having jealously watched TV cameras spend an entire afternoon focused on Mitchell, Selig and Donald Fehr, Washington politicians now want the Three Blind Mice to bring baseball’s controversy and ratings back to Congress’ studio for a little more grandstanding and pontificating about the virtues of old-time players.
It’s not what we need. There is no easy solution to this problem. You don’t scare drug users straight, especially drug users who have good reason to believe their drug use is improving their health and ability to function.
These aren’t crackheads, coke whores or meth fiends.
These are world-class athletes working with highly educated doctors and trainers. That’s the big difference, to me. You see, everybody wants to pretend the steroids era in baseball started in the 1990s or mid-1980s. That’s a joke.
Non-Olympic athletes figured out how to “properly” use steroids and performance-enhancing drugs in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. But the experimentation and random use of the drugs began long before then.
At the same time professional football, basketball, baseball and hockey players — they’re all on the stuff, don’t kid yourself — learned how to use performance-enhancing drugs, salaries skyrocketed, which means the incentive to use skyrocketed.
Extending your career by any means necessary could add several million dollars to your retirement portfolio. Roger Clemens earned $140,000 in 1985 and $18 million in 2005.
My point is Clueless Bud Selig should spend his time trying to get his athletes to have an open, real discussion with him and the rest of ownership about performance-enhancing drugs and how to curb their use, limit the health risk and level the playing field. Selig should also take the lead among sports commissioners in getting American scientists to have a spirited debate about human growth hormone, a drug some doctors call the “fountain of youth.”
Investigating every athlete and trying to punish some of the athletes mentioned in the Mitchell Report are wastes of time and counterproductive.
For the most part, these guys are not criminals. They’re competitors trapped in the American moneymaking machine, an instrument that cares little about the exploitation of the human body.
To reach Jason Whitlock, call 816-234-4869 or send e-mail to jwhitlock@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.
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