Remember when the Olympics were exciting, inspiring and fun? I do. I’m old enough to recall the grainy color pictures of the pixie-ish Olga Korbut from Munich and the spectacular performances of the USA track squad in Los Angeles in ’84.
|
|
Now, the Olympics are one big doping scandal. Every medal presentation is conditional on what some laboratory geek finds on a mass spectrometer report a week or two later.
Remember when baseball was revitalized by the fabulous homer-fest season of McGuire and Sosa, and you couldn’t wait to see Barry Bonds get to bat in his chase for the Babe’s record?
Now, baseball is on the verge of being renamed Asterisk-Ball as all those records are a joke.
And Floyd Landis? Thanks to him, the Tour de Testosterone is tainted forever. (Fortunately, only about 600 crazed European biking types really care.)
Drugs and drug testing have changed the culture of sports and our perception of sports heroism forever. Now, any time any athlete does something extraordinary, there’s a little nagging question in everyone’s minds: “Hard work or hard dope?”
Gee, it’s a good thing Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem is confident that professional golf doesn’t need drug testing, huh? None of our noble sport’s athletes would ever resort to performance-enhancing substances, would they?
Hmmm … let’s see. Pro golfers do everything possible to improve their game by a stroke or two. They hit 500 balls a day, hire sports psychologists and putting coaches, test 39 different drivers made from materials developed for the space program and put themselves through workout regimens that would kill the average duffer.
Oh, but none of them would ever try human growth hormone or EPO any other performance-enhancing substance just to get those extra five or six yards on a drive that might mean the difference between making millions on the Tour and giving lessons to Mrs. Hacker at Podunk Hills Golf Club, would they?
Please give me a very large freakin’ break. There’s no doubt in my mind that performance-enhancing drugs already are being used quietly on the various tours now and by legions of aspiring young players looking to get that golden ticket. There’s too much money and prestige on the line to believe that somehow – miraculously – competitive golf is exempt from this scourge.
I suspect that, deep down, Mr. Finchem knows this too. Allow me to speculate wildly for a minute that the word was quietly spread by Tour minions in the locker rooms at Medinah and Firestone that now is the time to clean up, because testing will be coming soon.
Golf can no longer blithely continue to pretend that we’re above this sort of thing. There are no asterisks in our record books, and there never should be. GCN
Pat Jones is president of Flagstick, LLC.
