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(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Turning to the Needle
To Keep Pace


[T]he mother of all steroids exposes, the piece that should have alarmed America and told us where all of this steroid mess was headed long ago...ran in late October 1988. It caused quite a stir in my college locker room, and I've never forgotten the story. I'm not sure anyone else in America read it. It was hidden in an obscure sports magazine called Sports Illustrated; maybe you've heard of it.

The piece might have been 8,000 words, and it foreshadowed absolutely everything that is going on today.

For the past year, I've sporadically tried to locate the piece on the Internet. You can find the sidebars to the main story on Lexis.com, but you can't find the main story. Monday, I called the author, Rick Telander, now a sports columnist with the Chicago Sun-Times and a noted author. He faxed me a hard copy of the story, and he shares my disbelief at the way American sports fans and some journalists pretend like the steroid crisis is new.

"It's all in there," Telander told me. "There's nothing new. Not one iota. I get really frustrated when people say sportswriters buried their heads about steroids."

It's the same frustration I feel when sportswriters try to reduce the steroids crisis to Barry Bonds and home runs. It's juvenile and highly unfair. It avoids an obvious reality that a young sportswriting friend, Bomani Jones, summarized perfectly: "Baseball corrupted Barry Bonds more than Bonds corrupted baseball."

All of our athletic steroid users are victims, even and especially Bonds. They're victims of America's obsession, glorification and money-injection of sports.

Telander exposed this beautifully in 1988 when he befriended a University of South Carolina football player, Tommy Chaikin, and persuaded him to tell his steroid story. It's as fine a piece of journalism as you'll find. It's more relevant today than it was when it was written.

Chaikin told absolutely everything about his steroid abuse and his teammates. He estimated that half of the Gamecocks' 100 players used or tried steroids. I'm going to repeat a passage from the article that is likely to make some of you very uncomfortable. But it's the passage that sparked the most discussion in my Ball State football locker room, and it's a truth about the steroid controversy that most people are reluctant to address. I'm not repeating this passage out of some form of perverse delight. I'm repeating it because we have to understand everyone's motivations if we're ever going to come close to getting a handle on this problem.

Here's what Chaikin said in 1988 that no one in authority dealt with then or now:

"Another thing that had gotten to me was trying to compete with the black guys. I hadn't played against many blacks, and they intimidated me with their strength and speed. I'd say all but a couple of the guys on my team who used steroids were white, and the reason they did was to keep up with the other guys on steroids and with black athletes."

That passage set off great debate in my Ball State locker room, because the sentiment rang true in our environment, too.

I've always believed that German Olympic athletes turned to science after Hitler was embarrassed by Jesse Owens and Co. American Olympians turned to science to keep pace with the foreign athletes who were using. My belief is that in the last 20 years of college football, black players turned to steroids to keep pace with the steroid users.

This is a verifiable fact: My football coaches certainly favored the steroid users over the nonusers. The pressure to use was immense. Telander wrote a powerful piece in what was then the most influential sports publication on the abuse of steroids by college athletes, and not one of my coaches chose to address the topic with our team. Steroid use was the white elephant in the room that we were supposed to ignore.

We're still ignoring it. We've simplified the discussion and resorted to labeling all of the users as dirty, nasty, immoral cheaters because that makes it easier to go after Bonds and protect the sanctity of a meaningless record.

I'll be honest. Some of the guys who used steroids when I was playing football were/are some of my best friends. Good guys. Victims of college sports becoming big business. Victims of their desire to compete at the highest levels. Victims of the leadership failure of the men in authority over them. Victims of our collective sports obsession. No different from Barry Bonds. No different from all the athletes getting busted today.

According to the people leading the Bonds-steroids witch hunt, Barry watched sportswriters go nuts over Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's 1998 home-run chase, and Barry turned to the needle to keep pace.

The indifference to Telander's 1988 masterpiece laid the foundation for where we are today.

If you want to get rid of performance-enhancing drugs in team sports, start punishing the team owners, coaches, universities and high schools that financially benefit from steroid abuse. Test the college athletes regularly and fine the coaches and strip the schools of scholarships when the players turn up dirty. Test the pro athletes regularly and fine the coaches and owners and strip the teams of roster spots when the players turn up dirty. Of course, you can still punish the players, too.

Five years of this kind of policing, and NFL linemen will go back to weighing 260 pounds, and recovery from serious knee injuries will take nine months to a year again.

But right now there is no real motivation to clean up the athletes. The leagues and colleges are making way too much money. Sports fans don't really care. Sportswriters only care because it's a tool to carry out their vendetta against Bonds.



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