I just read this article by Bill Simmons. It is, bar none, the best article Simmons has ever written. Or at least, it’s the best one of his I’ve ever read.
Here are the concluding paragraphs (lightly edited):
I believe that Ray Lewis cheated. I believe that to be true based on circumstantial evidence, his age, his overcompetitiveness, the history of that specific injury, and the fact that his “recovery” made my s**t detector start vibrating like a chainsaw.
I believe in my right to write the previous paragraph because athletes pushed us to this point. We need better drug testing. We need blood testing. We need biological passports. We need that stuff now. Not in three years. Not in two years. Now. I don’t even know what I am watching anymore.
I believe we need to fix this disconnect between our private conversations and our public ones. Cheating in professional sports is an epidemic. Wondering about the reasons behind a dramatically improved performance, or a dramatically fast recovery time, shouldn’t be considered off-limits for media members. We shouldn’t feel like scumbags bringing this stuff up. It’s part of sports.
I believe that, if I played sports for a living, I would steer clear of performance enhancers no matter how many millions were at stake, no matter how famous they might make me, no matter how many titles I might win. I like to believe that, anyway. The truth is … I don’t really know what I would do. And neither do you.
As far as I’m concerned, this article is directed more at the sports media- ESPN, Sports Illustrated and so forth- than non-media people. As he says, non-media people think of this all the time, but we never see sports media figures say “You know what, I’m not buying it- prove it.”
Something to consider- it’s possible that it’s impossible to play professional sports without drug enhancement. Think about it- 160+ games in baseball; 80+ games in basketball and hockey; 16 games in football which is more physically taxing than the others. It may be that even the best-of-the-best can’t make it through their sport’s season without drugs simply because it’s not possible for their body to recover and heal from game to game.
Anyway, Simmons’ article is well worth the time to read it.
One reply on “Bill Simmons on PED’s and Sports”
Interesting read…I like a lot of what he says, but he starts to lose me at the end of the article. Mainly because he claims Ray cheated but Adrian did not cheat. How does he justify this belief? He justifies it because his BS meter went off on Ray, but not on Adrian. My BS (Bill Simmons) meter went off on the fact that he has no idea what being an athlete is and the work and effort it takes to be better than everyone else. As close as he has come is being stuffed in a locker and praying that locker has a leftover jock that he can sniff.
Adrian Peterson’s recovery from his multiple ligament tears and his nearly unprecedented season is infinitely more improbably than Ray’s return with a torn triceps. Ray has never claimed to have healed, just like Justin Smith is playing with a torn triceps and Terrell Suggs is playing with a torn biceps and Ken Norton Jr. played a number of years ago with a torn biceps. It can be done, it has been done. It hurts like heck, it essentially eliminates your ability to ever heal properly and use the muscle, or even have the muscle in some cases. But, doing it is vastly more probably than what Adrian Peterson did with his ligaments.
Do I think either of them cheated, my cynical side says probably…but the truth is, I do not know. Did I think Lance cheated, my cynical side said probably, and now I know. Just like baseball players, all of them, not one specifically, all of them, and track athletes, all of them, and cyclists besides Lance, all of them and a portion of football players and basketball players and high school athletes and college athletes and even journalists that pop Adderall to meet a deadline. I do not know how long it took BS to write the article, but it is one of the best I have ever seen him write, I now suspect he may have cheated.
My point is if the media wants sports to be fair, then report it fair. Even in an article focused on promoting fairness in sports, BS blatantly discredits himself with BS. You can’t have it both ways within an article where you are trying to have it one way. His concluding paragraphs discredit his entire point because it goes against everything that he spends so much time building up to make.
If you want to take a stand in life, take a stand. The amazing thing about great athletes is they are not afraid to try something because they know they will not fail. Even when they fail, they know where they made their mistake and they attempt it again. There is no fear at the highest level of athletics. That is what separates them from us, they know they will not fail and we know that we will fail. Eventually, they become us, and they too fail, even when they know they will not fail. They become mortal, like us. Their careers end when someone else in their world comes along and shatters their fantasy and sends them crashing back to Earth with the rest of us.
BS has never experienced that and he is not alone. The vast majority of the Earth’s population has never and will never experience it. That is why we watch and that is why we marvel, and in some cases, that is why we doubt.
But until people like BS decide that they truly want to use their voice to do something about it, the ones that should crash to Earth sooner than they expected, will continue to soar above us. Saying and doing are two very different things, and this BS article says and does two different things.