On Gods and Steroids (Floyd Landis, Barry Bonds, et. al.)

"Haphaestus (Vulcan to the Romans) was a Greek God who had deformed feet who compensated with a talent for forging and making things, including possibly Pandora. Haphaestus married Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love and Beauty who more or less started the Trojan War and who was never linked to either silicone or collagen, but maybe her husband was just that clever."



     Just before the Tour De France, Sports Illustrated ran a feature on Floyd Landis that focused on his origins as a Mennonite –raised boy whose love and talent for mountain biking literally pushed him into the very different world of international cycling.  While the Mennonites are not quite as strict as the Amish, for instance Landis attended public high school, there’s a charming story about Landis insisting on wearing sweat pants for his first mountain bike race because bicycle shorts were immodest by Mennonite standards.  Jumping ahead a decade and a half later, we have Floyd Landis telling the world that after performing poorly in a critical mountain stage he decided to drown his sorrows in hard liquor and that may have contributed to his unusually high ratio of testosterone to epi-testosterone.  Landis’s story comes bizarrely close to the early Farrelly Brothers farce, Kingpin, which traced the rise and corruption of Randy Quaid, a young Amish man, with a passion for bowling.   

     With Justin Gatlin and Barry Bonds also prominent in the news lately, I have been wondering if a couple generations down the line if our genetically-enhanced, chemically optimized, and possibly bio-cyber equipped descendants will think of us as “Amish”.  One sign in my household is that my daughter has a close friend whose parents refuse to have a television or an internet connection at home. She refers to her friend’s family as “Amish”, though they’re not religious at all.  Competitive athletics does seem to be one of the last realms where we persist in this sharp moral division between “natural” and “unfairly enhanced”.  No one, for instance, complains that Courtney Cox shouldn’t get roles because she went through a late puberty after she did her time as Alex Keaton’s girlfriend on Family Ties.  If I remember correctly (yes it’s embarrassing that I know these things) but Jenny McCarthy couldn’t get into Playboy pre-plastic surgery despite the fact that she was otherwise quite attractive.  To be fair, any number of folks do bemoan the departure of the “natural” body from our popular notions of sexual attractiveness and I'm definitely not sure how the public will react to Mel Gibson or Lyndsay Lohan's apparent choices of "enhancement".

I also get a constant flow of spam offering some equivalent form of male enhancement, I still think that my wife got mad at me at some point and turned my name over to a mailing list.  I have yet to hear a story of a young woman dumping her boyfriend because he has the same doctor as Rush Limbaugh.

Obviously, we don’t insist that people who wear contact lenses are cheating in life.  Most Americans also have very few concerns about artificial hearts or ironically enough the possibility that Floyd Landis might try to compete in cycling with an artificial hip some time in the future.  In fact, Bo Jackson is a particularly interesting case.  He’s generally celebrated for trying to play baseball with an artificial hip, yet there are some who point out that the condition may have been brought on by steroid use in the first place (Bo Jackson sued over the latter claims and got an apology btw).  While it seems easier to draw a line between enhancements and drugs that are “therapeutic” in nature or that address deficits and those that bring one fame and fortune because they let you perform beyond the norm, the line is far fuzzier than people realize.

Consider the example of amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius's story.  Prosthetics have now advanced to the point where a double amputee has a significant advantage over a single amputee sprinter.  The basic idea is that you can lengthen the stride dramatically by producing very long artificial lower legs.  With a single amputee, there’s an upper limit on the length of the prosthetic.  Some experts believe that double amputee sprinters will soon be competitive with world class “natural” sprinters and could potentially surpass them.  Could we see a point where serious sprinters start cutting off their lower legs in order to stay competitive?

Not many people remember Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, a hall of fame pitcher who had a farming machinery accident and inadvertently developed the “split-finger” fastball.  This is unquestionably possible surgically and we’re not far from being able to genetically encourage “deformities” that might create competitive advantages in any number of realms.  In the 2004 presidential debates, President Bush appeared to have some sort of box crammed into the back of his jacket.  While the President and his handlers, including Edgar Cheney, deny that there was any device to help prompt his memory or feed him answers, was it really that different from the rest of us answering questions with the benefit of an internet search engine?  Most of us, even when we have good memories, accept the notion that a PDA can help make us more efficient, or not :}.  

In my own lifetime, one of the biggest changes I’ve seen is that the “artificial” has become more and more “integratable” into our daily selves.  Any number of people are able to lead “normal” lives thanks to various pumps, battery-powered regulatory devices, and sockets implanted in their bodies.  It’s clear to me that our notion of what offends us is far more conservative when it comes to sports.  The fascinating thing to me is that we live in a culture that treats its athletic stars as Gods in so many ways, yet as we ourselves develop ways to do things once reserved for the Gods or through their intervention our fear of this sudden shift manifests in sports.

