The enormous bonuses revealed during the Wall Street financial crisis and Federal bailout drive home the awareness that we live in a “star culture:” People receive outsized, outlandish rewards for coming in Number One.
The interconnected awareness: Where there is money, there is cheating – and there always has been. And there is money in sports. Big money.
No modern sport is spared from scrutiny in Crooked: A History of Cheating in Sports, by Fran Zimniuch (Taylor Trade Publishing, NY, 2009; ISBN 978-1-58979-385-9).
In fact, Zimniuch finds cheating ingrained in our culture dating back to the Biblical Book of Genesis, where Jacob and his mother Rebekah conspire to cheat Jacob’s brother Esau, and win a blessing from the father, Isaac.
Baseball and Steroids
In sports, it’s hard to equal the impact of the two major baseball scandals of the past 100 years: the Chicago White Sox, forever after known as the “Black Sox,” selling out to gamblers and throwing the World Series in 1919; and the “steroid era” beginning in the 1990s when performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) threatened to shred the record books and impair the integrity of the game.
But even the most noxious notion in sports on the playing field – intentionally losing – can’t compare to the fallout of the steroid use by some of the biggest-name players in baseball – such as sluggers Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, and pitcher Roger Clemens. The use of steroids can be a life-and-death matter.
Emulating the stars in baseball’s pantheon, pitcher Taylor Hooton of West Senior High School in Plano, Texas, used steroids to enhance his abilities on the diamond. Then he suffered profound depression resulting from withdrawal when he tried to stop using the drugs. The depression became so unbearable in 2003 that he hanged himself. Talor’s father, Don Hooton, has since become a campaigner against the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
“What disappoints me is the number of apologists who go out of their way to defend themselves, like the Barry bonds of the world,” Don Hooton tells Zimniuch. “Guys, we’ve lost total perspective here. Whether it was against the rules or not, it’s cheating. Not only that, but this particular behavior is a felony.”
Don Hooton continues: “We’re sending mixed messages to our kids. A dad can lecture and talk about not cheating and not using drugs. But then he’ll take his kid out to a ballgame and stand up and give Barry bonds a standing ovation. What a contradiction here.”
Mitchell Report Cites the Dangers
Athletes are role models whether they want to be or not. Zimniuch cites the Mitchell Report – the investigation into drug use in baseball headed by former Maine Senator George Mitchell. With statistics from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the report stated that 8% of male high school athletes had used steroids in the year prior to 2001. While that figure might have declined to between 3-and-6 percent, the Mitchell Report concludes that there would still be several hundred thousand teenagers using the stuff, maybe even a million.
While advising that we should certainly pay attention to major league baseball players using steroids and other dangerous PEDs, the Mitchell Report concludes: “It’s at least as important, perhaps more so, to be concerned about the reality that hundreds of thousands of our children are using them. Every American, not just baseball fans, ought to be shocked into action by that disturbing truth.”
It could be a matter of life and death.
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