See these two guys:
When I was a kid I worshiped these two guys, aside from Bo Jackson, Cam Neely and Michael Jordan, they were my favorite athletes. Over the last few weeks it has come to my attention that these two dudes (Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire) were hopped up on steroids for most of their careers.
Naturally, a lot of people are pissed about the alegations that Canseco raises in his new memoir, which is cleverly titled "Juiced". He said that baseball is full of roid heads and he should know because he has pretty much introduced everyone to the growth drug.
Controversy isn't the word for it, people are screaming about taking away past MVP awards, adding asterisks to every record broken in the last 15 years and drawing and quartering everyone that has put on even a pound of muscle since 1989. Normally, I would think that this was a huge over reaction, but in this case, I agree.
People love baseball. They put their faith and trust in the sport. Even when the idiots who run the game fuck it up, people always take baseball back. Why? Because it's a game that is hard to cheat at. Sure you can scuff up a ball, cork your bat, but other than that it's a pretty fair and square sport. Canseco and his band of freaks found a way to pull the wool over everyone's eyes.
And as much as people love baseball, they love homers more. When Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine said, "Chicks dig the longball" in that Nike comercial a few years ago, they weren't kidding. But it's not just chicks, it's dudes too. We are all in love with the home run.
I'm sure this story has happened to everyone once in their life, we've all been dicked over by someone that wasn't what we thought. For example, in college I fell head over heals for a chick who I thought was the most perfect girl ever. In my mind's eye I had built her up as the hottest, smartest, funniest and most pure girl ever. I respected the shit out of her.
We went out once, hung out a few other times and nothing happened (more my fault because I really liked her and didn't want to screw it up by being too forward). She got bored, which is the natural reaction, and she never talked to me again. As the weeks went by I found out more and more about this girl. She wasn't the pure, virginal chick that I thought she was. She was a fucking slut. She nailed half the school.
I was pissed because I thought she was lying to me. But the thing about my thinking was, and it's not something I realized until many years later, the signs about the way she really was were there however I was just too dumb to notice. That's how the baseball public feels right now, they feel like I did.
For over a decade these guys have been growing bigger and bigger and bigger and have been absolutely crushing balls into orbit. Yet, we just make excuses like, "These athletes train year round" or "They eat better" or "They use andro." Bullshit, they've been doing some real shitty stuff right under our noses, but we didn't want to notice.
Now we get pissed when they tell us that they've been cheating. If there's anybody we should be mad it, it' ourselves. We allowed ourselves to fall in love with an idea of a purity that had zero evidence of being pure. We were wrong and who likes to be wrong?
I had a bunch of other stuff to write, but I can't remember what I was going to say ... hopefully I'll remember the next time.
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