Gene Lyons: Lighten up, Sports

Lighten up, sports

Gene Lyons

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Like many sports fans, I see games as a refuge.

A refuge from what?



Well, what have you got? Republicans, Democrats,

the Iraq war, traffic jams, Rush Limbaugh, Antonin

Scalia, Michael Moore, The New York Times,FOXNews,

CNN, telemarketers, televangelists, telephones,

e-mail, the Internet, the IRS, Rudolph the Red-Nosed

Reindeer and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Do I

make myself clear? That said, I have zero interest in

NASCAR, the latest quasi-athletic fad attracting basically

the same audience that gets off on professional wrestling.

And I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it, either.

Making an infernal racket with internal combustion engines

has long been the favorite outdoor pastime of the

influential Moron American community, but why would anybody

pay to hear it?



Politicians and pundits who say otherwise are mostly

patronizing the NASCAR fans they secretly consider dopes.

Anyway, here’s the deal: If there’s a machine involved,

it ain’t a sport. Newspapers should give NASCAR its own page,

like comic strips and bridal photos. Then real sports fans

wouldn’t have to fool with it.



This NASCAR business strikes me as symptomatic of something

even more problematic: the politicization of almost every

aspect of American life. It’s partly an outgrowth of TV’s

inherent need for conflict and melodrama.



Anyhow, last week’s big sports crisis was NBA players

running amok in Detroit. This week it’s baseball

players bulking up on steroids.



Funny, but some of the loudest scolds are the same people

whodenounce "elitists" for disliking NASCAR, where

participants regularly get killed. Irony aside, however,

here’s my question:How can ball games continue to serve as

a refuge if sports journalists turn into crisis junkies

and ideological combatants just like the rest of us? How

about if we all just lightened up a bit?



Take the brawl in Detroit, for example. Here’s my view. When

somebody like Charles Barkley, the former NBA star who once

heaved a guy who jumped him in a bar through a plate glass

window, kept saying Indiana Pacers forward Ron Artest needed

emotional help, maybe somebody should have listened. After

Artest charged into the stands in pursuit of a fan who threw

a beer at him, the league had no choice but to suspend him.

Stuff like that can get dangerous.



But Artest’s transgression was hardly the first in the

annals of professional sport. Baseball "immortal" Ty Cobb

once went into the stands to pummel a cripple. Anything

but contrite, he later said something to the effect that

a guy who couldn’t defend himself needed to learn to keep

his big mouth shut.



Hey, if sports teach nothing else, it’s realism. How dumb

would you have to be to pick a fight with Barkley, who’s

about 6-5, 320 and much quicker than either you or I? Maybe

as dumb as the drunken stockbroker who charged the mound

at Wrigley Field a few years back after relief pitcher

Randy Myers gave up an ill-timed home run. Myers was near the

end of his baseball career, but he also was a professional

athlete who dabbled in martial arts. Boom, boom. Out went

the lights.



Call me insensitive, but I laughed.



Steroid-enhanced baseball players aren’t funny, but,

hey, if it worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger, why not

Jason Giambi? Yankees first-baseman Giambi, who spent

much of last season on the disabled list with a pituitary

tumor, has admitted taking doses of human growth hormone.

Me, I refrain from taking anything that might grow hair

on teeth or cause testicles to drop off, but some of the

outrage is hard to take. After all, we live in a society

where it’s considered perfectly OK to get breast implants,

liposuction and nose jobs. According to The New York

Times, women in California are having plastic surgery to

improve the looks of certain non-public areas of their

bodies rarely subject to esthetic scrutiny. You can’t

watch a ball game without seeing 20 ads curing erectile

dysfunction.



And we’re astonished baseball players are taking

muscle-building steroids? Even potentially dangerous,

illegal or quasi-legal drugs? Look, as former Oakland A’s

beat reporter Steve Kettman wrote in Salon, everybody

around baseball had to know this was going on for at least

15 years, including former Texas Rangers "owner" George W.

Bush, who traded for Jose Canseco, one of the game’s

earliest synthetic musclemen, back in 1992. Put an

asterisk on Barry Bonds’ home run totals? Then how about

Mark McGwire’s and Sammy Sosa’s? And what about all

the chemically enhanced, 95-mph flame-throwers on the

mound over the past decade? Baseball needs to get serious

about procedures like those already in effect in

the minor leagues to protect these guys from themselves.

But a little less hysteria, false piety and maybe

something like a general amnesty would make it much

easier to get the job done.



• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock

author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.