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The OJ Effect

In the wake of a controversial court decision, a virtual mob of mourners carries signs and shouts slogans for a swarm of television cameras. In the meantime, lurid stories about the family spread viruslike through attempts to discuss any serious issues the case presents. The governor, the president, even our talk show royalty get involved. More Americans can argue the issues in this matter which in reality has little to no impact on their actual lives than they can about war, the quality of public education, budget deficits, or universal health insurance. It's all too familiar.
Today the object of their attention is Terri Schiavo, a 41 year old woman who has been in a vegetative state for 14 years as this generation's Karen Quinlan. Why the fuss? The Republican Right is evidently angry at Michael Schiavo because he hired a malpractice attorney and successfully raised everyone's health insurance rates through a frivolous million dollar suit. Because of his abuse of the legal system, their leaders have sought to protect his wife from him by making sure he can't carry out her wishes. There is after all a big difference between saying " I don't ever want to be on a ventilator, I'd rather just die." and "But if they ever put me on a feeding tube and my brain has no electrical activity, I want to live as long as possible." Am I the only one who thinks its strange that there's a crisis there because a woman can't die on her own in a place that Ponce De Leon found while looking for the Fountain of Youth? Which I suppose is just as odd as the thought of people seeking court orders to force a bulimic woman to take nourishment. In any case, this is one of the first times Republicans politicians have ever shown this much concern for victims of spousal abuse.
Cynics say it's really all about positioning the party for the 2008 election. I just have to say they are working awfully hard to make sure they keep their traditional voter base of persistently vegetative individuals. If, however, Terri Schiavo does vote in the 2008 election, I will vote Republican especially if she is nominated for Secretary of State there. Others think Michael Schiavo brought this on himself because he got inolved with another woman. Had he been in a gay marriage, this of course would never have happened. The Schindlers would have been able to legally prevent him from visiting his spouse while she was in intensive care. In any case, in their eyes if you get involved with someone who isn't legally your wife, you lose any rights as a husband. Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, and Henry Hyde's offices, however, all declined comment on this. Well, Gingrich's press secretary did say there is a very real difference between what Michael Schiavo has done and cheating on a dying wife who is still conscious, one is adultery and the other is just politics. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get them to clarify which was which.
A few years earlier, it was Elian Gonzales, a boy whose mother had died while trying to get them out of Cuba by boat. Thousands of people rallied to protect young Elian from his father, whose apparent crime was that he liked being Cuban and wanted to live with his son but whose former in laws declared they were better suited to look after Elian because they believed in capitalism and Miami public schools had never left any ESL student behind. Sadly, it ended because the Federal Government went much too far and involved itself forcibly in the situation thus interfering with the sanctity of extended family who had never met their nephew in favor of a father who can buy Cohibas legally. We now know that the problem was that Elian's mother died without a living will saying that she was leaving her son to the United States and the American Spectator. Because this was supposedly her dying wish, it was the American thing to do to make sure it was honored even if it wasn't in writing. It is very sad that Castro used this innocent child as a propaganda tool for his repressive regime where prisoners are held without charges and sometimes moved in the middle of the night to places where they can be tortured in ways that seem more perverse than effective.
Two more Florida tabloid phenomena come to mind. There's the 2000 presidential election when those public service ads reminding people that "every vote counts" took on an unexpected double meaning that left five people anxious to make certain that George W. Bush got equal protection in a state where his brother is governor. Lurid stories circulated about the governor, the secretary of state, about precinct officials and something called the "butterfly kiss" until the U.S. Supreme Court did its bit to make the United States safe for terrorists in Florida flight schools by appointing a president who keeps misplacing Osama and mistaking warnings about possible highjackings as historical treatises. You do remember where President Bush was on the morning of 9/11, in a Florida classroom reading an apparently very compelling book about goats.

Even in sports, there's a Florida tabloid angle. After all, who set off the latest round of congressional hearings before the Palm Sunday Emergency session, it was none other than Miami resident Jose Canseco. Who is Jose Canseco's biggest detractor in the major leagues other than errant fly balls in deep left, none other than Tampa native, Tony Larussa, the man who swore that there was no way that Mark Mcgwire could ever have done steroids. Bouyed by Larussa's character reference, Mcgwire then put the scandal to rest with his forthright testimony before the committee. Before Canseco, it was Rickey Williams, the Dolphins running back who decided it was more important to explore his spiritual side by taking hits of marijauna instead of from linebackers.

