Juiced Up Jocks and 'Roid Rage: Do We Really Care If Grown Men Use Steroids?

By Robert Lipsyte, Tomdispatch.com. Posted June 24, 2009.

The McGwire Effect

Of course, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Alex Rodriguez did not find that summer fun at all. Barry sulked; he was a far better ballplayer than McGwire, yet was being eclipsed by that wide white hormone container. It undoubtedly crossed his mind then that he'd better get some of that stuff Mark was using.

Roger Clemens, then 35 and on the downside of a fine pitching career, was wondering how he could survive against this new crew of monster hitters. He asked a Toronto Blue Jays strength coach, Brian McNamee, to help him out. And Alex, well, he was having a career season and nobody even noticed. It was time to step up his dosage.

Unlike Barry and Roger, who are brute craftsmen, Alex is an artist, and that description includes being vain, narcissistic, whiney, devious, ingratiating, whimsical, and sensual. There is something soft, dare we say almost feminine, about him, which is undoubtedly why the newshawks have always felt freer to beat on him than on Barry or Roger.

That sense of Alex enlivens A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (Harper, $26.99) by Selena Roberts, who extended a Sports Illustrated profile into what's become the hottest sports book of the season because Alex's name was leaked as a major leaguer who had tested positive for steroids in 2003. That was off a list that had been compiled for research only and was to have been shredded.

The media might have gone after the leaker, but pounced instead on Roberts as yet another no-fun snoop. Her use of mostly anonymous sources led that old fun guy, Murray Chass, now a blogger, to call the book a "journalistic abomination." He also wrote that she had not been much of a reporter or columnist back in their days as colleagues at the New York Times.

Bad enough a girl breaks the most sensational sports story of the year, but this girl! Jock Culture has never forgiven Roberts for a series of New York Times columns on the Duke lacrosse scandal of 2006. While the charges against the white Dukies for molesting a black stripper they had hired for a party were eventually dropped, Roberts' denunciations of entitled jock bad behavior were uncomfortably on the mark.

The major league version of boys being bad boys is at the heart of a sweet, sad autobiography, Straw: Finding My Way (Ecco, $26.99) by former Met slugger Darryl Strawberry with John Strausbaugh. I've had a soft spot for Strawberry ever since the Mets brought him up in 1983, before his time. We'd been hearing drumbeats from the minors about this "next Ted Williams." I remember the Mets general manager telling me he'd never promote this immature kid to The Show until he was really ready.

Then the Mets had a bad year in the standings and worse, at the box office, and there he was, a likeable, somewhat goofy beanpole. Terrific player. Rookie year he looked like he could be the second coming of Ted himself, the Splendid Splinter as he was known, if given a chance to grow up.

Straw says he never did steroids, but if so, he did everything else, especially speed (the steroids of the eighties), alcohol, coke, crack, groupies. His rehabs and relapses became an opportunity for sportswriters to whine about how Straw had let them down after all the nice things they had said about him. His colon cancer and its recurrence somehow elicited the same response.

Blaming the media for building 'em up and tearing 'em down is an easy shot, but not necessarily a cheap one. Strawberry is a good example, and one worth keeping in mind as we consider a less lovable star, Roger Clemens, who gets two books to himself this season.

Sailing on Denial

The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality by Jeff Pearlman (Harper, $26.99) is an absorbing profile of the one-time "fat boy from Ohio" who, like Alex and Straw, was mostly raised by his mother into a socially-awkward, sports-obsessed, life-time adolescent.

American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America's Pastime by Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O'Keeffe, and Christian Red (Knopf, $26.95) takes in a larger picture. The authors, members of the New York Daily News Sports Investigative Team, have been leading this story for some time and their book is a worthy successor to Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroid Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports by the San Francisco Chronicle's investigative team, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. Taken together, they add up to the definitive and lively history of the current Steroid Era.

See more stories tagged with: baseball, steroids, roger clemens, alex rodriguez, mark mcguire. sammy sosa

Robert Lipsyte is the host of LIFE (Part 2) a weekly PBS series on the aging of the boomer generation that will begin airing in September. He has written many books for sports nuts of all ages. His website is Robertlipsyte.com.

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