Proof of my raging man crush on Chuck Klosterman: I eagerly devour even his columns about football—in this instance a meditation on our attitudes to steroids in football. (HT: Baylen) On the one hand, he notes, for all our hand-wringing about individual athletes who get caught juicing, the public manages to “regularly watch dozens of 272-pound men accelerate at speeds that would have made them Olympic sprinters during the 1960s” without thinking too hard about the only conceivable way to achieve that, or at least suffering any cognitive dissonance about it. Yet at the same time, we react as though the use of performance enhancers invalidates athletes achievements—a judgment it never occurs to us to make in the case of the caffeinated executive, the coked-up day trader, the Benzedrine-fueled beat novelist, or the pot-smoking musician. He concludes:
In 1982, I read a story about Herschel Walker in Sports Illustrated headlined “My Body’s Like an Army.” It explained how, at the time, Walker didn’t even lift weights; instead, he did 100,000 sit-ups and 100,000 push-ups a year, knocking out 25 of each every time a commercial came on the television. This information made me worship Herschel; it made him seem human and superhuman at the same time. “My Body’s Like an Army” simultaneously indicated that I could become Herschel Walker and that I could never become Herschel Walker. His physical perfection was self-generated and completely pure. He had made himself better than other mortals, and that made me love him.But I was 10 years old.
There comes a point in every normal person’s life when they stop looking at athletes as models for living. Any thinking adult who follows pro sports understands that some people are corrupt and the games are just games and money drives everything. It would be strange if they did not realize these things. But what’s equally strange is the way so many fans (and sportswriters, myself included) revert back to their 10-year-old selves whenever an issue like steroids shatters the surface.
Most of the time, we don’t care what football players do when they’re not playing football. On any given Wednesday, we have only a passing interest in who they are as people or how they choose to live. But Sunday is different. On Sunday, we have wanted them to be superfast, superstrong, superentertaining and, weirdly, superethical. They are supposed to be pristine 272-pound men who run 40 yards in 4.61 seconds simply because they do sit-ups during commercial breaks for “Grey’s Anatomy.” Unlike everybody else in America, they cannot do whatever it takes to succeed; they have to fulfill the unrealistic expectations of 10-year-old kids who read magazines. And this is because football players have a job that doesn’t matter at all, except in those moments when it matters more than absolutely everything else.
It may be time to rethink some of this stuff.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Jason // Mar 21, 2007 at 3:41 pm
But the thing is, when you watch sports it’s usually because you are rooting for the players/team, which psychologically requires (or at least comports better with) a belief that they are the good guys.
It’s not that on Sunday you care about what Tom Brady or whoever was eating for lunch on Wednesday, but you do like to think that he wasn’t eating live babies, because knowing this would make it hard to feel you and he were on the same side, because who wants to be on the same side as a baby eater, unless you’re in to that kind of thing, in which case your allegiance to Tom Brady will be fortified by this discovery.
So assuming your average sports fan thinks drug use is bad, finding out that their team’s guy was doing drugs on Wednesday is a bummer because it makes it hard to root for him on Sunday. I don’t really care about drugs so I don’t experience this, but when I find out that one of the players on a team I root for gave $2000 to the GOP on Wednesday, or gave an interview about how much he hates gay people, it makes it a little harder to root for him on Sunday.
2 LP // Mar 21, 2007 at 4:27 pm
“…the case of the caffeinated executive, the coked-up day trader, the Benzedrine-fueled beat novelist, or the pot-smoking musician.”
I’ve never before thought of pot as a performance-enhancing drug for musicians, but this is totally correct.
But here’s a thought on why it’s different for athletes — one could argue that when a day trader, novelist, or whatever takes stimulants, the main advantage it gives him is a crutch to support him physically while he goes about competing in the real event, which is primarily mental (writing, predicting stock prices, whatever). Whereas the athlete taking steroids is actually trying to skew the competition itself. But this is a bad argument, partly because caffeine at least has some proven cognitive effects that provide a competitive advantage, and probably so do the others you named.
Slight digression: If a chemical was discovered/synthesized that had the effect of making the taker highly sensitive to harmonics, far beyond what a normal human ear can perceive, and a composer wrote a symphony under the influence, would other composers and concert-goers regard this as unfair? What if it turned out that Stravinsky wrote the Rite of Spring (which contains some highly unusual harmonies and discordances) while using it? I think no one would care much, particularly because music rarely involves direct, head-to-head competition with clear winners and losers. Plus, it would be pretty difficult to point to any specific feat of musical accomplishment and say it could only be possible with the aid of this drug, whereas one could say with fair confidence that a 300-pound football player could never run that fast without some kind of chemical assistance.