Bonds, Clemens must be forgiven

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:28:00 +0000

The members of the Baseball Hall of Fame's class of 2013 will be announced around noon today. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are among those new to the ballot this year, but I’m guessing that no one will make it this year -- because baseball writers are divided on nearly every issue surrounding eligibility, including what those issues should be.

The major issue, of course, is steroids, a subject on which everyone has an opinion but scarcely anyone has any hard facts. Except for a handful of players, we can’t be certain who actually took steroids. We can’t agree on whether taking steroids really constitutes cheating – if there weren’t any rules against taking a certain substance, many feel, how can you actually say someone cheated? Or so some arguments go.

We don’t even agree on what actually constitutes steroids. The truth of the matter is that very few of the sportswriters weighing in on the subject really know much about them. We lump all performance enhancing drugs under the heading of “steroids” in an effort to sweep them aside and brand them as evil; after years of reading about them, I am still not sure why human growth hormones are bad or why they’re banned. (I know there’s a rational answer to a question I have often asked, namely if HGH heals injuries faster, why is it wrong to use it? But no one has yet given me an answer I can understand.)

Lance Armstrong: Biggest sports fraud ever?

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:51:00 +0000

The next thing you know, we'll find out he never even really had cancer. Short of that, it beats me what new revelation anyone would need to confirm the verdict Chicago Tribune sportswriter Phil Hersh delivered recently on CNN: "You can push Marion Jones and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Rosie Ruiz aside. Lance Armstrong is the greatest fraud in the history of sports."

Armstrong famously beat testicular cancer and assorted other illnesses to win count-'em seven Tour de France titles between 1999 and 2005. But I might as well admit that, beating the Big C aside, the man never loomed too large on my constantly shrinking White Guys I Admire list. In 20/20 hindsight, wasn't his can-do vibe always just a little too much like one of those Charlton Heston sci-fi movies where a jut-jawed Chuck wakes up to learn he's the last American left alive on the planet? Even that too-perfect name—outside of comic strips, who the hell has ever really been named Lance Armstrong?—almost seems as if it should have awakened our suspicions from the get-go.

Salon.com > Barry Bonds

Bonds, Clemens must be forgiven

Lance Armstrong: Biggest sports fraud ever?