Sports have two purposes: they build character and they build physical fitness. It’s absolutely despicable when these two simple functions are perverted in the name of getting an edge.
For better or worse, coaches and professional athletes are role models. To the athletes that play their sports, they become heroes – sometimes gods. They may not have asked for this status, but they’ve got it now; like the uniform, it comes with the job.
Yet time and again we find that it is the coaches and the pro athletes spoiling all that is good about sports. Through words and through actions they encourage growing athletes to be the best, even if it means using performance-enhancing drugs.
It’s a sickening trickle-down travesty. The pros use the drugs, so the collegiate athletes who look up to them use them too, hoping for that sliver of an advantage to make it big. Pretty soon high school players are doping on steroids, trying to impress the college recruiter, trying to be the next big thing. Kids as young as 10 are doping now, just to get that competitive edge.
The NFL made the right call last week, announcing that it would begin random drug testing for the newest fad in performance-enhancers. Tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG, was designed as an undetectable alternative to steroids. Shows how far athletes will go for that edge over the competition, influencing drug manufacturers to engineer a drug the leagues couldn’t find.
Except the plan failed. A test for the presence of THG was created, touching off yet another major scandal in the sporting world. So far, at least seven NFL players and four representing major league baseball have been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury investigating the depth of doping in international competition. ore than 40 athletes in all have received summons.
Greg Aiello, spokesman for the NFL, said the league will add THG to its list of banned substances by the end of this season, but will begin testing for it immediately. In other words, they’re doing exactly what they should do. They’re sending a signal to professional athletes, and vicariously to college and high school athletes, that doping will absolutely not be tolerated. The NBA is considering a similar move.
Major League Baseball doesn’t even mandate drug testing yet.
If the use of performance-enhancing drugs is going to stop – and it must – it has to be stopped first among the ranks of the professionals. That means a united front, determined to discourage younger athletes from doping, accepting this as part of their responsibility as role models. For the good of the next generation of athletes, the community of professional sportsmen cannot afford one league or even one player wavering in his or her denunciation of doping.
Baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, track – all must be absolutely steadfast in enforcing an anti-drug policy. Players must govern themselves. Coaches must govern their players, but they must do so in the right way.
Coaches, like professional athletes, are role models. The difference is that coaches are active in the day-to-day lives of their athletes. They’re authority figures, and what they say goes. Their job description, aside from drawing up plays and setting practice schedules, is to be a mentor of morality for those under them.
When a coach tells his quarterback to go long, the QB does it because it’s good for the team. When a coach tells his players to take illegal steroids because it’s “good for the team,” that’s when the true perversion of sport occurs.
Not only does that coach deprive his team of hard-fought physical fitness, he shakes their character. Plausible deniability leads coaches to shy away from talking to their players about drugs. It sounds like one of those ads on television, but if coaches talked to their players, maybe they’d listen. Steroids have become so common in sports that a coach not telling athletes to avoid the drugs is the same thing as telling them to use them.
Coaches know when their athletes are using performance-enhancers. Doping has side-effects such as mood swings, rapid weight fluctuations and obvious muscle gain. Coaches are not so naive as to believe that their players don’t dope. But when you’ve had a couple of bad seasons, it’s an easy thing to turn a blind eye on. And when things turn around and you’re in the middle of a big winning streak, it gets even easier.
As inexcusable as it is for professional athletes to use these drugs, it’s worse when a coach overlooks such use for the “good” of the team. Worse still, some coaches and university officials corroborate or even encourage doping.
Former Fairfield College athletes are alleging that coaches falsified drug tests for them. Baylor, a school already plagued by NCAA violations and investigations, is now facing accusations that coaches knew about drug use by athletes, but ignored it.
At the University of Washington, a consulting physician for the school’s athletic teams lost his license to practice because of a drug-related scandal. William Scheyer prescribed thousands of doses of medication for student athletes, handing them out in white paper envelopes. He claims he gave the athletes only painkillers, while prescribing steroids for himself. Of course, he also admits that his record-keeping was less than accurate, to say the least.
The truth is, who knows? The team doctor gives you some pills to take to dull the pain, and you’re going to take them, because you trust the doctor. Just like you trust the coach who sent you to him.
Building up players’ bodies using steroids necessarily means tearing down their moral character and integrity. It has reached the point now that doping no longer gives the athlete a competitive edge – it has become the norm at all levels of athletics.
It’s a perversion of all that is good in sports.