There is no doubt that the state of Florida has become the capital of America’s most critical industry, the manufacture of tabloid stories. Colorado has done its part with Joan Benet Ramsey and Kobe Bryant and California still clings to its traditions with the Michael Jackson trial but they're clearly not in the same class with Florida. People are starting to say "Geez, only in Florida." Now, as a Californian, this has intrigued me because ten years ago they used to always say "Only in California."

As someone who grew up in the sixties, I remember the events then that bound all survivors of that decade together. JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby, the Moon Landing, Selma, Vietnam, Woodstock. Forty years later, my daughter’s list of shared cultural events is shaped more by Pitt vs. Anniston than say the New York Times v. the United States or Cox v. Nixon. The Manson murders not Civil Rights turned out tobe the decade’s legacy to 21st century media.

How did this happen though? And why did it all move to Florida?
Then last night, it hit me like a ton of Janet Reno impersonators, there is only one sensible explanation for why all socio-cultural excess has moved from California to Florida. I saw the same media circus almost exactly eleven years ago in California for yet another watershed cultural event, People lining the streets with sgns, controversial court decisions, deep divisions on guilt or innocence, extended speculation about marital habits, tv cameras and tabloid stories pushing asside real news. It was the O.J. Simpson trial.
And where did OJ move after the civil trial awarded the Goldmans millions of dollars they will never see, he is living out his grief as a widower on a golf course in Florida. O.J. Simpson is the American god of Tabloid events. Wherever he goes, mischief follows. While he uses his godly powers to find Nicole’s killers on the 14th hole, his tears make social cultural earthquakes that hypnotize Americans into a television-tabloid black hole, a massed collection of mesmerizing events that consume our collective consciousness. Even internet blogs can not escape.

Terri Schiavo, Elian Gonzales, Bush v. Gore, Jose Canseco in a bathroom stall all in Florida each event taking place after O.J. moved there. Think about it when you say OJ and Florida, anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant is no longer the first person who pops to mind.

My inevitable conclusion is that O.J. Simpson is the American version of Loki, the Norse God of mischief who interestingly enough was both unusually big and athletic, funny in a non-Leslie Nielsen movie sort of way, and accused of murdering Baldir. I am not a specialist in Norse lore, but Loki is possibly the most post-modern figure in ancient mythology in that he is neither clearly evil or good. His legacy is one of chaos, clever schemes,scandalous sex, drunken binges, narrow escapes, and the meanest practical jokes of all time. At the same time, the Gods depend on Loki to get them out of trouble that even they can't find a way out of. Does that sound like O.J. or what? Well, I have to admit, it also sounds like George W. Bush before he discovered Christ. It also occurs to me that had O.J. stayed in California he might now be my state's pro-life governor instead of our current anti-steroids governor.

Americans have grown increasingly aware of the bitter cultural war that divides our country. There are scientific-humanists on one end who believe in science-based policy and education, worry about the environment, talk about international cooperation, embrace things like vegetarianism, gay marriage, multiculturalism, and a woman's right to choose. On the other side are religious rovieans who talk about the Bible and the Constitution being a single document, about the sanctity of life except for death row inmates and Moslems in countries with oil reserves, the primacy of American culture and power, promise keeping households, and who equate personal and corporate taxes and regulation with Satan or Dan Rather. At the moment, the only way for these two groups to communicate and exchange perspectives is the show Wife Swap. I believe that the time has come to heal this spiritual divide and that healing must start in Florida.

If we want socio-political earthquakes like the Schiavo Case to stop distracting us from serious issues facing our society- ANWR, peace in the Middle East, children with guns, the funding of social services, free and fair elections in other countries, and the pressing need to privatize the social security system- we must address the problem directly. Unfortunately, the solution can not come through an act of Congress, because that august body has not yet changed the Constitution from saying "free exercies of religion" to "free exercise of Christian Fundamentalism" (as the Puritans and Pilgrims intended). We must go straight to the source. To heal our spiritual divide, we must venerate our version of Loki. Instead of erecting giant plaques of the ten commandments in our courthouses and statehouses, I suggest that we build shrines to O.J. Simpson. In each Florida airport, we can replace the Hertz counter with statues of a smiling #32 peeling an orange with a pocket knife, a pair of sunglasses perched atop his head. Each day, before they go through their security inspections, travelers to other states would place an offering of Bruno Maglio shoes at O.J.'s shrine. After all, lurid sensationalism has become our real God and America’s true idol. Why don't we just face the truth? It may be all we have left that binds us together.
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The Un-Natural (Where have you gone Ricky Ankiel, an online drugstore turns its lonely eyes to you?)

