Monthly Archives: July 2013

Alex Rodriguez, Lance Armstrong, Major League Baseball, NBA, NFL, PEDs, Ryan Braun

The Modern Arrogance of PEDs

As a society, it feels like we are always operating under the assumption that modernity is good, that being a part of a modern era means that we are advancing. Perhaps it is experience gained as we age, or perhaps it is because of all the technological and communication advancements made make us just feel so efficient, so intelligent, so very advanced as people.
Or perhaps it is just arrogance.
We find value in purpose if we convince ourselves that we are “better” people than those who came before us, those insufferable rubes we call our ancestors.
Just look at us now, with our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds, our Vine videos. We think we’re pretty special, taking pictures of our food with camera filters. We think people care to know what we think of the latest scandal in 140 characters or less.
But we’ve missed the point of the social media medium. It is not the technology that is too blame, instead it is how we use it. Communication and connection were made easier by these software applications – how we implement them is another manner entirely.
What does this have to do with sports, you might be wondering?
Really, it has everything to do with sports, especially right now, as the sports world as we know it sits bathing in performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). Almost daily, another user is identified, another lab busted, another player suspended or under suspicion of use.
Are all of these men and women, accused or proven guilty one and the same? Most assuredly not. Alex Rodriguez, Lance Armstrong and Ryan Braun are in a different world from the junior tennis player who took the wrong over the counter medication and tested positive.
We should all fear the kind of athlete, like Braun or Armstrong, who not only seeks to gain these advantages, but maliciously works to destroy those who stand in their path.
This is simply modern arrogance transferred into sports. We are scrambling to justify players using PEDs with a litany of fun excuses: hey, it’s just part of the culture of sports now; it’s really not that bad; does it matter if everyone is doing it; if they want to risk their health for my entertainment, who cares?
Rationalizing the use of PEDs in this manner is almost adolescent in nature, which is to say, does not make us very advanced.
Those excuses sound like lectures parents dole out on their kids during teenage years: if everyone was jumping off a bridge, would you? What does it matter if my friends Johnny and Tommy are doing it as long as I am not? Hey, it’s just what the kids do now.
So many of us have grown weary of this issue, the collective groan could be heard on the moon every time another story breaks.
Speaking of the moon, how would we feel if we heard Neil Armstrong had taken something that enhanced his ability to get to, and walk on, the moon? Cheapened a little? Like maybe we believed in something that wasn’t entirely real? Here is a landmark in the accomplishments of man, a moment that people of every race, faith and stature can point to and say, “humans can do anything.”
With the asterisk: as long as we take something to enhance our performance.
Look, I get it. It’s a tired and seedy story. It’s a slippery slope. It’s an argument we’ve all had in offices, living rooms, sports bars across the nation. What defines the line? Wouldn’t any drink that isn’t water that replenishes nutrients faster be categorized as a performance enhancer? Are all supplements bad?
There is most definitely no easy answer. No real, concrete line. How do we justify taking prescription drugs or medicines that improve your health when sick, physically or mentally, but stand on a bully pulpit when it comes to PEDs?
After all, those drugs allow you to perform your job better and possibly get a raise. They hide your mental or physical flaws from the outside world, giving off a false image.
The only response I can offer is this: there is a big difference between taking those kinds of drugs, which allow you to get back on a level that everyone else is on, and PEDs. If you are depressed, for example, not everyone around you is. A drug that helps level out the chemicals in your brain to a normal range simply put you back on par and allow you to live a life close to what many others enjoy.
They do not falsify your accomplishments and put you above the rest of your peers who are not doing the same things.
But I suppose, just ask yourself, do you feel something isn’t right about drinking Gatorade? About taking daily vitamins? Probably not.
Look, I take supplements. Just not the ones that improve hand-eye coordination, increase my muscle mass considerably and allow me to recover faster than people who aren’t taking them. Whether or not you’re just trying to get back out there and you owe it to the team, using HGH does still imply you are gaining an edge. You can call it speeding up your recovery, if it helps you convince yourself you weren’t looking to cheat – but it is still an edge over every other injured player who isn’t using it.
And there’s the rub, really. This is why we call something cheating: doing something that someone else in a similar position is not. It’s not so much about the morality of right and wrong, we blur those lines all the time.
Really, this is another mixture of PEDs and our society. We distinguish all the time what we will tolerate and what we won’t.
Barry Bonds was a noted jerk, as now is Braun and Rodriguez. However, guys like Derek Jeter use “good” steroids like cortisone to recover and we cheer their gutsiness. David Ortiz was caught with a positive test, and we just smiled. He’s Big Papi, so he’s cool. And I’m sure it was just for a little while to recover from something.
And this says a lot about our society, too. What kind of person you are, or portray yourself to be, will largely determine how willingly we accept or forgive you for a future issue. Do what we expect, based on what we know, and we will react accordingly.
This war, this battle in sports on drugs and PEDs, is driven by the media, and by people like me, too. Sons of old school fathers, fathers to young athletes. The last thing I want my three sons and daughter doing is taking something that enhances their performance to gain an edge on somebody else.
Remember the Ice Cube movie, “Friday”? (Oh yes, I’m going there.) Ice Cube is getting ready to fight the dude who played Zeus in “No Holds Barred” and wants to grab his gun. His father begs him to do it without the aid of a weapon, outside his fists.
I’ll give you another example, from an episode of the last season of “Boy Meets World” (yes, I’m going there, too). Cory and Topanga are just married and living in a dump. The pipes are spouting brown water, the place should be condemned and there’s a screaming baby in the apartment next to them.
They beg his parents for a loan to buy their dream house. Cory’s dad firmly says no, with little explanation of why they won’t. Later, Cory fixes the pipes himself (without deer antler spray), takes a clear glass of water from the faucet and demands his father drink it.
Finally, Cory gets it. It’s not that they couldn’t help – or did not want to. But if they would have, it would have robbed them of something that can’t be completely explained, that sense of accomplishing it on your own, of figuring it out, or doing it.
My argument against using PEDs and my reasons for continuing to wish for a cleaner sports world cannot be explained much better than that, with a hokey reference to a TGIF show and a the only semi-serious part of a comedy starring Ice Cube and Zeus.
Call me self-righteous and tell me I am naïve. Tell me I need to get with the times and just accept where the world is now, that all the athletes do it and have been for 20 years. Call them gentleman’s rules, unwritten guidelines, or just fair play.
Without that, what are we doing this for anyway? Money? Fame? Glory?
If that truly is the case, then we are far from advancing our society and culture.
Modernity is a myth for us, or at least it will continue to be, until we actually fix the faucet ourselves.

