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

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

Roger's neediness, Alex's insecurities, and Straw's cancer show up as well in The Yankee Years (Doubleday, $26.95) by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci. The book is written in the third person, with Torre as the main interview, which gives it a curiously distanced tone to the text. It feels as if Torre is not the author, but merely a source with veto power. And one who can always offload criticism on his partner. As superb a baseball writer as Verducci can be, I would somehow have preferred if this book had come from my favorite manager's heart.

Here's heart, though: The sleeper of the season is Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football (Four Walls Publishing, $17 Paper) by Matt Chaney, a passionate, personal attack on the Jock Culture that brought us to this point. Chaney concentrates on chemicals in football, where, so he claims, the abuse is far greater than baseball. His heroes are Penn State epidemiologist Charles E. Yesalis, one of the few clear-eyed scientists on the case, and the late Steve Courson, a former Pittsburgh Steeler who, in 1985, spoke of his steroid use.

Chaney was a college football player whose own steroid history is instructive. Young athletes do not agonize over the moral question of whether to use or not. They merely seek to answer the only question worth asking in their world: How can I be the best I can be? And older athletes are usually more than willing to strike what might be a Faustian bargain, even if it leads to future malady.

Or does it? As Yesalis points out, there is very little hard science about performance-enhancing drugs, including what they enhance, much less what damage they may do. This leaves us, alas, with the bellicosity of the sportsbabblers, driven to flail and threaten by their sense of betrayal. Those who haven't thrown up their hands and declared that we are already in the Post-Steroid Era -- Let's get past this, we're all clean now! -- are calling for the harshest penalty they can impose: exclusion from the Hall of Fame for such shoo-ins as Roger and Alex. This is real punishment. After all, as Zev Chafets points out in his fascinating Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame (Penguin, $25), election to the Hall immediately jacks up a retired player's speaking, autographing, and memorabilia fees.

Chafets, who is best known for his long-time reporting from Israel and his recent sympathetic New York Times Magazine piece on that former Kansas City Royals front-office worker Rush Limbaugh (soon to be a book), is leading the libertarian wing of the Post-Steroids Party, whose platform is just let them do it and we'll all forget about it. His essential position: the genie is out of the bottle, past generations had their enhancers, and in an age of beta blockers, Ritalin, and the like why pick on anabolic steroids?

While this seems smarter and certainly more pragmatic than breast-beating and witch-hunting, I'm still waiting for the lab reports. No question that adolescents should be barred from steroid use, but what are the consequences for grown -- physically, at least -- men? Until we have those answers, we really are letting down Alex and Roger, demanding they thrill us by any means possible, then turning them in to the sheriff for the crime of getting caught.

Meanwhile, it feels like the pin-striped suits are slinking away without the media-mauling they deserve, much less real punishment. Maybe this is the chance for the sports media to make a comeback, avenge the loss, win one when it counts. While it might be hard to mount a war crimes charge against George W. Bush, what about a steroids trial? After all, he was managing partner of the Texas Rangers in the early 1990s when Jose Conseco, the guru and snitch of performance enhancing drugs, played for him and began sharing his needle.

So, George, what did you know and when did you know it?

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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