Performance-enhancing drugs have had a big impact upon the sporting news over the past five years. Just last Sunday, pitching great Roger Clemens, a seven-time Cy Young winner, was the headliner on 60 Minutes, defending himself from accusations in the recently released Mitchell Report.
The questions regarding Clemens are many. If indeed he took steroids and HGH, how did it impact his career winning total? How legit were his last few Cy Youngs? Did the performance-enhancing drugs turn his 87 mph fastball into a 94 mph fastball, even as he was creeping past 40 years of age? Was his bat-throwing incident toward Mike Piazza in the World Series an example of ?roid rage”? How does this impact his induction into baseball”s Hall of Fame?
The Clemens controversy has taken some of the glaring negative limelight away from Barry Bonds, the game”s career home run king. Did drugs take him from warning-track power to McCovey Cove? How about those 73 homers and the multiple MVP awards? Like Mark McGwire, will the baseball writers withhold the HOF from him? In a sport that has a longtime love affair with numbers and statistics, is an asterisk necessary? Is Clemens” career really more like Early Wynn”s? Are Roger Maris” 60 home runs more valid than McGwire”s 70 and Sammy Sosa”s 66 dingers?
Professional football also has its issues with performance-enhancing drugs, but the reaction is much different from that of baseball. Shawn Merriman was suspended last year for steroids use and yet returned at mid-season and finished out his year at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. Will McGwire be punished year after year by HOF voters while Merriman”s proven cheating will soon be forgotten?
Football and baseball are not alone. Stories about with regard to cycling, track and field, weightlifting and professional wrestling. Sporting news is no longer about victories and personalities. In the 1960s, political views and actions worked their way onto the sports page. Today, drugs are front and center.
Which brings us to the world of professional and amateur golf. At this point in time, golf seems to be scandal free and squeaky clean. No one has ever accused John Daly of busting long drives because of steroids, nor has anyone ever pointed out the physical maturing of Tiger Woods as the result of HGH.
Nonetheless, we are in a world of performance-enhancing controversy and as a result, the PGA Tour, the Champions Tour and the LPGA Tour are finalizing drug-testing policies. Tiger Woods got the ball rolling in the summer of 2006 when he told reporters he didn”t believe anyone on tour was using steroids, but it could be a problem sometime down the line. When he was asked about the timeline for a professional golf drug-testing program, Tiger was quoted as saying, “tomorrow would be fine with me.”
The PGA Tour has identified four categories of concern, namely steroids, HGH, narcotics and beta blockers. Initial guidelines would include random testing with first-time violators drawing a one-year suspension and half-million dollar fine. While tour commissioner Tim Finchem believes that no one on the PGA Tour is using performance-enhancing drugs, European Tour commissioner George O”Grady put a humorous spin on the issue. He said, “If Tiger Woods is clean, what does it matter what the rest of them are on?”
It”s hard to imagine how performance-enhancing drugs could better one”s golf scores at the game”s highest levels. Even if steroids allowed a talented golfer to hit his tee shots 360 yards, there would be the equivalent fear that his 125-yard wedge shot would be nuked 50 yards over the green. It”s also difficult to fathom how steroids would make you more accurate at the U.S. Open or how they would make you a purer putter on the treacherous greens at the Masters. It”s hard to imagine the benefits, especially if steroids result in tapping a tricky 4-foot downhill putt 10 feet past the cup. Can you imagine a golfing great going through ?roid rage” on the 16th green at Augusta National?
Nonetheless, professional golf is taking a proactive stance. The tour sent its members a manual on the anti-drug policy in December. The tour is soon going to schedule a drug policy meeting. The tour intends to initially educate its players.
Once the policy is ironed out and put into place, the random testing will be administered by the National Center for Drug Free sports. They do the same thing for the NCAA. The PGA Tour will have all this in place by the summer of 2008, the Nationwide Tour will be on board by the end of 2008, and the Senior Tour will begin testing in the summer of 2009. The LPGA Tour will begin drug testing by mid-2008 and the first violation will result in a 25-tournament suspension.
Of course, performance-enhancing drugs are the talk of this sports era. Some eight decades ago, the legal drug of choice for golf”s biggest names was alcohol. Walter Hagen was admired for showing up late on the first tee, still dressed in his tuxedo from the night before, with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
And speaking of cigarettes, it was common for 1950s great Ben Hogan and 1960s dynamo Arnold Palmer to chain-smoke while playing golf to steady their nerves. Even a young Jack Nicklaus smoked when he first got on tour. