This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=122131
Shooting Up on Jock Culture By Robert Lipsyte
I was shooting depo-testosterone the other day, imagining how good the juice would make me feel and how it would power my pedaling up the Ram Island hill, the toughest test on my 15-mile bicycle ride. The hill is my Alps and so my feelings about Floyd Landis testing positive this past steroid summer after winning the Tour de France with a ruined hip are so mixed as to be almost incoherent. Like all super-elite athletes, including Barry Bonds and Marion Jones, Floyd is a freak of physique and will. I could double my dosage, shoot up every day, and never ride in his shadow.
So consider what follows just random notes from Jock Culture by a recovering sportswriter.
Denial and Demonization
I do understand my own complicity in the superstars' need for the needle; we -- fans, coaches, parents, owners, media -- demand that they attempt superhuman feats to thrill us, authenticate us, make us rich and proud, and naturally they need superhuman help to satisfy us. (We also want our Whole Foods before they rot, which is why long-haul truck drivers pop speed.)
And we don't want to know about the process. When it's jammed in our faces, when athletes come up "dirty" in testing (or truck drivers jackknife on the interstate), we demand that they be punished and expunged from our fantasies.
This pattern of denial and demonization is our problem, not theirs. Steroid use in sports is a symptom of our disease more than theirs, and a fascinating, if tinted, window on Jock Culture, on its connection to the complicated, dangerous, exhilarating way manhood is measured in America from the field house to the White House.
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And how can we justify teasing out sports performance from all the other ways we try to enhance ourselves?
"Performance-enhancement is in a gray area," says Dr. Robert L. Klitzman, a psychiatrist and faculty associate at Columbia University's Center for Bioethics. "Would you include new technologies to improve cognitive abilities? How about access to SAT prep coaching? Assisted pregnancies?
"It‘s going to get even more complicated as techniques for screening embryos and scanning brains become more sophisticated. Scientists will be looking for stupidity genes and smart pills. Cosmetic psycho-pharmacology is an area where people with money will have advantages over people who don't. Is that fair? In an ideal world there would be a level playing field. Exactly where does cheating begin?"
Cheating begins at the beginning, of course, with our kids.
Enhancing Childhood
I've heard about normal-sized kids getting human growth hormone just to give them a leg up, and I've watched four and five year-olds taking golf and tennis lessons, or racing cars. This is childhood enhancement, the sports equivalent of getting your kid into that pre-school whose starting blocks are on the track to a prep school that feeds Princeton. It makes just as much sense in sports; by pre-adolescence, the competition is fierce and the youngster whose killer instinct hasn't been honed simply won't be advancing to the finals.
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Jocks and Pukes
The first time I heard the word "puke" used as a noun was in 1968. That was the way Columbia's head crew coach, recently returned from stroking a shell along the Saigon River while a Naval officer, described political activists demonstrating against the war, as well as English majors lolling around campus listening to their beards grow.
Just when kids need to be socialized, taught fundamental sports and fitness skills, and made comfortable in their bodies, along comes Little League baseball and PeeWee football to weed and classify them. In typical suburban environments, the sorting is simple enough -- the kids marked as future elite athletes join "travel teams" that soak up resources and attention. Whatever level field once existed in such sports has long since tilted.
However, the kids left behind, the pukes, are still not free to play; they have to keep competing for the crumbs. With less pressure than the travel team members, some of them may actually get more from their experience, but for the most part they will grow up idolizing and resenting the jocks. No wonder the biggest growth in sports has been the so-called fantasy leagues in which mostly men, hooked on their computers, play owner, selecting athletes from actual teams whose actual individual performances will be toted up at season's end to produce on-line winners. While money is often involved, the biggest pay-off seems to be finally getting power over those jocks. What better control then owning them?
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[From] a former Jock:
"We really did get special attention both from the students, and from the teachers. We also did cruel things to other students. I have a 20th school anniversary this summer and plan on seeking forgiveness from the people I know I helped terrorize."
The word terrorize took on a different resonance after 9/11, but the values of Jock Culture loomed large even on that day. The firefighters, police officers, and emergency technicians who rushed into the World Trade Center exemplified Jock Culture's most heroic and selfless models; and a majority of the victims who died at work in the Twin Towers were identified as jocks in their obits. Personnel executives I interviewed about that phenomenon admitted that they specifically tried to hire former varsity high school and college athletes for brokerage jobs because they had discipline, were responsive to authority, knew how to overcome setbacks, and were willing to play hurt (come to work sick).
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Crossing Up the Duke of Wellington
That we pretend to care about chemical performance-enhancers in sports seems hypocritical and diverting, and perhaps the last gasp of the character-building that we once claimed for sports. The Duke of Wellington's declaration that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton became, in nineteenth and early twentieth century America, a slogan of the secular religion of amateurism, of young men joyously playing games that prepared them for war and factory work. As amateurism was devalued, the new cult of mid-twentieth century professionalism offered a promise of class mobility, of young men loosed from the rural mines and the urban slums to play college ball and maybe even become major league millionaires. But athletic stars were still "role models" for youth because the supposed meritocracy of sports and the inherent fairness of games made them morally superior to the actors, musicians, and celebrities who merely entertained us.
But as sports crossed-over into manufactured televised spectacle and athletes became rappers with muscles, our games seemed to become a way of distracting us from work and war, an opiate instead of an inspiration. The Super Bowl became as much a part of the cultural landscape as the Academy Awards, its half-time variety show a coveted showcase. Jocks were just a bigger breed of show-biz celeb, similarly insulated by agents, publicists, posses, bodyguards.
Athletes were swept along with their industry. As the ideals of sportsmanship (often elitist and hypocritical as they were) gave way to the tactics of gamesmanship, as totally dominating your opponent became the ultimate test of victory, as cutting corners, intimidation, and living large became marks of the winning style, Jock Culture developed new values and definitions that spread into the larger culture of politics and big business. (Or, as the sports apologists claimed, societal values leaked into the leagues.)
Whatever, dude. So why should we -- Botox'ed, Viagra'ed, silconed -- be surprised that athletes are enhancing themselves, too? And why should we care?
On one level, I don't. The jock's capital has always been his body, and he should be free to spend and invest it.
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No question I'm taking a performance-enhancing drug -- and one that seems as cutting edge as that old friend penicillin, as this steroid summer turns chilly and quaint. In England, according to London's Sunday Times, a number of top soccer players have been "storing stem cells from their newborn babies as a potential future treatment for their own career-threatening sports injuries."
Now they tell us. Maybe that could have helped Floyd's hip or Barry's damaged back and knee, or Marion's post-partum blues. Our blues, too.
Robert Lipsyte, a former sports and city columnist of The New York Times, was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in commentary. He won an Emmy as host of "The Eleventh Hour," a nightly public affairs show on WNET. He is most recently author of the Young Adult novel, Raiders Night. His website is Robertlipsyte.com.
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