by Matt Brown, Neirad Sports Editor
In the world of professional sports, which has been enhanced and forever changed by our modern age of social media, a handcuffing question has been raised by many: is it a professional athlete’s obligation to his or her fans to be a role model?
Answers to the question are diverse, and perhaps the most interesting of answers come from athletes themselves. In an ad campaign, former NBA All Star Charles Barkley (pictured above) stared into a camera and said, “I am not paid to be a role model. I am paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court.”
But professional athletes are often not just simply role models to kids. To many they are gods, immortals sitting upon a Mount Olympus comprised of their salaries, so great that anything but extraordinary is disappointing. The world of sports is filled with comparisons. Endless towers of statistics are used to measure and analyze every facet of every player’s game, all dwindling down to the decision of who is the best. Second best means nothing to any fan or history book. The fear of being second best and desire to be the best will forever spawn a particular group of people: cheaters.
Baseball is a game particularly ruled by statistics and comparisons; however, it is also particularly plagued by Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED’s). Recently, San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera was suspended 50 games for banned substance use. Pitcher Bartolo Colon of the Oakland Athletics was dealt the same punishment for a similar offense. Both players, although at different times, were once New York Yankees. In 2009 the Yankees current 3rd baseman Alex Rodriguez admitted to using steroids when he was a member of the Texas Rangers. Former All Star Yankee pitcher Andy Pettitte admitted to using Human Growth Hormone (HGH), and when his fellow All Star Yankee hurler Roger Clemens told Congress he never used PED’s, the Feds launched a perjury investigation. Famous sluggers Sammie Sosa of the Cubs and Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants both were accused of using steroids in their hunts for jacking homers.
When you look at each case, they are all unique. Roger Clemens, although never proven guilty, seemed to have used the drugs simply to gain and maintain a competitive edge, or simply to cheat. His friend Andy Pettitte, claims he was introduced to the drug by Clemens when he was hurt, and the chance to heal twice as fast and return to the mound perhaps clogged Pettitte’s judgment skills.
Alex Rodriguez is an enigma in many ways, but juvenilely simple in others. While the rest of the world looked at his potential $275 million dollar contracts as a Powerball winning, he looked at it as putting 275 million bricks of expectations on his back, expectations that he didn’t believe he could reach without PED’s.
Cabrera and Colon, both saw their careers quickly declining and turned to the banned substances as a way of sustaining their place as relevant in the baseball world. The drugs could not save Colon, but rejuvenated Cabrera to an astounding .342 batting average only to be cut off by his suspension.
To say that illegal or banned substance use is just rampant in baseball is naïve. The exponential growth of player size in the NFL is far too rapid to consider it simply evolution. And NBA stars like Kobe Bryant and Andrew Bynum (along with golfer Tiger Woods) traveling to Germany to receive “platelet rich plasma therapy” could raise an eyebrow or two because two seconds of Googling proved that they skipped over domestic clinics that offer the therapy in New York City, Kansas City, and Florida.
In every sport, fans expect to see a level of excellence. If something has been done before, we do not want to see it twice, we want to see it topped. We do not want to see players aging and declining, we want to see them maintaining and improving. The pressure on players is not to be good, but to be better than anyone has ever been. Pressure mounts as dollar signs next to player names mount as well, which perhaps explains the link between the New York Yankees, who boast the highest payroll in sports, and the teams laundry list of alleged steroid users.
Most recently, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency stripped Lance Armstrong of his Tour De France victories. His seven victories, all of which came consecutively, after surviving testicular cancer. In his sport of road cycling, performance enhancing drugs are almost as common as the bikes the athletes ride on. Armstrong simply gave sports fans what they desperately desire: persistence, heart, hard work, and triumph on a level that they had never seen. The man used his platform as an athlete to raise millions of dollars for cancer research through his Livestrong campaign, deeming him in my book, doping and all, a darn good person.
I propose, that perhaps on just special occasions, that instead of assassinating the character of the next alleged cheaters, that you put society as a whole into question. For in a world where we constantly raise the bar on what we expect our professional athletes should be able to do, is it not hypocritical to despise the athletes that utilized ways to raise the bar of what they physically could do? Maybe your favorite player owes it to you not to cheat, but maybe they owe it to you to push themselves as far as any human can go. At the very least, the next time a cheater falls to the depths of the Hall of Shame, remember, they did it for you.