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belief, children, family, travel baseball

The Value of Maybe

This Sunday will officially end another season, another year, really, of travel baseball.

Some cannot – and do not – understand why we do it, my wife and I. Why would we spend so much of our hard earned money on team fees, equipment, uniforms, hotels, gas, lessons? Why would we spend so much of our most precious commodity – that of time – doing this?

After all, our oldest son is 11. One of hundreds of thousands of boys playing baseball, of thousands playing this thing called travel ball. We cannot possibly believe he will make it big, can we? We cannot actually believe he’ll get a college scholarship and advance to the MLB draft, right? We can’t be that naive.

The questions never stop, really. From family, from friends, from co-workers. What we will do with our other three children when they say they want to do it, or something that conflicts? How do you take vacations? Don’t the other kids hate it?

Sometimes, we don’t have the answers, because, well, we don’t.

Honestly, we don’t know what the future holds. What we know – all we know, really – is what we value and what we believe.

We believe in our children. We’re not irrational, mind you. We’re aware of each of their areas of weakness, where they can improve and we work on it, tirelessly.

Some days, we’re more successful than others. Other days, two are pouting, one has melted down completely into a screaming banshee from some distant planet and another looks as though they haven’t ever been shown how to take a bath, clothe themselves or comb their hair.

It’s chaotic, it’s beautiful, it’s our life.

Right now, we have a son who has a gift and a passion for the sport of baseball. We’re following his lead, really. He has stated his goals and works hard at honing his skills. He lives it and breathes it.

And he dominates our schedule. Tournaments in other states, for three or four days at a time. We’ve seen the sun come up on the way to the baseball fields and been there long after it’s gone down. Our summers are blur of dirt, cheering, consoling, feeding snacks, sunscreen, sweat and a van full of passed out, dirty kids on a late Sunday afternoon.

Will we do it for the other kids? Whether it be gymnastics, soccer, basketball, chess, dance, theater or macaroni performance art, yes, we will.

