First Michael Phelps falls from grace with one photo of him French kissing a Bong. Can you imagine the guy sitting next to him waiting for his turn? Phelps has got to have amazing lung capacity. You would be there all night waiting for Phelps to finish that hit.
Now A-Rod is turned into a public A-Hole with the admission he took “performance-enhancing substances.” That sounds a whole lot nicer than illegal drugs. Any time I see professional sports on TV the number one sponsor for the program is Viagra. If that’s not a performance-enhancing drug then I don’t know what is.
Why are we judging these guys for wanting to perform better by taking something too?
The other most popular commercials I see are for beer. So let me get this straight. Michael Phelps used a drug that is not performance enhancing after the Olympics and got suspended from any competition for three months, lost his multi-million sponsorship deal with Kellogg’s and is no longer thought of as a clean cut all American role model. Is that about correct? But beer, a drug that will make you want to fight a guy for looking at you the wrong way is sold to us over the TV with pretty girls in Bikinis at cool parties around fast cars. Its something of a mixed message when it comes to drugs. The thing with A-Rod and frankly any sport star is to remember is that they have one job in this world-to hit a ball farther and faster than most everyone else on the planet. That’s it. That’s his whole existence. So if he wants to take something that will make his balls shrink to hit that ball a little farther and a little faster in pursuit of breaking records for our entertainment, go for it. Besides, if were honest with ourselves we might admit that we would love to see genetically modified humans grunting away on the sport fields. Hell, make steroids mandatory. That might make me want to watch the three-hour snooze fest that is any Baseball game. Between the roid rage and the incredible displays of super human abilities it would be a game more like Thunder Dome in Mad Max than what it is now.
Don’t we want our sports Hero’s to be all they can be?
Every time I watch TV there is another prescription drug being pitched to me with side effects that sound worse than the actual problems they are meant to cure. If performance-enhancing drugs are wrong for athletes then why are these quality of life improving drugs OK for the rest of us? Coffee is performance enhancing when you need to wake up. Viagra is performance enhancing when you need to get it up. Both are legal and both have side effects that come with long-term use. So go for it athletes. The biggest side effect from taking performance-enhancing drugs seems to be homeruns.
