Thursday, May 30, 2002
Jocks on juice not huge secret
Athletes have used for decades
It's no surprise to anyone who follows sports and has a set of working eyeballs that baseball players use steroids. You don't name names in the paper, because you don't have documented evidence. But you've been around awhile. You've talked to doctors and trainers and strength coaches. You look at a jock, you know if he's dirty. You just know.
If you know, lots of people know. The athletes all know. A player does not hit 15 home runs one year and 50 the next because he hired a personal trainer. A player does not add slabs of muscle like coats of paint. He doesn't go from playing 150 games a year for a decade to missing several a month with a chronic muscle problem.
Shoulders that could apply for statehood? Steroids.
Jaws whittled from hickory? Steroids.
Weight gain from the waist up, until the user “looks like one of those Casey at the Bat cartoons” in the words of Reds medical director Dr. Tim Kremchek.
Hamstrings that pop, calves that pull, bodies that wear like cheap radial tires. Moods that swing like Benny Goodman. Mickey Mouse to Mickey Mantle, in one offseason of “hard work.”
Steroids and steroids.
A story:
Early in the 2000 season, Junior Griffey and his agent, Brian Goldberg, were having lunch at the Montgomery Inn Boathouse. The walls are full with photos of jocks. Griffey looked over Goldberg's shoulder for a long time.
“What are you looking at?” Goldberg asked.
“Check out that picture,” Griffey said.
It was a photo of a certain Oakland Athletic, on the turf at Riverfront Stadium. Goldberg figured it was taken during the 1990 World Series. The player was tall, but not yet big. Not in the pro jock sense.
“Look at that, Brian,” Griffey said. “That does not look like the same person.”
If you've seen that photo of Mark McGwire hanging at the Boathouse, you would agree.
Should you care?
Should people paying $32 and hoping to see home runs care if the player who provides them resembles a chemically enhanced gargoyle?
Lots of people watch wrestling. They don't care.
Some watch weightlifting and bodybuilding. Most watch the Olympics where, for 30 years, ever since the East German women swimmers started resembling side-by-side refrigerators, everyone has been a suspect.
The jocks don't care. Some of them. Some Olympians would inject bat dung and Liquid Plum'r if they thought it would lead to a gold medal. So they juice up. To hide the juice, they juice up with juice that masks the juice.
The effects down the road are ... down the road. They'll take their One Moment In Time right now. We'll cheer them for it.
Major League Baseball doesn't care. When it comes to steroids, baseball is cynical and hypocritical on its good days.
It had no problem with (Really) Big Mac busting Roger Maris' record in '98, even as the andro-evidence rested in plain view on his locker shelf. Androstenedione is legal. It's also an anabolic steroid prohibited in the NFL, the NCAA and the Olympics.
Baseball didn't care McGwire was lifting the game on his chemically enhanced shoulders. Baseball just wanted him to keep playing Atlas.
Do you want integrity? Or Sammy Sosa going yard 70 times? Is it important? Or is it, as Barry Bonds said, “nobody else's business”?
Other entertainers lift their faces, tuck their tummies and enlarge their breasts. We don't seem to mind. Botox is a drug, too. Botox won't kill you, the way dianabol might. But it's not your body. Or your choice.
Did the fact Raquel Welch was surgically va-voomed hurt the integrity of her performance in One Million Years B.C.?
Should we insist on a higher standard for people who play games?
By now, there's not an athlete alive who isn't aware of the dangers in putting this stuff in his body. If he decides it's worth the risk, and he's not breaking a law, who are we to say it's not?
Would I trade five years of my life to become a best-selling novelist? I'd think about it.
We have reserved a pedestal for our jocks, and we won't let them off. They are just people, though, with special talents that for some reason we pay exorbitant amounts to watch.
If a brilliant philosopher discovered at age 80 a chemical that could make him think like age 20, might he use it? Would we question his decision?
E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/daugherty.
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DAUGHERTY: Jocks on juice not huge secret
