Perspective

Sports fans on steroids

Despite the hue and cry about athletes behaving badly, if they play well all is still well. Too bad.

By PETER GOLENBOCK Special to the Times
Published June 3, 2007

About 20 years ago I was contacted by an Olympian who had a secret. His name was Chuck Debus, and he was a coach of the U.S. Olympic track team.

During an era when East Germany was dominating, Debus decided to go to East Germany to find out what made their athletes run, jump and throw so much better than his. His discovery: steroids and human growth hormones.

If America was going to compete, he saw, his athletes were going to have to undertake the same regimen as the East Germans. And so the doping of our track athletes began.

Debus wanted to write a book, and after I interviewed him I sent a proposal around to all the big publishing houses. Not a single editor was interested. Who cares about track? they said. Who cares about steroids? Despite all the heat, not much has changed in a generation. Who cares, indeed?

Steroids have been around for a long time. When I lived in Wilton, Conn., in the 1980s, the high school kids who played line on the football team were enormous. The rumor was they were on steroids. Their parents didn't know. Their coaches looked the other way. Did the Wilton athletes know something no one else knew? Don't be naive.

Athletes in all sports - football and baseball most noticeably - bulk up. It's the nature of competition: If just one athlete does it to add strength or take it as a palliative to injury, just about everyone else will too. Because if you don't, you're more likely to lose, and few athletes opt to go out on the field at a disadvantage.

And this has been true in every sport. If one Tour de France bicyclist is blood doping or taking steroids, you can bet many of the others, especially the top riders, are too.

Steroid use is rampant in sports. It's been that way for 20 years. But the outcry has come only recently and it has been misplaced. The government has been going after our professional baseball stars like Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmiero. But these are grown men playing professional sports. I would venture to say that most Americans don't care about whether they took steroids about as much as the publishers didn't care about Debus' track stars. If fans cared, they'd stop going to games. Yet attendance is better than ever.

Sports journalists are bent out of shape over steroids, and the baseball commissioner has to look like he cares because it's PC to do so. But fans simply assume players of the era before drug testing took steroids, and so that era is considered different from the previous era the way Babe Ruth and the lively ball era differed from the dead ball era.

The bigger question is why we aren't stopping our high school athletes from taking steroids? If you're a high school football player who comes out of a poverty-stricken environment with his sights set on getting a college scholarship or going to the pros and making millions, will you take steroids or human growth hormones to get there?

With college costing $25, 000 a year, the payoff is high, the risk relatively low. (A heck of a lot more kids die from drunken driving than from steroids.) Florida is on the verge of testing high school athletes for steroids. If society really wants to end steroid use, this is the best way to limit it. Yet a concerned booster of a Florida university might ask: If no other state tests for steroids will we be hurting our kids' chances to compete on the college level?

More so than ever, we seem to be living in a "win at all costs" age. What counts is the bottom line. Morality and doing the right thing? Not so much.

That the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth could mount a smear campaign to devalue John Kerry's service in Vietnam while his opponent stonewalled to mask whether in fact he even showed up for duty in the Texas National Guard says a lot about where we are as a nation. We are told: Bush won. Kerry lost. End of story. Get over it.

Politics and sports and life are all about the bottom line now: Are you a winner or a loser? So long as you're a winner, you don't have to take personal responsibility. Josh Hancock, a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, had a serious drinking problem. Two days before he crashed and died drunk he had been involved in another accident. Now his family is suing the place that served him before the fatal crash.

Elijah Dukes, a talented Devil Rays rookie, has five children by four women. He is 22. His wife said Dukes threatened to kill her and their children. She showed a reporter a photo of the gun she says he e-mailed to her along with a recorded threat.

The question, as always, is what to do about it. The ideal would be if Dukes would admit his anger problems and get help. But he hasn't. Having an accused wife abuser on the team doesn't square with a family-fun-days image, though in their defense, Dukes hasn't been charged with a crime, thanks to the kindness of his wife, who obtained a protective order and is planning a divorce.

Owner Stu Sternberg talks of leaving his options open, but the Rays options are limited because they stupidly allowed another top prospect, Josh Hamilton, to be snatched away by the Cincinnati Reds. Hamilton is in the running for rookie of the year honors. If they let Dukes go, they will look doubly dumb, because he'd be snapped up by another team lusting for his immense talent.

These are tough times for major league franchises wanting to do the right thing and tougher times for the fans. Look where quarterback Michael Vick has put the Atlanta Falcons. Vick has been accused of being part of to-the-death dog fights. Dozens of fighting pit bulls were removed from his property. An informant on ESPN said that as many as 30 NFL players engage in dog fighting. It'll be interesting to see whether journalists jump on the dog-fighting story with the tenacity they have pursued the Barry Bonds-on-steroids story.

And we as fans have to decide whether we can separate the off-the-field behavior from the on-the-field behavior. Vick says he has never been involved in dog fighting. Scores of pit bulls certainly imply something else. I am betting most of the American sporting public will choose to believe him.

St. Petersburg's Peter Golenbock is the author of six New York Times bestsellers. His current book is 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel. His Web site is www.golenbockbooks.com.

[Last modified June 2, 2007, 20:50:11]