I grew up playing moderately competitive baseball. I was good enough to hop on a bus and travel around Colorado and parts of Arizona, but not good enough to dream of playing Division I, let alone big league ball. Some of the kids I played with possessed the talent to play at that level and I witnessed first hand the difficulty behind chasing a dream while trying to do it "cleanly."
Scouts from colleges in the area and some small time pro scouts would come to watch our games and every single one of us was aware of them at all times. Every pitch, every swing, every crouch into a defensive stance, was being analyzed by people who held our dreams in their hands. So it came as no surprise when steroids entered the fray.
One night, on a long bus trip back to Denver from southeastern Colorado, I had a debate with a friend who was taking steroids. He would go on to play Division I baseball at a major program and still plays professionally to this day (not in MLB). He was a fan of my game and he pushed me to take steroids because he was convinced it would give me a real future in baseball. He was the best player on our team. His fastball sat between 90-93 mph and he was slugging over 1.000 and he attributed much of his success to his decision to start juicing.
I rebuffed his offer, but it was not because of some moral aversion to taking steroids. I refused because I thought I was so far away from the big leagues that steroids couldn't help me. I had made my bones as a defensive stalwart who knew how to work the count, but in a decade and a half of baseball, I only hit two over the fence home runs. My batting average was mediocre and my only calling card at the plate was my ability to get on base. What was taking steroids going to do? Allow me to hit ten home runs in a fifteen year span? In my mind, I was a lost cause.
Sometimes I look back and wonder how my life would have been different if I had taken my friends advice and juiced. I still don't think I ever would have sniffed the big leagues, but I was good defensively and if I could have hit a lick, I might have been offered a scholarship. I'm happy I didn't after seeing episodes like Chris Benoit, but could I have lived with myself from a moral perspective? Looking back, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
What is cheating after all? Is it breaking the rules of the establishment you're playing under? If so, anyone who ever criticized Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire is a hypocrite because steroids weren't officially banned in baseball until 2005. Also, if you take this view, the Ohio State players who exchanged memorabilia for tattoos are bigger cheaters than Gary Barnett and the University of Colorado who provided strippers and alcohol for recruits, since Ohio State received harsher punishment from the NCAA. These are not moral equivalents and the public reaction to both proved they are not viewed as such. So obviously our moral aversion to cheating has little to do with the institutional restrictions placed on it.
Given the visceral reaction we have when it arises, cheating must be based off of some moral interpretation of what is "right." We marvel at athletic accomplishment, but it becomes meaningless to us as soon as certain rules that we set in our head are broken. I think this is due to our strong emotional bond with sports. They serve as metaphors for our own lives. We watch our teams struggle through adversity and we desperately root for them to overcome it, but only through natural means.
But where do we draw the line between what is natural and what is not? Steroids, blood doping, and HGH are illegal and are punished severely in the court of public opinion (but not so much in the court of our sports leagues), but lasik eye surgery, platelet-rich plasma therapy, and taking pretty much whatever the doctor lets you in the aftermath of major surgery are totally cool? All are modern medical advancements that can dramatically enhance athletic performance. Differentiating between them is simply drawing lines between shades of gray.
I think back to my at bats in front of professional scouts and how nerve-wracking they were. "Keep your hands back." "Rotate your hips." "And for the 10,000th time, don't swing over the top of that freaking slider down and away." I can't imagine the stress that comes with your performance when there are millions of dollars on the line. But it does help me to understand how someone can feel that they need to "cheat."
We tend to lament how much our athletes make. We look at their million dollar a year salaries and resent the fact that they play a game for half the year and make more than we earn in 20. What we never take in to account is the length of a professional sports career. The average NFL career is 3.5 years. The NBA is 6. The MLB and NHL are 5.6. So we stick guys in the most competitive leagues on the planet and they have roughly half a decade to maximize their earnings potential before they have to figure out what they are qualified to do for the rest of their lives. This must be terrifying considering most of them have only done one thing in their lives up until now.
In this vein, I don't blame them for taking PEDs. If Kobe Bryant can fly to Germany to do what seems to be high level blood doping, why can't some mid level rotation player take HGH to extend his career a few years to ensure his family still has a roof over their head a decade after his playing time is over? What's the difference?
And from a functional perspective, what is the big difference between taking PEDs when you're healthy and taking them or something like them when you're rehabbing from an injury? So the doctor draws the moral line once they write a prescription? I'm sorry but I just don't buy that.
This leads us to the biggest dilemma of them all. If everyone is cheating, is it cheating on an individual level? Personally, I don't think so. Which is why it's hard for me to get worked up over anyone from the steroid era in baseball or Lance Armstrong's destruction of the dirtiest sport we have or John Calipari's domination over a dysfunctional NCAA. A competitive advantage is only an advantage if you're one of the few doing it.
Ultimately, these are entertainers who are paid handsomely to entertain. If they cheat, that's just a natural consequence of the consequence we bestow on their craft and we need to stop taking ourselves so seriously. The "think of the children" argument that the Mike Lupica's of the world throw at us is nothing more than pious bullshit. Perhaps it's best that kids learn from sports that people always try to game the system. It's better than them finding this out when they sign a mortgage only to learn that a handful of bankers halfway across the world destroyed the value of everything they worked their lives for on a reckless gamble.
Regardless of whether it's sports, finance, or the lemonade stand your neighbor's daughters set up, people will always try to navigate around whatever roadblocks are placed in front of them. Deeming HGH but not platelet-rich plasma therapy to be cheating is a personal choice. So is deciding that the steroid era is more tainted than Babe Ruth's era where the only dark face you would see in the stadium was a shoe-shiner. Ultimately, cheating is a subjective measure and it evolves with time. I think people need to get off their high horses and stop acting like this is a black and white issue and agree that not all "cheating" is cheating and not everything we deem to be "clean" is clean.
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