Tag: USA Today

Maxwell Mehlman: Let the Athletes Take Their Performance Enhancing Drugs

In USA Today, Maxwell Mehlman offers a defense of performance enhancing drugs. As Mehlman notes, most of the arguments offered against performance enhancing drugs just aren’t very compelling. Rather, the argument against PEDs is largely aesthetic,

This leads to an unavoidable conclusion: There is nothing inherently wrong with athletes using relatively safe drugs. People simply find it distasteful. It offends their aesthetic sensibilities.

Make no mistake: Aesthetics are important. Our sense of aesthetics is what allows us to distinguish what is beautiful from what is ugly. It drove XFL football out of existence. But people’s tastes differ. Some fans don’t seem to mind steroid use by professional baseball players, for example, as long as it lets the stars hit more home runs.

Tastes change, as perhaps they will when people realize that the ultimate justification for the policy against all drugs in sports is the same reason that we get upset when the neighbors paint their house purple.

I’m not sure they will change that much. There is one pseudo-athletic area where fans not only tolerate but seem to, by their behavior, encourage steroid use. That, of course, would be in wrestling outlet such as the WWE. Part of the appal of wrestling, as far as I can tell, is people want to see larger than life characters and having exagerrated almost comic book-like muscles adds to that effect (it also tends to kill wrestlers at relatively young ages).

But competitive athletics are a bit different. Part of the attraction of athletics is identifying with the athletes in a way that is very different from wrestling. The use of performance enhancing drugs detracts from that identification, and would, I suspect, make competitive sports less attractive to watch for many people.

Source:

What’s wrong with using drugs in sports? Nothing. Maxwell Mehlman, USA Today, August 11, 2004.

USA Today on Atlas Shrugged

USA Today has an enormous front page story today on, of all things, Ayn Rand’s horrible novel Atlas Shrugged. The article is centered on CEOs reading the book as a defense of what they do in light of corporate scandals.

I’m amazed that busy CEOs would have the time or energy to plow through it. Even though I agree with Rand on many things, Atlas Shrugged is ideological fiction at its worst, including an enormous political speech that goes on for something like 50-70 pages.

But to be fair to Rand, some of the criticism in the USA Today article seems unfair. For example, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, CEO of the Leadership Institute at Yale University, claims that,

Ayn Rand did not anticipate CEOs who would loot their firms for hundreds of millions of dollars beofre bankrupting them.

But if you actually read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (which is not a very good novel either, but a better polemic than Atlas Shrugged) I think it is clear that Rand did anticipate crooked/corrupt businessmen and lays out quite well her view of such people. Rand certainly was clear in her vehement opposition to fraud, whether originating in the private or public sectors (though she did think, like many of the people interviewed in the USA Today article, that many CEOs and businesses had received a bum rap).

Warfare Analogies in Sports

One of the sillier claims I heard anyone make after the 9/11 terrorist attacks was on the Sunday when NFL football games resumed. One of the commentators on ESPN’s pre-game show sagely pronounced that the attacks would likely end the use of war-related language to describe sporting contests. All of the people in the studio agreed, saying that since Americans had been exposed to a real act of war, such language would be inappropriate.

Apparently that’s all over with. The latest issue of the ESPN magazine has a striking black and white photo of Kurt Warner and the St. Louis Rams receivers with the headline “Special Ops.” In USA Today, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis says that this week’s game against Pittsburgh is going to be a “war.”

Dumbest All-Star Comment

USA Today sports columnist Jon Saraceno ran a column filled with his impressions of the best and worst moments of Major League Baseball’s All Star Game. His comments on Dale Earnhardt Jr., however, have to qualify as the dumbest thing anyone said about the game:

Worst All-Star Game Move: Dale Earnhardt Jr., introduced to the crowd, saluted fans by hoisting a beer bottle, then taking a hearty swig from it. The moment, captured on Safeco Field’s giant screen, looked scripted. If so, it was a crass marketing ploy likely hatched by his race-car sponsor, a major brewery. It was a bush-league move because of the indelible image and message it left on young, impressionable minds: It’s cool to drink alcohol.

Right on. If this keeps up, the next thing you know they’ll even start selling alcohol at baseball stadiums!

The Whole Vince Carter Thing

It was like one of those surreal moments that’s only supposed to happen in nightmares. Here I am prepared to watch the last couple games of the NBA Eastern Conference semi-finals and what’s the big story — should Vince Carter attend his college graduation ceremony in North Carolina the morning of the Big Game? This was like the worst of all possible bad jokes.

USA Today sports columnist Joe Saraceno put Carter’s graduation ceremonies in perspective today noting that, “All I heard was how Carter’s preparation, focus and rest might be adversely affected. But if generations of athletes who’ve been drunks, druggies and womanizers performed their typical night-before-the-game rituals, I’m pretty sure Carter could figure out how to get a good night’s rest, attend this graduation, fly 75 minutes to Pennsylvania and play basketball.”

It was understandable when the media jumped all over Michael Jordan years ago for spending the night gambling in Atlantic City before a playoff game with the Knicks, but to feed this story about Carter’s graduation merely to find more ways to question his dedication and heart (the knock on Carter is similar to Grant Hill — loads of talent, but doubts about his desire) was obscene. And, of course, Carter’s teammates didn’t help with their noncommittal “it’s his decision” responses.

Toronto ended up losing to Philadelphia when Carter’s last-second shot hit the back of the rim, but I defy anyone to watch that game and seriously argue that attending his college graduation affected his game.

Lousy Journalism Invading the Ranks

USA Today posted an outstanding example of the worst sort of sensationalistic reporting in a story about drug use within the military, Ecstasy invading the ranks.

The basic gist of the story is that, “Drug testing by the Air Force, Army and Navy indicates that usage is as much as 12 times what it was two years ago.” Of course whether or not a 12-fold increase is worriersome depends a lot on what the original baseline for drug use two years ago was, and here is where the story falls apart.

In the Air Force example, a grand total of 500 people out of 375,000 active USAF members tested positive for Ecstasy or admitted to using the drug. It sounds more spectacular to say drug use increased 12-fold in only two years rather than pointing out that only 1.3 people in 1,000 used Ecstasy in the Air Force.