And we’ll buy the Macaroni Performance Art team gear, to boot.

As so many know, it’s just what you do. What else are you going to do? Sit around? Nah, I can do that when I’m 50.

It’s not always easy. Nights of drop off and pickup, coordinating schedules, still in my business casual from work at 10:30pm. Eating dinner or lunch at weird hours. One heading to gymnastics, another to basketball, another a hitting lesson. Feeling guilty again asking for help from our family, another parent on  the team.

Yet even when weary, we find we would not change it. Our children are organized, responsible. They support each other, they get their chores done. They excel in school.

Could this backfire? Maybe. I don’t know.

But what I do know is that we’ll never tell them they cannot do something. Our job is to not only keep them safe and make them good-natured, productive members of society, but to subtly nudge them to attempt to be great.

We don’t want them settling for something, anything, when they are capable of more. Whatever they chose will be fine, as long as it was a choice. It has to be what they want. This is how, we’re convinced, they can do their part to live differently, to change the world in their special way, with whatever gifts have been given to them.

Rarely do I write solely about my family. I’ll have a hard time publishing this post, mainly because I always thought of pieces like this a “Come Blow Your (Own) Horn” moment. But that’s not my intention.

We’re not perfect, far from it, in fact. All any of us can really do in life is follow a combination of heart, instinct, some kind of faith or belief (in something) and a sense of right or wrong. The rest will figure itself out.

Do I know if this world of travel baseball is right? How can I? It feels like it. Do I know if we’re raising our children to actually do what we want, which is to follow their passions? It feels like it. And that’s life, really, just a bunch of moments built on feeling something.

Emotion is what gives life, well, life.

So I’ll take every dirt angel in the summer, every night spent washing a uniform, every time we’re squeezing in a movie or a family dinner that actually takes place at our kitchen table. I’ll take every road trip, every moment with the iPod plugged in and the whole family – including the 21 month old – singing “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.”

Our mini-van turns into a recording studio, a little traveling band: Mom, Dad, three boys and a girl. The lyrics to our song of life are noisy gyms, cracking baseball bats, football pads colliding, paintbrushes dipping into cups, toys strewn from one floor to the next, barking dogs, dirty dishes, sidewalk chalk, tears, laughter, and more laughter.

This is our life. And I wouldn’t want to miss it.

Right now, it’s travel baseball. In five years, it could be something else. Whatever it is, it will keep our family tight-knit, supportive and growing as individuals, and as a family.

My wife and I found our purpose, and it wasn’t for a job, a career or paying bills. It was to pour every ounce of what we have into the children that a higher power entrusted in our care.

We can’t know if we’re doing it the right way or the wrong way. We can only go on feeling it out as we go.

Maybe they’ll change the world, in their own way.

And maybe is worth everything.

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Dallas Mavericks, Dwight Howard, Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers, NBA, NBA Free Agency

