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| Pro Sports Hero Worship, and the Angry, Middle-Aged Male |
By: Ryan Whirty
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Posted: Monday, January 18, 2010 10:38 pm
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The show's robot character, Bender, defends the under appreciated stars of the old Robot Leagues, in a sly reference to the 20th-century Negro Baseball Leagues. As an example, Bender points to Pitchomat 5000.
But Professor Farnsworth, the program's crusty old curmudgeon, has another opinion. "He's good, all right," the Professor says. "But he's no Clem Johnson. And Johnson played back in the days before steroid injections were mandatory."
I always think about that quote and laugh every time we in the 21st century flip out over the latest steroid scandal in baseball, because I think that maybe - just maybe - we're making way, way too big a deal of the whole issue.
The subject came up recently when former St. Louis slugger Mark McGwire finally acknowledged publicly that he used performance-enhancing substances while he assaulted the home-run record books.
As soon as the news of McGwire’s admission broke out, sports pundits exploded in a hailstorm of sanctimonious finger-wagging and indignant disgust. Scribes and broadcasters, both locally and nationwide, were quick to lambaste McGwire for phony honestly, crocodile tears and too-little-too-late contrition.
True, McGwire looked like a complete fool when he weaseled his way around Congressional questioning in 2005, when he famously uttered, "I'm not here to talk about the past." And true, steroid use has been illegal for quite a while.
However, steroid use wasn't banned by Major League Baseball when McGwire, Sammy Sosa and others were launching home runs in record numbers. And in that magical summer of 1998 - when McGwire and Sosa almost single-handedly brought the sport back from the dead with their pursuit of Roger Maris' single-season homer record - fans, baseball officials and journalists alike were fawning at the sluggers' feet, reveling in the artificially-produced joy the spate of round-trippers produced in our culture. At the time, very few people were seriously raising concerns about steroids. Even when McGwire admitted that he used androstenedione, a legal supplement that nonetheless serves as a performance-enhancer, most of us didn't care. We all took big gulps of the steroid-spiked Kool-Aid and turned our faces to the wall.
But now we feel differently. Now we call McGwire and Sosa and Barry Bonds cheaters for using (or reportedly using) steroids. We flog them mercilessly with our scorn and holier-than-thou revulsion.
And we do this with no acknowledgment of our hypocrisy, no admission that those famous sluggers simply gave us what we wanted. We wanted to see home runs rocketing out of Busch Stadium and Wrigley Field. We wanted fireworks, we wanted excitement and sweet-swinging delight.
We demanded the best out of our heroes. We required them to live up to their multi-million dollar contracts. We placed enormous, almost unfair demands on our sports stars to give produce for us what we desired. We ourselves created an environment in which many players felt so much pressure to perform that they believed they had no other choice but to use chemicals to give us what we wanted. And now we have the utter, unabashed gall to bash McGwire for succumbing to that almost inhuman pressure to succeed?
We don't bother to place ourselves in McGwire's shoes. We don’t consider what we might have done had we been Mark McGwire. What if we had all that pressure on us, all that money in our bank accounts, all that fame and fortune and adulation at our fingertips? For anyone who now criticizes McGwire to honestly say they wouldn't have at least considered steroids is a self-deluded hypocrite and liar.
That's not to mention our sheer arrogance when we draw a line between what we feel is acceptable and reasonable, and unethical and unfair. Just like our society unjustifiably outlaws some intoxicating, potential dangerous chemicals (like marijuana and other illicit narcotics) while accepting and even celebrating others (like alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and any number of prescription drugs), we arbitrarily separate some performance-enhancing technology from others. It's fine for a player to get laser-eye surgery to improve his vision at the plate. It’s fine for a player to use hi-tech workout equipment to get buff and powerful, to regulate and manipulate their heart strength and lung capacity. But it's not OK to use chemicals to make oneself better. How can we seriously say that some technologies are perfectly acceptable while others are abhorrent?
Our proclivity to judge each other with almost arbitrary standards of right and wrong has always exposed our inability to use reason, logic and fairness when evaluating each other's character and way of life, and our criticism of steroid users is just another example.
Our own indignation at perceived unfairness and injustice reveals our own insecurities and self-doubt. We heap criticism on Mark McGwire because maybe, deep down, we know that we might have made the same choices he made.
We do so retroactively because we know that we are two-faced double-dealers when it comes to ethics. We now rip Mark McGwire for his so-called cheating, his allegedly disgusting decisions. But our own hypocrisy and sanctimony are just as disgusting.
-Ryan Whirty, who resides in Ontario, NY (Wayne County), is a former journalist for City Newspaper, and currently makes his living as a free-lance writer. We are proud to welcome back to the Smugtown Beacon, Mr. Ryan Whirty.
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