PEDS (Performance Enhancing Drugs)

On NPR this morning, sports commentator Frank Deford said that it was difficult to believe pitcher Roger Clemens' protests that he did not use steroids. For my own part, I also find it difficult to believe that his trainer would lie, as Clemens has suggested, because he was under threat from Feds that he might go to jail. The fact is that he was being threated with jail IF he lied, and to lie about someone the trainer looked up to so much in the face of that makes no sense at all. Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds went from being good, maybe even great, players in their 20s and 30s, to being extraordinary players as they approached 40. How did they do this when everyone else who had ever played experienced a downward slide to their career at that age? How did they get to be bigger, stronger, and faster than they'd ever been at a time when other people's bodies are begin to slip? When we hear that Clemens' trainer, under pressure, admitted to giving Clemens steroids, it fits what we saw too well to not be believed. It helps to explain the unexplainable. The tape Clemens illegally recorded--isn't it still illegal to record phone conversations without telling someone you're doing it?--doesn't prove anything. I heard a man who was still 'worshipping' Clemens seeking forgiveness and asking Clemens to speak with his ailing son. I feel sorry for the trainer to have been captured in such a pathetic position, but that's another point.

What I really wanted to write about here, however, is based on a theme that Deford brought up. He argued that while people look down more on actions like shaving points for gamblers, the fact is that all cheating in sports, whether the goal is to win or lose, is 'fixing' the games. It's just as bad, he said, to cheat to win as it is to cheat to lose. And you know, that's what people really believe, too. Clemens is angry because he has become a pariah. He has gone from hero to goat. What got my attention in this commentary is how much of a pariah people like Clemens and Bonds become once people know they've cheated with steroids. The message that goes out to young people now has to be this: if you cheat, far from being acknowledged as 'great', you could very well spend the rest of your life in disgrace.

(Cartoon by John Pritchett)