The Plight of Dwight


If there were a soundtrack to the life of Dwight Howard, these past two years would simply feature Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” being played on a continuous loop.
At least that’s the song I’d pick for him, because to watch Howard agonize over where he plays professional basketball, it requires a heavy dose of the reality elixir being administered in high dosage – to himself.
If we thought LeBron James was bad, if we despised the posturing, self-aggrandizing and egocentric ways of 2010’s “The Decision” – then what do we make of this, the Indecision?
You cannot even put a year stamp on it, because it’s spanned two years now – and who knows if it will truly end when Dwight picks a place to play.
Being disgusted by the nerve of professional athletes as they cleverly maneuver from Point A to Point B kind of comes with the territory. Every few years, with someone like James, or Alex Rodriguez, it reaches new heights among sports fandom. We gripe, complain, let out our angst, burn some jerseys and then move on.
But what happens when the athlete – in this case, Dwight Howard – really seems tormented by such decisions? It’s like Howard didn’t get the memo. He’s supposed to be running this joke of a process. Yet Howard seems to be earnestly unaware of how preposterous this charade has become.
Perhaps, as was pointed out the other day by another talking head on the radio, Howard truly doesn’t know what he wants because it changes constantly. And this could be due to not going to college, as was suggested. It could be that by never being in charge of his direction at the age of 18 and selecting where he wanted to go, he’s always had this lingering thought in the back of his mind that other people held the cards.
So you didn’t go to college, Dwight? Well, that too, was your decision. Blaming others is a weak façade, especially in the world of professional sports – no matter if it works or not.
But this is what Howard believes: that currently, this free agency period is his first chance to control what he wants to do.
Problem is, he doesn’t know what he wants. Putting deadlines of making a decision today won’t change that.
What’s weird is how Howard reacts and handles his business after a decision is made. It’s been revealed he still talks with Stan Van Gundy – even after that awkward moment when everyone knew Dwight had told Magic management to let SVG go. He wants to be legendary, to be remembered in the lineage of NBA bigs, but somehow doesn’t seem the connection with the Lakers and oh, Wilt, Kareem and Shaq. Instead, he’s leaning towards Houston, Golden State and Dallas.
Whatever.
There was a time this drama would captivate us, now it feels like updates on Howard are force fed, and they are wildly uncomfortable for everyone, from the people doing the reporting, to those analyzing on radio and TV, to basketball fans that must be in the know, even if they don’t really want to know.
Of all people, Kobe Bryant probably said it best. It’s been reported that during the Lakers pitch to Howard earlier this week, Bryant looked Dwight in the eyes and told him to “put some roots down.” In other words, just make up your mind, man. At this point, we’ve forgotten whether or not we care – just that we want some finality to it.
Maybe Brett Favre changed that for us. Or LeBron. Or the unending coverage. Or a combination of all the above, plus other events. Either way, we’ve become intolerant and resistant to the manufactured drama.
NBA free agency has always been this weird process that sits outside of what is normal in sports or the world. The circus comes to town, everyone loses their mind like they are drunk at a friend’s wedding, making promises they can’t keep about staying in touch.
There are recruiting calls from those loyal to a franchise, packaged presentations with videos, billboards, fake jerseys, Pat Riley tossing down a bag full of rings. Franchises in Texas and Florida always pull out the “no state income tax” card, because stuff like that matters to someone earning $16 million a year. Weather, wives, schools for their children, the possibility of a player becoming a “global brand.”
It’s nonsense. It works. It’s part of it, yet it’s also out of control.
Americans already live in a world of excess compared to the rest of the globe, a country obsessed with gadgets, gossip and material goods. Oh, and money. So it says quite a bit that we, as a collective whole, feel disgusted over a situation like Dwight Howard’s free agency. The disgusting have become the disgusted.
And for what, really? A relatively young center with lots of miles on the tires, with a bad back and a fragile ego who’s never won anything other than individual awards, considered the best at his position during a period of the game when that position happens to be at its weakest? If I were the Lakers, I would have rethought the billboards and banners based on how the season played out.
If this feels like an attack, well, it probably is. Mainly because Dwight Howard is the epitome of an ego run amuck. At least Allen Iverson kept his cornrows and never changed a bit. We knew what was going to happen. In fact, most players are who they are.
Howard, however, came into the league sporting his religious background and a massive smile. He spoke like a cross of the religious Baldwin brother and Champ Kind. He was all about having fun on the court. The east coast home of Mickey Mouse seemed a perfect and wholesome place for Howard.
Somewhere along the way, Howard looked around and thought he was just as good and marketable as all these other fools. He deserved rings and love. Neither came in Orlando. Not much in of either in L.A. My assumption is he won’t find much in the next city as well, until he can forget about what everyone thinks and just becomes happy with being Dwight Howard.
And working on his offensive game more than five feet from the basket, but I digress.
The underlying fear of all this is that even once Howard picks a place, puts down some roots, they will be soft roots. What happens when he gets injured? If the media turns on him a bit? If the team doesn’t perform up to expectations? Howard has spent so much time pointing fingers at everyone else the past few years, there’s no one left to point to.
Except maybe if he found a mirror.
Notice how little of this has to do with money? It’s always been about conduct unbecoming. We’ll forgive a lot and forget a lot as Americans, as sports fans. Just don’t whittle away our patience for your plight.
But Howard has reached that point, probably long ago. We don’t care, Dwight. And it seems the people who play with you and that are pursuing you are growing weary to this saga as well.
If any redemption can be found, this is the recommendation: decide. Stick and stay. Go away from our public stream of conscious. Let some other jerk take the spotlight. Let us look at a stat box next March and say, “D12 had 34 and 18 again last night? Dang.”
For now, just go sell your crazy somewhere else. We’re all stocked up here.
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