[Piney]

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...d/14043754.htm

Posted on Wed, Mar. 08, 2006
IN MY OPINION

Steroid story a case study of situational ethics

By DAN LE BATARD

dlebatard@MiamiHerald.com

<!-- begin body-content -->We're so arbitrary with our judgments in sports. Kirk Gibson hits a famous home run doped up on cortisone, a steroid, and we cheer for the artificial courage that muted his body's screaming. Not a performance-enhancer? Well, it certainly enhanced that performance, which wouldn't have been possible without medical help.

Jim Haslett claims the 1970s Steelers were on steroids, but that doesn't seem to bother us so much. We care about baseball's sacred numbers more, and we don't like so much that polarizing Barry Bonds is chasing gentleman Hank Aaron, so we scream about the integrity of one game being contaminated while shrugging about the Steelers possibly winning four juiced championships in another.

Brett Favre being addicted to painkillers while on an unprecedented streak of consecutive starts? That's somehow a testament to his strength. Bonds being addicted to being better than everyone else? That's a testament to his weakness.

And we are outraged and dismayed that, in between the commercials for Levitra and anti-depressants, Bonds would have the audacity to bring the pharmacy to the field.

The latest ''news'' on Bonds isn't shocking, revelatory or even terribly interesting.

Discovering an athlete went looking for an edge, legal or otherwise, artificial or otherwise, is like discovering he has muscles. Seeking advantages is what athletes do for a living, whether it's the wide receiver wearing uniform pants without seams to be more aerodynamic (Rocket Ismail) or the crazed linebacker sending his feces to a lab monthly to make sure his diet is balanced (Bill Romanowski).

DIMINISHED IMAGE
But now Bonds, huge and flawed, shrinks back from immortal to mortal as that syringe takes some of the life out of his legacy. He will have to settle for being merely the best of his inflated time, not the best of all-time, merely unfathomable instead of unprecedented. Steroids giveth, and steroids taketh away.

We'll wag our finger at him and enjoy calling him ''Cheater!'' and ''Liar!'' and ''Fraud!'' -- judging athletes is the new national pastime -- but there are plenty of us who would have done the same thing in his cleats.
Let's say you are an accountant, mailman or secretary. And there are two people in your business who aren't as good as you are (Let's call them Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa) getting a lot more rewards because of some secret potion, powder or pill that isn't against the rules of your workplace.
You aren't going to go looking for that secret elixir that might make you better and add five years of money to your career? You are going to fall behind your competition by applying ethics? If so, good for you. You are a noble person. And, rather literally, a loser. You are going to be devoured for being less competitive and cruel than your cutthroat surroundings.

A STAR AT ANY SIZE
Fans have a right to be upset, even though steroids might have saved baseball while McGwire and Sosa made us forget about work stoppages with all their heavy lifting.

The record books are a mess now in our most historic sport because we don't know how many of Bonds' home runs were aided artificially or how many of the pitchers he faced were juiced, too.

Still, it bears remembering that he won three MVPs as a stick figure with Jheri curls. You could erase his past five years completely, and he would still be a Hall of Famer.

Cheater? No more so than Gaylord Perry, who spit-balled his way into the Hall of Fame. You can want all of Bonds' records erased, but then you would have to go back and maybe erase the 2003 Marlins championship, too. Maybe Pudge Rodriguez, 30 mysterious pounds heavier then, doesn't hold onto that ball after J.T. Snow crashed into him at the plate in the playoffs.

Perhaps we were a little more OK with steroids in that one instance because of how arbitrary we are with our judgments in sports.
It's OK for us to want to win at all costs.
Its just not OK for people like Barry Bonds.