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

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

I don't remember such a publishing flood of bad news sports books, at least not during a flood of really bad news in the supposedly real world of politics, wars, and finance. Why beat up on the mendacity of our games? Aren't they our dream world, a distraction from the deadlier contact contests? Or is the message from the sports media meant to be apocalyptic: the nation and its pastime have struck out for good?

All the books about the treachery of elected officials, financial operators, and juicing jocks constitute a literature of betrayal. From the Bush leagues to the major leagues, the narratives roll out about how our role models in pin-striped suits or pin-striped uniforms consciously lied to us for their own advantage. In turn, the beleaguered heavy hitters also claim betrayal, especially by the media: Hadn't they been doing what was wanted, what was needed? Why are we picking on them now?

The treachery of the suits is certainly time-honored: Americans have traditionally used cynicism toward pols as an excuse not to become aggressively involved in civic life, and we expect businesspeople to cheat. That's why we try to bet along with them. We think they've rigged the game and we want in. When they do just that, however, and we lose, as now, we're outraged.

On the other hand, we generally believe in our teams and our sports heroes for good reason; our goals are the same -- to win. That's what we're rooting for, isn't it? That's why "Say it ain't so, Joe," the apocryphal wail of a small boy to an alleged Black Sox fixer, has resonance. Winning is the only thing. Just do it. So why should we care so much when the players go to injectable extremes to do just that? After all, they do it for us, too. Dontcha like home runs?

'Roid Outrage

When it comes to Wall Street and Washington, the anger is clearly real -- and widespread. When it comes to baseball, the larger question may be whether the fans really care in the first place. For all the yammering on talk radio, in whatever newspaper columns are left, and in the steroidal spate of recent books I've read so you won't have to, there doesn't seem to be even a distant rumble of mass boycotts, sponsor pull-outs, or parents forcing kids to turn in their bats for violins.

Could all this rage over 'roid rage be little more than the revenge of the nerd media? Are its practitioners so ashamed of having blown the only truly big sports story of their generation that they have now turned viciously on their former heroes? It's the mirror-image of the story about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that weren't there. The steroids were right in front of their lying eyes, but they were in denial -- and in the tank.

Despite the current rash of weak mea culpas, the media failure on the story of steroid use in baseball is inexcusable because honest stories were being written -- and ignored. In the 1980s,Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post and others were already pointing fingers at the juicers.

In 1995, Bob Nightengale, then with the Los Angeles Times, quoted general managers saying that steroids were becoming part of the game. In 1998, Steve Wilstein of the Associated Press wrote about observing a bottle of androstenedione in slugger Mark McGwire's locker. He was assailed by many of his colleagues as a snoop.

In 2002, Ken Caminiti, the National League's 1996 most valuable player, admitted that he had regularly used steroids. He died two years later. In Editor & Publisher, Joe Strupp wrote:

"But instead of sparking a wave of follow-up articles or investigations to ferret out the details of steroid use in baseball -- who was using it, where it came from, what it did to the body -- sportswriters essentially left the story alone."

They left it alone not out of laziness or stupidity, but rather in the sweet moral corruption of love. Perhaps even more than entertainment and political writers, perhaps even more than hardcore fans, sportswriters adore the events themselves and the heady, faux-manly access to the subjects and the locker rooms. Love wants to be blind. As Murray Chass, then of the New York Times told Editor and Publisher, "I'm not sure that you want to spend every day being suspicious of someone. It might be the journalistic thing to do. But it is not fun."

Fun was the home-run-happy summer of 1998. Remember that moment when the St. Louis slugger with Popeye's forearms, Mark McGwire, andro'ed us out of a national depression over Bill's stain on Monica's blue dress? (Ah, for the dreamy days when McGwire, with Sammy Sosa close behind, was breaking Yankee interloper Roger Maris's record of 61 homers, and thus refurbishing the legend of Babe Ruth.)

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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