1.8.07

Of Mice and Mice Made More Better by Steriods

Esquire magazine recommends the following summer cocktail:

The Bay Bomber

3 oz. orange juice
2 oz. grenadine
1 oz.
stanozolol

garnish with asterisk

I’d suggest it get served in a size eight fitted ball cap, but who am I to mess with success?

It would take to long to gather all the funny, interesting or outrageous arguments surrounding Barry Bonds. Suffice to say that his row with Bob Costas tells us enough: steroid use in baseball is in the public eye. The recent marring of the Tour de France with 34,875 allegations of doping has done little to quell public debate about athletes, drugs and the purpose and joy of sport.

With these issues firmly in the back of my mind, I recently ran across the following video of a five-year old American who has been deported to a tennis camp in France:



Watching the video of this talented youngster, I began to wonder if such complete training at such an early age implicates the same ethical issues that cause fans (outside of San Francisco, at least) to uniformly boo Barry Bonds home runs. The blurring of the line between practice and dedication, and turning people into sports machines is, to my mind, almost complete. This realization has caused me to embrace a rather radical and unpopular solution to the ethical boondoggle presented by steroids: two leagues. One allows use of all types of drugs, the other bans them.

Just to be clear, it seems quite obvious that, following a short period of adjustment, everyone in the world will start watching the juiced athletes. One of the obvious criticisms of this idea is that two leagues for every sport is commercially unsound. I know. I also know the league that features the 95-pound striplings will be the one going bankrupt. But, for reasons I will shortly illuminate, simply dropping the drug ban doesn’t solve our psychic issues with doping.

First, we need to cast aside the idea that banning steroids in professional sports helps keep young athletes off drugs. Estimates of steroid use among high school students varies widely, but it clearly happens.

It’s easy to see why, steroids offer major advantages to juiced athletes. Enough advantage, apparently, to offsets the risk of a shriveled twig, smaller berries, acne, big head syndrome and, I dunno, spending so much time in the weight room huge-ing that you forget to go attend practice and never get good enough to hit the bigs even if you can rep 1500 lbs. four hundred seventy-five times.

The other major complaint is that sport is about celebrating human physical ability, and steroids unrealistically inflate those abilities. When proponents of this argument wax nostalgic for a time when ‘real’ athletes strode the field, they mention Hank Aaron, Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle. But today’s athletes are different from those guys in a lot of ways. 24-hour nutritionists. Intensive weight room coaching. Training from obscenely early ages. Training for the Olympics (an amateur competition) is essentially a full–time.

The fact is that athletes, even amateurs, lost any connection to normal humans when sending your five-year-old to live at tennis camp across the pond became acceptable. The idea that a person can be molded from a single digit age by trainers and nutritionists stretches the credibility of sport as measure of human potential to the breaking point.

But I can understand not wanting to compare Tiger Woods and his titanium clubs to the Golden Bear, or a juiced Bonds to Hank Aaron. They are, after all, playing different games. That realization obviates the need for putting an asterisk next to Bonds’ record. And that’s the beauty of having a different league. We get to keep all the old heroes from the days when pro sportsmen were the car salesmen and factory workers who could swing the stick best, and we get to watch what we really want: monster home-runs, big hits and goals from thirty yards.

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