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Please Stop Lying, Roger Goodell: Steroids, Concussions and the NFL

Sports Do Not Build Character...They Reveal It --John Wooden

If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough. – Unnamed baseball player

National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell is concerned about concussions, and to try to curb them he has been fining player for violent hits on the field. This makes sense not only for the health of retired players, but also for the long-term economic interest of the sport. Football came close to being banned once in the history of this nation. In a country of overprotective mothers, Goodell has to be seen doing something today to keep football as America’s new favorite sports pastime, or watch it possibly get played on barges tomorrow.

Yet, I do not believe our NFL Commissioner is being completely honest. In his effort to round up the usual suspects to keep this problem in check, one culprit is noticeably absent, the one that would be number one on the most wanted list if everyone was honest, steroids, HGH and other bodybuilding drugs. Add thirty or forty pounds of muscle, speed a player up, and common sense would tell you that these performance enhancing products are a major factor in severe head trauma. Yet, no official is going to admit that his sport is dirty and possibly invite Congressional oversight, smaller crowds, lower television ratings, and less merchandise being sold. Better to pretend like nothing is wrong and hope there is not a Jose Canseco in shoulder pads out there.

Yet, I don’t blame Goodell for trying a blind eye to the problem. Sportswriters and other sports networks have just as much blood on their hands. Much like Captain Renault in Casablanca who is “shocked, to find that gambling is going on” at Rick’s, as the croupier hands him his winnings in chips, sportswriters were shocked, shocked to discover that the baseball players they were covering were doing steroids. All of a sudden sure first ballot Hall-of-Framers like Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens became question marks. When banjo hitting middle infielders started clobbering the ball, sportswriters pumped out a series of articles attributing the increased output to a juiced up baseball, a downturn in pitching, a smaller strike zone, or that it rained on Thursday. At the same time, on the same newsstands, were ballplayers on the covers of bodybuilding magazines. These were the same bodies that these shocked sportswriters saw in the clubhouses. Skinny young men that they had interviewed early in their careers now looked like human bobble heads, or that they should be floating above the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. It could be claimed that journalists thought these athletes were just hitting the weights for the first time. The problem is, there are steroid and human growth enhanced bodies, and natural bodies, and a person can tell the difference. A person does not have to be a genius to recognize an enhanced body. Sportswriters, who claim to have not realized that the players they were covering had so many chemicals in their system that they could have been labeled a toxic waste site, are either lying or in denial worse than a fundamentalist mother finding a gay magazine under her son’s bed. The same is true with football today.

If anyone thinks that baseball is the only sport made in a lab by Pfizer, he or she does not have the NFL package. While it is impossible to figure out what percentage of football players are juiced to the gills, I guarantee that if your child got that percentage of questions right on their test, you would have that proud parent sticker on the bumper of your minivan. If the NFL really cared about concussions, the best way would be to eliminate the HGH’ed defensive end slamming into the quarterback, or ban for a year the steroid ridden monster defensive safety who just slammed into your juiced star wide receiver.

Our professional athletes are modern gladiators. They just retire and die off screen. Forty-four years ago, Dr. Gabe Mirkin surveyed some of the best track and field stars in the nation and asked, "If I could give you a pill that would make you an Olympic champion -- and also kill you in a year -- would you take it?” Half said they would. In similar surveys in recent years, eighty percent of athletes have stated they would take the pill if it knocked five, ten or even twenty years off their lives. Mirkin had no clue that the factious drug he was asking about was steroids. The will to win, the need to feel special, the drive to be a winner overtakes common sense and concerns for long term safety.

In other words, a lot of athletes are cheaters. Baseball, football, basketball, mixed martial arts, track and field, cycling, heck, there is even evidence that certain golfers are on the juice. All fine and good, but here is the thing, while politicians and sportswriters act outraged when a scandal breaks out, the American people could care less if it was their team’s player. New York Yankees loved Alex Rodriguez after he brought them home a championship. Barry Bonds gets a whole book written about his Balco adventures, and Giant fans turned out in droves to watch him break Hank Aaron’s home run record. Manny was just being Manny and Boston fans danced in the streets when he brought home a World Series. I doubt that you could find a St. Louis Cardinal’s fan that thinks Mark McGwire should disown his homerun record. The only thing that Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro and Roger Clemens seemed to do wrong is retire before they could get their images rehabbed with their on field juiced heroics. My only question is what message is this sending to the big fan’s children.

America loves a cheater as long as he is our cheater. Cheaters win the big game. Cheaters get the babes. Cheaters get the big contract. Cheaters and those that play with them get concussions, have their bodies crippled, and die early. Cheating has a long and storied history. It is nothing new. As far back as the 1904 Tour de France, the second ever such event, a cyclist named Hippolyte Acouturier, decided against blatantly grabbing onto the sides of automobiles to win the race. In the previous year, one of his competitors had spiked his water bottle. Other bikers had thrown broken glass, nails and other debtis onto the road behind them to pop tires and cause chaos and fender benders. Like something out of a B movie, some riders even put itching powder in their fellow riders’ shorts. Acouturier did not grab an automobile. He wired himself to the bumper. He tied one end of a thin wire to the backend of a car and the other to a cork, which he gripped in his teeth. This ancient Wile E. Coyote actually won four out of the six stages of the race. Even though judges ultimately disqualified Hippolyte for his cheating, they also had to throw out three other place winners and award the race to Henri Cornet, who came in fifth. Almost every sport has a long and noble history of cheating, but here is the thing about steroids in football. Juiced football players are like Acouturier being wired to an automobile. Both are doing things their bodies could not naturally do on their own. Cheaters are cheaters. Yet, Hippolyte’s crime was just in the race. Once he climbed off his bike, everyone went home safe and sound. His cheating just affected that day’s race. In the NFL, steroid users leave long-term damage on the bodies of their opponents, and if that is the case, who is the worst cheater?