Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Scott from the My Mountain blog recently commented on my recent posting about Kirby Puckett and Barry Bonds, and also pointed to his blog entry on the recent Barry Bonds steroids use article in Sports Illustrated. I read Scott’s posting with interest, agreeing with some but not all of it. It did get me thinking more about this topic.

I agree with Scott’s point that we attach undue significance to sports, particularly professional sports. We take sports seriously, both individually and collectively. Some of us want to wear the jersey of our favorite player. Some of us collect baseball cards, or have some cards from when we were kids. Maybe we are part of a fantasy football league.

Collectively, sports can impact the psyche of a population. Even if you’re not a sports fanatic, the impact is unavoidable. In Pittsburgh, even if you’re not a football fan, you need to know how the Steelers are doing. The spirit in the area from the recent playoff run and Super Bowl victory was amazing. The marching band from one of the local high schools was in the Steelers’ victory parade and the entire school district closed down for the day!

The amount of attention paid to sports, and especially professional athletes, far exceeds their contribution to the general good of society and of humanity.

But that doesn’t mean that professional sport doesn’t matter. It matters because it’s a reflection of us. We created professional sports. They exist because of us. The athletes and their grossly inflated salaries and their huge egos exist because of us. We pay for them through our going to the games, by purchasing cable TV, from buying licensed merchandise, and through our taxes which subsidize the arenas in which our gladiators compete and which make sports a public priority. And we build the culture that supports this system by subscribing to Sports Illustrated, through betting on games, and through water cooler sports conversations. Sports is one of the only topics besides the weather about which you can talk to a stranger.

And what about steroid use by our athletes? It exists because of us, too. We expect our athletes to be the best. And not just the best, but the best ever. We expect superhuman performance out of them. We pay outrageous ticket prices for sporting events and we want to get our money’s worth. We expect that spectacular slam dunk or that acrobatic touchdown catch. We expect that our athletes will go to any length necessary to achieve the dreams of glory that we’re experiencing through them. And for some, that means getting that extra edge through the use of steroids.

But we want more than for our athletes to be the best and for our favorite team to be the best. We want to maintain an illusion that it was all done through “legitimate” means. We read about the records of heros such as Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Joe DiMaggio, and Lou Gehrig. And when those records are broken, we want to believe that the players breaking the records did it fairly. We don’t want an asterisk in the record book. Why? Because we have within us an ideal of fair play.

But that ideal of fair play is not always what’s rewarded. What’s rewarded is the performance, no matter how it was achieved. The ambition to achieve that level of performance can become so great that the line between right and wrong becomes blurred, and any action deemed necessary to achieve that goal is justified.

And this affects the rest of us who aren’t athletes. Because our ambitions in our lives can affect us in the same way. In sports, that can mean using steroids or other forms of doping in lieu of a good training program and proper nutrition. In school, that might entail cheating rather than putting in the hours of studying necessary to ace that exam. In business, it could mean that you lie on your resume instead of accurately representing your achievements.

The result? We have high school athletes taking steroids to get that added edge. We have Radio Shack’s CEO being fired for lying on his resume. And we have Charlie Weis who, when being introduced as the head coach of Notre Dame’s football team, said “Bringing in character kids is important. But it's all about winning games.” News Flash: If the message to our student athletes is that it’s all about winning games, then the corollary is that no sacrifice is too great if it’s necessary to win.

Notre Dame is in this sorry state because their fans and the school expect it of them. Baseball has a steroid use problem because we, as their fans, expect performance levels that can be achieved only through the use of steroids. And we have a problem because we expect achievements from ourselves that sometimes we can’t gain without cheating. We have forgotten that our ambitions must be limited, that there is a right way and a wrong way, that there are some paths on which we cannot go, and that success is not a matter of whether we got caught or not.

So the world of sports does matter. The Baseball steroids scandal matters. Barry Bonds matters. They matter because they reflect us. And we’re in need of a makeover.