So we found out this weekend that Alex Rodriquez tested positive for steroids in 2003. While this hardly came as a surprise (at least to me) the sports writers world went nuts.
Why was I not surprised? Because since I can remember, athletes in every sport have been doing any and everything to gain an edge on their competitors. I remember in high school there were guys on the basketball team using creatine and anything else they could get from GNC. Imagine then your livelihood depended on your being physically better than everyone else?
No doubt A-Rod already had talent. But when you mix talent with drugs--performance enhancing drugs--you get a superstar. The real question becomes is this cheating. To me there is a line between cheating and illegal. Something that is not allowed within the rules is cheating; something that is against the law but not defined within the rules is NOT cheating, particularly since the general laws of society don't govern certain activities (i.e. sports). So what A-Rod and 103 other people (and likely more) may have been illegal, but since it wasn't against the rules of baseball it can't be cheating.
A-Rod, Giambi, Bonds, even Clemens didn't cheat. They just took their attempt to get better to the next level. While some guys were drinking energy drinks, popping uppers, going to GNC, these guys had the financial ability to get human growth hormone and other steroids that the average minor leaguer couldn't touch without a hook up. In short, they weren't fuckin around.
Considering that we are a doped up society as a whole, we shouldn't be surprised. There is a drug for just about everything now, many of them geared toward the mark of getting better at something. What the use of steroids by these guys does do is rob us of knowing how truly great they are. And it tells us how great guys like Ken Griffey Jr, Frank Thomas and the like are (assuming they didn't use anything at all). But what they did wasn't cheating--it was simply one upping the next guy.
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