A Dopey Scandal -- Drug Use Is Ignored When Celebrities Do It!

A Dopey Scandal

Please excuse me while I reach for the smelling salts. The news that some professional baseball players may be using steroids is beginning to sink in and the shock is staggering. Congress is even going to hold a hearing. Imagine, young men making what is equivalent to the GDP of a small African nation employing drugs to enhance their performance. What next, news that politicians can be influenced by campaign contributions or that some men of the cloth have weird sexual predilections?

The steroid news came recently via a mea culpa by ex-major leaguer Ken Caminiti in SportsIllustrated. He claimed to have been among perhaps half his fellow players who juiced up on steroids. Now out of baseball and having been treated for substance abuse, the ex-all-star third baseman waffled slightly in later interviews regarding the percentage of abusers, but the story has resonated throughout the big-time sports world, where reporters and commentators have gasped at the possibility that the recent spate of home run records and zillion-m.p.h. fast balls might be chemically supercharged.

To which I say, perish the thought. Not the idea of steroid use, but rather the resulting hysteria and frontal-lobe-massaging by the media gurus.

Some of our boys and girls loading up in the same gonzo compounds that turned the East German women's Olympic team into babes who could body-slam Hulk Hogan? What a shock!

Sad but true, we are a chemically motivated society. We've got a folk hero on a U.S. postage stamp who was so ripped on drugs that he couldn't find his own bathroom. We loved him. He was our "King." His name was Elvis Presley. One of our most beloved presidents allegedly kept his bad back at bay thanks to amphetamine ("vitamin") injections from a New York celebrity doctor, Max Jacobson ("Dr. Feelgood"). His name was John F. Kennedy.

We still venerate such legendary performers as Judy Garland, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Robert Downey Jr. and MTV's own Ozzy Osbourne, plus scores of other entertainers who spent most of their adult lives blasted on booze and enough illegal junk drugs to support the entire Colombian economy. One of our greatest authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, fell victim to Demon Run during a period when I recall it was against the law to consume alcoholic beverages.

Imagine the futility in trying to catalogue all the athletes, celebrities and venerated characters who have violated good sense and the law while overdosing, overdrinking and generally behaving like frat boys on Spring break.

And now we swoon over the thought that some baseball players are bulking up on steroids -- which, by the way, aren't even illegal according to the owners and players' union, which together run this sport/business. Let me see now, wasn't the game energized by the epic home-run duel between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa a few seasons back? Is not Barry Bonds' current bashing of 400-foot boomers the stuff of headlines? Do the thousands of fans who warm the seats care if their hero juices up before the game? (Which, by the way, he denies.) Or would they rather watch skinny shortstops decide the games with hinky Texas Leaguers and sacrifice bunts?

And, yes, I believe there are several pitchers in the Hall of Fame who made their living with the dreaded spit-ball, a technique as illegal in baseball as the double-dribble in basketball and a chop-block in football.

Harsh fact: Big league sports is not contract bridge. Men (and woman) will take the highest risks, legal and illegal, to play at the top level. Why? Because the rewards are enormous and the tolerance of the bread-and-circus throngs is limitless as long as victory is in sight. Couple that with careers generally lasting little more than a decade in the big leagues and only trouble awaits.

The use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs is now common even at the high school level, and as long as society remains electrified and energized by their surrogate heroes on the fields of play, the juice will flow. Major league baseball ain't co-ed softball on the Harvard Yard and for the media (the same ones who slavishly celebrate athletic performance) to suffer palpitations over steroids in baseball borders on the ludicrous.

You want to pay kids million of dollars a year to win and not expect abuses? Can we expect them to behave any differently from rock stars, movie actors, artists and hotshot entrepreneurs who are lavished with money and fame practically before they can vote? This is a youth-obsessed culture that winks at drug use and slobbers openly over celebrities of every kind. Win baby, win. You want pure, unsullied sportsmanship? Try croquet or backgammon. At least until professional leagues are formed.

Mr. Yates is editor-at-large of Car and Driver magazine.

Updated June 24, 2002