There is so much news about steroids these days that not a single day has passed without Google News featuring some aspect of this story.  It’s Barry Bonds or Jose Canseco or Roger Clemens or Lyle Alzedo or …….  In a nutshell, taking steroids or growth hormones can, coupled with the usual workouts, make your body bigger, or faster, or stronger, or more durable and thus professional athletes have been using these substances for the last fifty years.  That’s right, fifty years.  While it is not illegal to use them, the professional leagues of the various sports have “banned” their use making it “unethical” to use them.  Before going on, I should also say that there is a downside to using these substances.  They can have long-term negative effects upon both the health of the body and the mind.

I lived in Oklahoma City for a few years.  It was the first time I’d experienced living around and amongst college football fanatics.  In those days, it was coach Bud Wilkinson and his Oklahoma Sooners versus the Texas Longhorns.  People talked about this football player that was a legend amongst legends.  He was thought by some to be the greatest football talent ever and had he steered the course of his life differently, he would have been recognized as the greatest football player of all time.  But this big, strong, fast, very handsome, rich and smart hero steered himself only into blind alleys, madness and self-destruction. One of Joe Don Looney’s friends, fellow Sooner athlete John Flynn reportedly explained how Joe Don went over to Baton Rouge and got all “’roided up and got so big he couldn’t receive.  He started arguing about everything.”  The rest of Joe Don Looney’s tragic life illustrates just exactly what those long-term negative effects can produce.  Rest in peace Joe Don.

He wanted an “edge”.  All those athletes you’ve been reading about this year just wanted an “edge” too. Nike designs equipment to give athletes an edge.  So do many other companies. An edge is, according to the Encarta dictionary, “ an advantage.  An advantage over somebody. (Like) a competitor.”  So these athletes all wanted a competitive advantage that could mean the difference between success and failure, between riches and poverty, between stardom and anonymity.  Am I surprised? Not at all.  Getting an “edge” starts early in life or  in school.  Cheating appears to give us an edge.  90% of all students admit to having cheated.  Cheating is rampant in every university in this country.  There’s that edge again.

What about the girls in high school who stuffed tissue paper into their bra’s to get an “edge”.  Some of them went on to get an even bigger edge at the plastic surgeon with nose jobs, breast augmentation, rib removal, face lifts, liposuction and a host of other procedures.  What about the captains of industry?  The amount of cheating that goes on in business or in the stock market rivals or exceeds the cheating that occurs in colleges.  Ask Ivan Boesky.   And in politics…I’ll leave that one up to you.

Tally up the lies you’ve told to achieve your “edge” and be honest about it.  Assess all  the “little things” you’ve said and done that you’d rather nobody else knew about, and tell yourself the truth.  Write it down if you dare and read it over and over.  Tape it to the mirror.  Now look at the accusers in the steroid “scandal” and ask yourself if that cadre of pot-bellied, fancy suited, bewigged and pompous judges of the morality of others have done anything themselves to gain an “edge”?

So let’s get back to steroids.  Let’s be honest.  Let’s look in the mirror.

Geoffrey