Sportswriters and analysts have been picking on every word, fact or expression made by Alex Rodriguez in the past week. While Picasner appears to always be defending A-Rod, that's not the case. I simply believe in fairness...and baseball. I'd prefer to talk about baseball, it's funnier. In the interest of "integrity", let us take one more look at the A-rod fiasco.
Selig claims he knew nothing about Steroids till he read about McGuire in 1998. Most sportswriters admit that they could have "done something" in the '90's when they "began to hear stories." Gee, nobody knew. However, there's this excerpt from a Sports Illustrated article by Bill Gilbert...
"… after it has been admitted that most citizens dope themselves from time to time, there remain excellent grounds for claiming that in the matter of drug usage, athletes are different from the rest of us. In spite of being -- for the most part -- young, healthy and active specimens, they take an extraordinary variety and quantity of drugs. They take them for dubious purposes, they take them in a situation of debatable morality, they take them under conditions that range from dangerously experimental to hazardous to fatal. The use of drugs -- legal drugs -- by athletes is far from new, but the increase in drug usage in the last 10 years is startling. It could, indeed, menace the tradition and structure of sport itself. … 'Are anabolic steroids [a male hormone derivative that supposedly makes users bigger and stronger than they could otherwise be] widely used by Olympic weight men?' rhetorically asks Dave Maggard, who finished fifth in the shotput at Mexico and is now the University of California track coach. 'Let me put it this way. If they had come into the village the day before competition and said we have just found a new test that will catch anyone who has used steroids, you would have had an awful lot of people dropping out of events because of instant muscle pulls.' … There are abundant rumors -- the wildest of which circulate within rather than outside the sporting world -- about strung-out quarterbacks, hopped-up pitchers, slowed-down middleweights, convulsed half-milers and doped-to-death wrestlers. Nevertheless, it is the question of motive and morality that constitutes the crux of the athletic drug problem. Even if none of the gossip could be reduced to provable fact, there remains ample evidence that drug use constitutes a significant dilemma, not so much for individual athletes as for sport in general. One reason is that the use of drugs in sport leads one directly to more serious and complicated questions. Is athletic integrity (and, conversely, corruption) a matter of public interest? Does it matter, as appreciators of sport have so long and piously claimed it does, that games be played in an atmosphere of virtue; even righteousness? If not, what is the social utility of games -- why play them at all? Drug usage, even more than speculation about bribery, college recruiting, spit-balls or TV commercials, raises such sticky questions about the fundamentals of sport that one can understand the instinctive reaction of the athletic establishments: when it comes to drugs, they ignore, dismiss, deny."
Oh yeah, we've heard this before. Big deal. Fine, except this article was written in 1969. 1969! So who's not credible now? I guess Mike Lupica et. al., won't be going into the Sportswriters Hall of Fame now. Maybe Bob Ryan will organize a special wing.
No comments:
Post a Comment