Bonds, Bones, Byrd - What's the Big Deal?

I tie this debacle into the Internet and technology, but mostly this post is a rant.

"Mitchell Report List" is one of dozens of headlines with the same news.

Sixty Major League baseball players have either used or possessed steroids, twenty four were cited for "Alleged Internet Purchases of Performance Enhancing Substances By Players in Major League Baseball."

There was surprisingly little overlap between the two lists.

Fox News ("Bonds, Clemens, Tejada Named in Mitchell Report") gave a link to
"REPORT TO THE COMMISSIONER OF BASEBALL
OF AN INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION INTO
THE ILLEGAL USE OF STEROIDS AND OTHER
PERFORMANCE ENHANCING SUBSTANCES
BY PLAYERS IN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL"

Why All This Fuss?

Why focus on steroids? Today's athlete and role model has a impressive menu of performance-enhancing drugs to choose from.

• Human Growth Hormones
  • Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hCG)
  • Luteinizing Hormone (LH)
  • Human Growth Hormone (hGH)
  • Insulin-Like Growth Factor (IGF-1)
  • Insulin
• Drugs to Increasing Oxygen in Tissues
  • Protein Hormones
  • Artificial Oxygen Carriers
  • Blood Doping (A charming process of pumping whole blood into a fully-loaded "athlete"
• Masking Pain
  • Narcotics (like morphine, methadone and heroin - groovy!)
  • Protein Hormones
  • Cortisone
  • Local Anesthetics

With athletes flying high and feeling no pain, it seems to me that steroid abuse may not be the sports world's top drug problem.

Is anyone really surprised?

Records get broken: but the spectacular performance - and physiques - of contemporary athletes makes more sense, when you realize that many of them were conditioned, pumped up, and bombed out of their gourd when they did their superman routines.

It seems that it takes more than Gatorade and better bats to live up to today's athletic standards.

This isn't a drug problem: It's a culture problem First, there's an 'ethics-be-damned,' 'win at any cost,' attitude that's unhealthy on the field, and off.

Remember, about two years ago, when a half-dozen football players whizzed on someone's lawn in an eastern suburb of Minneapolis? Probably not.

In a way, the Vikings party wasn't such a big deal. Seventeen football players rented two charter boats on Lake Minnetonka and shipped prostitutes up from Florida, but not all of the sports figures performed sex acts in front of the boats' crews. And, presumably, not all were involved in spreading condoms, sex toys, and urine on the lawns of people living near the lake.

Hey, "boys will be boys," right? Wrong, but it's going to take an enormous change in many people's attitudes to hold "stars" to the same standards that we follow.

I think the big question is:

Why are these doped-up doofuses still regarded as "roll models?"

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Back to something interesting.

Thanks to the Internet, we can read the Mitchell Report ourselves, instead of depending on what some sequence of reporters and editors decided to publish.

And, you think high-flying/high-living athletes are something? You ain't seen nuthin' yet. Ten years or so from now, some report may "reveal" that the top-performing athletes in some sport had a little help:

• Remote-control injectors inside their chests, that shoot game-appropriate drugs directly into their bloodstream when the coach thinks they need a little boost
• Little, tiny, boxes in their heads, connected to their limbic system, dentate gyrus, nucleus accumbens, and anything else it takes to make them enjoy the sensation of getting bones broken.
• Titanium splints, or something of that sort, strung along their bones so that, even if a bone breaks, they can stay in the game

Far fetched? Considering what these sports dudes and their handlers are willing to do today, I'm not so sure.

Okay. The rant is over now.