What the hell is wrong with sports

According to the Sports Guy, it seems that Trump and Bono have more in common than both attending my graduation: "Trump? He's phenomenal. Much like Bono, he's one of those rare celebrity self-parodies who somehow remains in on the joke."

Okay, I was reading Bill Simmons' column and just thought I'd toss that in. But there are more pressing issues - what the hell is wrong with sports? We have brawls breaking out at games - culminating of course with that pistons-pacers debacle - and now we have confirmation of what we all believed - that athletes are juiced up. To me, even though I believed ball players like Bonds and Giambi and runners like Marion Jones were using steroids, it somehow has a much bigger effect when you hear it coming straight from the horse's mouth (did I use that idiom properly? I'm still not sure why it's a horse). I guess it's because before you could take some solace believing, if even just a tiny bit, that it all isn't as fucked up as it seems to be. But now, with these grand jury testimony leaks and Victor Conte's interview (which really makes me wish I was in the U.S. this weekend so I could watch 20/20), it seems like things are even more fucked up than I thought. And it really devalues and taints all of sports for me, and from two perspectives. The first is the obvious one: using steroids is out-and-out cheating and damages the integrity of sports. And now that we know how many people were using just from one dealer, how many players in all of sports can there be? The second thing is that, this situation pulls back the curtain just enough for us to start wondering, "What other ridiculous things are going on in the background of sports?" How many skeletons are their in the closet? Conte's claims that he's seen positive drug tests covered up at the Olympics is pretty symptomatic of this fear. Sports are enjoyable because, beyond mere entertainment and competition, they allows us to root and cheer for heroes who do some pretty amazing things and triumph, but do it while not really doing anything important. It's a diversion from the real world competitions - elections, wars - that can be exhausting and have real consequences for real people. Sure sometimes athletes screw up, say or do the wrong things (Sprewell? Artest? Any athlete who has referred to himself as a 'soldier'?), but we forgive the bad apples. So a few weeks after finding out that schools like Ohio State are doing what we all figured by running shady programs, we now have our fears confirmed about steroids too (I still contend that both Clarett and Conte may be exaggerating, but they can't be making this all up in their respective cases). These people can't really be our heroes now that they cheated their way there. Not that they're completely to blame - it's a competitive, pressure-cooker world I'm sure where high-stakes lead to bad decisions. But it still crushes the simple pleasure of following sports.

So, with talks of stripping Jones of her medals, voiding Giambi's contract and MVP award, and asterisk'ing Bonds's stats, for me the real asterisk goes someplace else: the ability to simply enjoy a ballgame for being a ballgame.