*FAN SUBMISSION by David Cabrera of Silver Spring, MD. Follow him on Twitter @CabreraaaaaD.*
There really is no surprise to bad news in the sports world any more, especially when it comes to athletes being found using performance enhancing drugs. With the report Monday, that Milwaukee Brewers Left Fielder, Ryan Braun, was suspended for the rest of the 2013 season for violating MLB’s drug policy and up and coming Denver Broncos linebacker Von Miller facing a 4-game suspension for an unspecified violation of the NFL’s drug policy, I honestly thought to myself, “who’s next?”
Maybe the BALCO scandal in the early 2000’s and the Congressional hearings with Sosa, McGwire, and “I have never cheated” Palmeiro in 2005, conditioned my mind to just keep expecting the worse when it came to athletes and performance enhancing drugs. Having not been born in the 80s, I wouldn’t know exactly how people felt, when that first major drug bomb was dropped in the ’88 Seoul Olympics, when Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal in the 100 meter finals when it came out that he failed a post-race drug test. I bet people were pretty peeved about it, pretty shocked and disappointed.
BALCO in the early 2000s was the Ben Johnson type of event for my generation (the 90s). I and many others were shocked that our baseball, football, and track heroes had felt justified and content with using performance enhancing drugs to gain an upper hand on their competition. I guess those drug investigations kind of explained the reason why Barry Bond’s head went from basketball to watermelon size. Bonds, Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, and Jason Giambi are some of the athletes who got caught under BALCO’s web and wanted to stay tangled under that web to sustain their success. That malcontent attitude landed two of them (Jones and Montgomery) in prison, while Giambi has never been the same player since his guilty admission. Bonds is and will forever be a pariah in baseball.
Those years taught sports fans one important thing: you really can’t trust what athletes are telling you. When one athlete says that they are completely clean, have never seen a needle, and have someone to corroborate their story, you see that as a well-orchestrated and calculated lie; someone who is going way over the top to exonerate themselves of a future positive drug test. Look at Braun.
The man wins the 2011 NL MVP, then a couple of months later fails a drug test after there are elevated levels of testosterone found in it.
Then he makes a public statement in early 2012 stating that he is a victim of the MLB, that the truth will come out and that people will see that he is a clean baseball player. Heck, he had Aaron Rodgers betting his own 2013 salary that he was clean.
Wonder if I could get one of those game show buzzers that buzzes when a contestant gets a question wrong?
Courtesy: Sports Illustrated/CNN
Let’s face it, Braun is a great young player, but was he on upward trajectory that would see him with a plaque in Cooperstown 20 years from now? Looking over the averages in some major categories for his 6 year career (thanks to ESPN.com), they go something like this: over 30 home runs, 97 RBIs, and a .312 batting average. Those are stats that 12-year veterans wish they had; but those stats are a wee bit tarnished now.
Braun’s laughable public statement in 2012 is something that Miller should learn from. 2013 is shaping up to be the season that Miller is going to prove himself to be the top pass rusher in the league after having 18.5 sacks last season and entrenching himself as the catalyst of the Broncos’ defense. He is the best player and the most important player on the Broncos not named Peyton Manning. Now, he’s trying to prove that he’s not going to be the next Shawne Merriman.
Going on Twitter and tweeting that you didn’t do anything wrong, like Miller did, is even worse than what Braun did. Plus you only get 140 characters to explain to people why they should believe you’re innocent. What Miller should do is just focus on preparing for the 2013 season and answer questions on the drug test with a simple “no-comment.”
With Sports Center’s media coverage going into overdrive after the news on Braun and Miller, the news on the next high profile athlete to fail a drug test is coming soon and should not be met with surprise. We are still living in the performance enhancing drug age, no matter how long ago the BALCO scandal was and no matter how much we want to tell ourselves that there is not a drug problem in sports anymore.
