Why steroids, spying, and all those other sports scandals are actually good for fans
A month ago, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Rick Ankiel was the feel-good sports story of 2007, a welcome corrective to Barry Bonds’s successful — and joyless — pursuit of Hank Aaron’s career home-run record. Ankiel originally broke into the majors as a pitching phenom in 2000, but imploded in a playoff game that same year, throwing five wild pitches and walking four batters in one inning. His career subsequently derailed, but Ankiel didn’t quit. Instead, he eventually reinvented himself as an outfielder (a dubious proposition, given pitchers’ tendency to be shitty hitters) and started making his way back to the majors.
On August 10, the Cardinals called Ankiel up from Triple A, where he’d hit 32 home runs this season. He responded by hitting nine home runs in his first 81 big-league at-bats and becoming an instant national celebrity. Some likened him to Babe Ruth, another pitcher-turned-slugger. Others pegged him as a real-life version of Roy Hobbs, a/k/a The Natural. On August 20, Sports Illustrated (SI) contritely announced that it was retiring its snarky “Ankielometer,” which was originally launched to skeptically track the player’s comeback efforts. Ankiel isn’t just a study in “courage and heroism,” SI said at the time; he’s a case study in “how resilient and surprising the human spirit really is.”
The magic didn’t last. On September 10, the New York Daily News reported that Ankiel received a year’s supply of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) from a mail-order pharmacy back in 2004. Since Major League Baseball didn’t ban HGH until 2005, Ankiel may not have violated league rules; nor is it clear that he broke any law. Still, his achievements — just like Bonds’s — are now permanently tainted in the eyes of many fans. In light of this new info, Ankiel seems to be just another disheartening example of professional baseball players’ willingness to take ethically dubious measures to get ahead.
Baseball didn’t have a monopoly on sinners in 2007, however. This year also saw ethical breaches in other sports, including football (the Patriots videotaping scandal, starring head coach Bill Belichick, and Patriot safety Rodney Harrison’s own suspension for HGH use); basketball (the revelation that NBA referee Tim Donaghy bet on, and possibly tampered with, games he had officiated); cycling (the ongoing implosion of the Tour de France, including the revocation of 2006 winner Floyd Landis’s title and the ejection of 2007 leader Michael Rasmussen amid blood-doping concerns); and auto racing (Formula One’s McLaren racing team was fined $100 million [!] for spying).
In some quarters, including the esoteric sub-discipline known as “philosophy of sport,” this flurry of malfeasance is cause for great concern. “Any social institution that wants to endure can’t survive solely through the enforcement of its rules,” says St. John’s University philosopher Paul Gaffney. “There has to be an accompanying social ethic. So when there isn’t that kind of noble code in sport, you’ve really got something that is breaking down.”
But maybe we shouldn’t lament the sundry scandals that have made 2007 the Year of the Cheater. Maybe, instead, we should see them as a desperately needed dose of reality — as incontrovertible proof that, in light of current financial and technological developments, our age-old idealization of sport has become untenable. Maybe we need a new, post-ethical conception of fandom, one that accepts cheating’s entrenched role in the fabric of 21st-century sport and prizes athletic and competitive prowess — regardless of whether it’s natural or lab-manufactured — over alleged good behavior. Look at the situation this way, and Ankiel, Belichick, & Co. didn’t let us down. Instead, they did us a favor.
Times have changed
I know what you’re thinking. Untwist your panties, Reilly, you dreary Midwestern killjoy. The Sox just won the AL East and have a shot at a second World Series title in four years; the Patriots are perfect and looking unbeatable; with the acquisition of Kevin Garnett, the Celtics have suddenly become the chic pick to win the NBA title; Boston College has replaced Notre Dame as the favorite football team of smug Catholics everywhere. Some of us are actually enjoying ourselves. Plus, none of this is new — ever heard of the Chicago Black Sox?
One point at a time, please. Yeah, I get it — it’s a nice time to be a Boston fan. Do enjoy yourself, please. But there’s a bigger sports universe out there, and it’s in the middle of an ethical realignment — thanks, in part, to the transgressions of the once-sainted Belichick. This here’s a chance to inoculate yourself against the disappointment you’ll feel the next time one of your sports heroes gets accused of some unsavory activity. And it will happen, so you might want to pay attention.