2008 Woodie Awards
The Sports Pile: America is steroids nation
Seriously, is anyone clean?
Will Brinson
Issue date: 10/9/07 Section: Sports
I promised myself I wouldn't do this, and by this I mean talk about steroids again. It seemed to me after a summer-long chase watching Barry Bonds go after records that we all thought would be astericized, that we couldn't possibly suffer through any more steroids overload. We'd been maxed out and virtually numbed as a nation to the entire concept of cheating to get ahead in athletic competition - it appears I was wrong.
Within the last two weeks, both Sugar Shane Mosley and Marion Jones have been busted and/or admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs. Since we've long known that boxing is corrupt (What? Noooooooooo!) this isn't some revelation that's going to bring the sports world crumbling to its knees, and track and field and Olympic athletes have been under various clouds of suspicion since furry Chinese women started swimming past us in the 1980s.
But just like any normal camel-back breaker, it just seemed to me, at some point over the last week, that since our society is so inundated with performance-enhancing drugs we might as well just give up, start from the bottom, and count who doesn't cheat when making up these fictitious lists of heroic athletes. I'm pretty sure that Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez, Roger Federer, and LeBron James are in no way cheating in order to gain an edge. They simply all possess the most God-given talent for doing what they do best, or, more importantly, they work the hardest.
On his television show Rome is Burning, Jim Rome recently asked an extremely relevant question: "Is there any athlete anywhere that would shock you if you found out they were using performance-enhancing drugs?" And that answer is an emphatic "no." Now, if I found out in a week that any of the four monsters listed above had tested positive I would be extremely upset. Finding out that Ryan Howard's gorgeous moon shots were artificially inseminated, I wouldn't be anything short of depressed, but would I be shocked? Absolutely not.
There's a very tiny list of athletes that I'm absolutely certain haven't taken steroids though. I seriously doubt that Phil Helmuth uses steroids. I questioned it earlier in his career when he won 10 World Series of Poker bracelets, but surely a lot of that can be attributed to luck. Especially with his inability to close out the record number of rings, and the fact that he's not particularly ripped, well, it just seems impossible.
Within the last two weeks, both Sugar Shane Mosley and Marion Jones have been busted and/or admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs. Since we've long known that boxing is corrupt (What? Noooooooooo!) this isn't some revelation that's going to bring the sports world crumbling to its knees, and track and field and Olympic athletes have been under various clouds of suspicion since furry Chinese women started swimming past us in the 1980s.
But just like any normal camel-back breaker, it just seemed to me, at some point over the last week, that since our society is so inundated with performance-enhancing drugs we might as well just give up, start from the bottom, and count who doesn't cheat when making up these fictitious lists of heroic athletes. I'm pretty sure that Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez, Roger Federer, and LeBron James are in no way cheating in order to gain an edge. They simply all possess the most God-given talent for doing what they do best, or, more importantly, they work the hardest.
On his television show Rome is Burning, Jim Rome recently asked an extremely relevant question: "Is there any athlete anywhere that would shock you if you found out they were using performance-enhancing drugs?" And that answer is an emphatic "no." Now, if I found out in a week that any of the four monsters listed above had tested positive I would be extremely upset. Finding out that Ryan Howard's gorgeous moon shots were artificially inseminated, I wouldn't be anything short of depressed, but would I be shocked? Absolutely not.
There's a very tiny list of athletes that I'm absolutely certain haven't taken steroids though. I seriously doubt that Phil Helmuth uses steroids. I questioned it earlier in his career when he won 10 World Series of Poker bracelets, but surely a lot of that can be attributed to luck. Especially with his inability to close out the record number of rings, and the fact that he's not particularly ripped, well, it just seems impossible.
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