Few people seem fazed by the Carolina Panthers steroid scandal, even though it's come out that players took steroids just days before playing in the Super Bowl. One typical response is, "Football players? Steroids? (sarcastically) Who knew?"
CBS Sportsline's Mike Freeman has a good piece explaining why there should be shock:
This latest steroid bombshell... shows performance enhancing drug use in sports is worse than we ever thought. This is more horrific news than any baseball player, Tour de France scandal or track athlete getting busted because this story involves the crown jewel of sports, the Super Bowl.
It ties in with a bedrock belief borrowed from Bill James: Scandals result not from new evils, but from Higher Standards. People were disgusted with baseball when its steroid revelations were splashed across the media, but with the NFL, this is just taken as par for the course, even though the players' medical records have been put on display as court documents. (Todd Steussie took anti-estrogen drugs because the 'roids were giving him breasts; Kevin Donalley went on a regimen even though he had a family history of stroke.)
Why? Because baseball is held to a higher standard by the public, and the media wants to write stories they believe will capture the audience's interest.
It's similar to the difference between how people looked Richard Nixon's White House during Watergate three decades ago and look at George W. Bush's White House today. What Watergate was about was about the public imposing a higher standard on the White House in how it conducted business. Bush hasn't been pressured to resign since, among other reasons, similar high standards for the U.S. Presidency have not been imposed.
(Digression: Some would say no standard has been imposed on the Bush White House, neither internally nor externally. By the way, want to find out how bad the environment is getting? Thanks to George W., you never will.)
Anyway, as far as the NFL and steroids scandal goes, you can't even say that it will take a player dropping dead to get fans' attention, especially since the league, its PR wing and tsh-tshing hometown columnists can always just smear the guy as a juice monkey. Lyle Alzado ring any bells?
Prediction: Sooner or later, a couple former players who used performance-enhancing drugs are going to drop dead. You'll likely see insurance companies (one of the least regulated industries going, by the way) refuse to pay off on their life-insurance policies due to all the crap they put in their bodies, and the NFL teams may withhold pension money or deferred salary payments, even though they tacitly encouraged these guys to cheat in order to stay in the game and make mad stacks of cash. There's going to be lawsuits all over the place. Just you wait and see.
(This isn't Chicken Little stuff. North Dallas 40 author Peter Gent, in a couple of his other books, described that exact scenario some 20 years ago.)
That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.
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