There were two baseball stories that caught the public’s attention this year. Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s major league career home run record and Ricky Ankiel, once a promising pitcher, returned to the majors as a home run hitting outfielder. Both events evoked Babe Ruth who remains the sport’s patron saint. Bonds now holds the two records that people associated with Ruth for more than a generation, the single season home run record (73) and the career home run record. Ankiel’s reinvention echoed Ruth’s own fabled transformation from Hall of Fame level Red Sox pitcher to New York Yankees slugger, a shift so iconic that Bernard Malamud made it the center of his novel The Natural.

For a couple weeks, it appeared that the Bonds and Ankiel stories were supposed to contrast with one another. Despite his numbers, Bonds had sullied the game through his likely use of both steroids and HGH from 1999 to 2004. As he approached Hank Aaron’s 755, the baseball gods were punishing him by having a cloud of flying accusations follow him from stadium to stadium. Even more painful, Bonds’s team was stuck in last place. They had been collectively dragged down by their flawed star’s pursuit of the record. Ankiel’s story was all about how hard work and belief in self had let Ricky Ankiel keep his dream alive. After their world series win last year, the Cardinals had appeared to be cursed. First, manager Tony La Russa had been arrested for drunk driving then pitcher Phil Hancock had died while driving drunk. The team had no performed on the field. Ankiel got called up from the minors, hit nine home runs, and suddenly the team had gotten back into the playoff race. Ankiel’s inspiring story had saved their season. He was the anti-Bonds.

Yesterday, it turns out that Ankiel was linked to eight shipments of HGH in 2004 not long after he had undergone Tommy John surgery. Ankiel and the Cardinals quickly explained that he had a Doctor’s prescription and that HGH was not a banned substance in 2004. As to the facts that he was getting the drug from a shady non-bricks and mortar pharmacy and that HGH doesn’t seem to be the norm for elbow reconstruction surgery, Ankiel and the Cardinals have a whole lot less to say. When asked what other drugs his doctor might have been prescribed, Ankiel’s response was that the information was protected by physician-patient privilege. Nonetheless, every article I saw on the story took pains to mention both the doctor and the fact that baseball had not banned HGH in 2004. The shipments to Ankiel apparently stopped just before MLB started testing for it.

Not a single Ankiel article mentioned the fact that Barry Bonds’s likely use of HGH occurred before 2005.

Will the public turn on Ricky Ankiel as this story unfolds? I don’t know. The game needs heroes and that heroism usually has to take the form of hitting lots of home runs in the middle of a pennant race. Ironically, the Cardinals have the game’s best young home run hitter in Albert Puljos. It’s just that Ankiel’s comeback has been a more riveting story than the fact that no player in history has done more in his first few years in baseball than Puljos

Is the disparate treatment of the Ankiel and Bonds story just a matter of black and white?
It’s possible. Roger Clemens is likely as surly as Barry Bonds yet when Clemens announced his comeback this year at Yankee Stadium it got a standing ovation. The fact that Ankiel is white has likely played some role in his getting sympathetic press both for his return to the majors and with the HGH revelation. Still, I have trouble thinking of Barry Bonds as a civil rights icon. He has Aaron’s record, but Aaron’s own chase had more honor. It’s not the drugs. Aaron was forced to deal with the racism that came with being a black player chasing Ruth’s record less than ten years after the shooting of Martin Luther King. That’s just not part of Bonds’s story arc.

Going way back, Ruth’s home runs rescued baseball from the taint of the Black Sox scandal. The Ricky Ankiel story had promised to help pull the game out of the steroids-HGH scandal. Instead, it was like pulling the game’s head out of the water then dunking it back in. It's that moment in an action movie when someone comes to the rescue forty minutes into the movie only to turn out to be yet another bad guy in disguise.

A couple days ago, I got in a conversation with a couple guys who were doing fantasy baseball leagues. Even though most of my friends would have predicted that I was exactly the sort of person who would have gone for fantasy baseball in a big way, I never have. Anyway, they began talking about a number of their roster coups and it struck me that I didn’t know many of the names anymore. It’s not a shock. Players move from team to team quickly now and there are a lot more teams than there were when I was a kid memorizing the stats pages in the Sporting News for every team in the majors. Knowing every twenty five man roster in baseball is just a much more difficult feat today. The shock about my not recognizing so many baseball names is that I didn’t feel any sadness about it.

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