Like many sports fans, I see games as a refuge. A refuge from what?
Well, what have you got? Republicans, Democrats,
the Iraq war, traffic jams, Rush Limbaugh,
Antonin Scalia, Michael Moore, The New York Times,
FOXNews, CNN, telemarketers,
televangelists, telephones, e-mail, the Internet,
the IRS, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Do I make
myself clear? That said, I have zero
interest in NASCAR, the latest quasi-athletic
fad attracting basically the same audience that
gets off on professional wrestling. And I don’t
feel the least bit guilty about it, either. Making
an infernal racket with internal combustion engines
has long been the favorite outdoor pastime
of the influential Moron American community,
but why would anybody pay to hear it?
Politicians and pundits who say otherwise are
mostly patronizing the NASCAR fans they secretly
consider dopes. Anyway, here’s the deal: If there’s
a machine involved, it ain’t a sport. Newspapers
should give NASCAR its own page, like comic strips
and bridal photos. Then real sports fans
wouldn’t have to fool with it.
This NASCAR business strikes me as symptomatic
of something even more problematic:
the politicization of almost every aspect of
American life. It’s partly an outgrowth of TV’s
inherent need for conflict and melodrama.
Anyhow, last week’s big sports crisis was NBA
players running amok in Detroit.
This week it’s baseball players bulking up on
steroids.
Funny, but some of the loudest scolds are the
same people who denounce "elitists" for disliking
NASCAR, where participants regularly get killed.
Irony aside, however, here’s my question:
How can ball games continue to serve as a refuge
if sports journalists turn into crisis junkies
and ideological combatants just like the rest
of us? How about if we all just lightened up a bit?
Take the brawl in Detroit, for example. Here’s
my view. When somebody like Charles Barkley,
the former NBA star who once heaved a guy who
jumped him in a bar through a plate glass window,
kept saying Indiana Pacers forward Ron Artest
needed emotional help, maybe somebody should
have listened. After Artest charged into the
stands in pursuit of a fan who threw a beer at him,
the league had no choice but to suspend him.
Stuff like that can get dangerous.
But Artest’s transgression was hardly the first
in the annals of professional sport. Baseball "immortal"
Ty Cobb once went into the stands to pummel a
cripple. Anything but contrite, he later said something
to the effect that a guy who couldn’t defend
himself needed to learn to keep his big mouth shut.
Hey, if sports teach nothing else, it’s realism.
How dumb would you have to be to pick a fight with
Barkley, who’s about 6-5, 320 and much quicker
than either you or I? Maybe as dumb as the
drunken stockbroker who charged the mound at
Wrigley Field a few years back after relief pitcher
Randy Myers gave up an ill-timed home run. Myers
was near the end of his baseball career, but he
also was a professional athlete who dabbled in
martial arts. Boom, boom. Out went the lights.
Call me insensitive, but I laughed.
Steroid-enhanced baseball players aren’t funny,
but, hey, if it worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger,
why not Jason Giambi? Yankees first-baseman Giambi,
who spent much of last season on the
disabled list with a pituitary tumor, has admitted
taking doses of human growth hormone. Me, I refrain
from taking anything that might grow hair on
teeth or cause testicles to drop off, but some of the
outrage is hard to take. After all, we live in
a society where it’s considered perfectly OK to get
breast implants, liposuction and nose jobs. According
to The New York Times, women in California
are having plastic surgery to improve the looks
of certain non-public areas of their bodies rarely subject
to esthetic scrutiny. You can’t watch a ball
game without seeing 20 ads curing erectile dysfunction.
And we’re astonished baseball players are taking
muscle-building steroids? Even potentially dangerous,
illegal or quasi-legal drugs? Look, as former
Oakland A’s beat reporter Steve Kettman wrote in Salon,
everybody around baseball had to know this was
going on for at least 15 years, including former Texas
Rangers "owner" George W. Bush, who traded for
Jose Canseco, one of the game’s earliest synthetic
musclemen, back in 1992. Put an asterisk on Barry
Bonds’ home run totals? Then how about Mark
McGwire’s and Sammy Sosa’s? And what about all
the chemically enhanced, 95-mph flame-throwers
on the mound over the past decade? Baseball needs
to get serious about procedures like those already
in effect in the minor leagues to protect these
guys from themselves. But a little less hysteria, false piety
and maybe something like a general amnesty would
make it much easier to get the job done.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little
Rock author and recipient
of the National Magazine Award. URL:
http://www.nwanews.com/story/adg/101253