This is a great article. We now live in a performance enhanced society.
Bonds reflects a society looking for an edge
We need to start taking a look in the mirror about our unsatiable need to alter ourselves before making a scapegoat of the Giants slugger, who is widely said to have used steroids.
Kurt Streeter
Los Angeles Times
August 6, 2007
You're a hypocrite . . .
If you knock Barry Bonds and let your daughter sneak an Adderall to do better on her college entrance test, then you're a hypocrite.
If you knock Barry Bonds and filch one of your husband's Prozacs to mellow out for a job interview, then you're the same kind of hypocrite.
Truth is, if you knock Barry Bonds and slip behind the stands to chug a few Red Bulls before playing in the office softball game, then you're a hypocrite too.
A lesser hypocrite, perhaps. But a hypocrite.
Bonds, it is widely said, has used steroids. And steroids, his extremely vocal critics say, have given the Giants slugger an unfair edge that will soon leave him standing alone with the career home run record.
But honestly, would that make Barry Bonds any different than your cousin the violinist, who takes a beta-blocker to steady his hands before a concert? Or you on Viagra, when neither of you really needs drugs medically?
I'm with John Hoberman, a professor at the University of Texas in Austin, who has long studied the tormented relationship between drugs, society and sports.
Not just in baseball, or in the Tour de France, he says, but in society at large, we are on a mad sprint to bust past our normal limits. We're awash in the use of all kinds of performance enhancements -- some illegal, some not.
As long as we do that, Hoberman says, and we don't start taking a long look in the mirror about our unsatiable need to alter ourselves, we need to think hard about singling out Barry Bonds.
He's a scapegoat. I agree.
It's simply hypocritical.
For me, none of this is to excuse illicit drug use by athletes. I cringe at the shadow our drug-addled pros have cast, at the fact I can't tell my nephew Jack that I know his sports heroes are clean.
No, this is about us. Hypocrisy is inexcusable too.
It's one thing that we're already medicinal lemmings. We take way too many pills with the encouragement of doctors who are working under the spell of companies such as Pfizer. It's even worse that loads of us are gulping pills nobody with any medical authority signed off on.
Take a look at two popular medications: Ritalin and Adderall. They can give a distracted kid the focus of a Tibetan monk. Doctors prescribe them for kids with attention disorders. These days, though, they are often the drugs of choice for kids who don't have attention problems but are looking to ace their exams. They help students cram for hours. They make a full day of testing seem as if it lasted 30 minutes.
Let's say your daughter is cramming for her SAT. She gets her hands on some of her best friend's Adderall pills and takes the pills to boost performance. Well, her scores will be stacked against those from other kids across the nation, and she'll have an unfair advantage.
It won't be just an edge in a pro sport that only a few of us have any chance of playing. It will be a cheater's advantage in the race to get into a top college, which for millions of us is the key to a lifetime of success.
How many of these kids get caught? How many get vilified? How many of their parents turn a blind eye?
We're constantly redrawing the line on what constitutes normal behavior, aptitude, beauty and performance.
Used to be if you were shy you coped with it. Now a doctor prescribes a prescription -- and, as fast as you can swallow a tiny pill, you can't stop talking to strangers.
As a society, we're way too OK with being users. Abusers even. And our multimillionaire athletes, the ones we -- perhaps foolishly -- hold up as paragons of virtue simply because they can run and throw, are they supposed to be different?
Said Hoberman on the phone the other day: "You can't have an enormous development in performance enhancement in society in general and expect the sports world to be immune to it."
It's not only about pharmacy drugs. We want to be able to bash Bonds and head to a surgeon to get a new chin and new lips, so we can fake everyone into thinking we've slowed the march of time. We want to bash Bonds and then drive to a health-food store and load up on non-prescription pills that have us feeling as if we can walk through walls.
Watching Bonds get booed at Dodger Stadium last week, I began pondering options.
• We throw our hands in the air and legalize performance enhancers for the pros. We allow drugs up to a certain limit and hire platoons of doctors to keep the athletes from dosing themselves to death.
• Or we go the other way. We go after drug users in sports the way we'd go after robbers trying to get inside Fort Knox. We toss out sham drug-testing programs. We sample DNA. Year round, we give not only urine tests, but blood tests too.
Some of the smarter, wealthier athletes and their scheming doctors will try to stay one step ahead of us. So we drive a stake through their pocketbooks if they slip up. Get caught? You're done. Outta here. For good.
Trust me, with millions on the line, the more sophisticated users would think twice.
• No matter how we deal with big-time athletes, we turn to ourselves. Where we can test, we test. Particularly people whose jobs affect us all. We test the pilots. We test the muscle-bound cops who get so hopped up that they head into neighborhoods like rhinos, wanting to charge at anything that moves.
And where we can't test, or where we just can't stomach what this does to our freedoms, we start using some discipline , and getting some self-awareness.
Maybe we toss the Red Bull and talk with our kids before their next big tests. Maybe we ask ourselves why it's so important to make ourselves look 45 when we passed 45 two decades back.
Maybe we ask ourselves why we're so obsessed with athletes and drugs when we do some of the same things they do.
Then again, maybe we keep doing what we've been doing and fiddle around at the margins of change. That way we can keep filling the seats and buying the Dodger Dogs and feeling smug as we boo Barry Bonds, comfortable in our hypocrisy.
Think about it.
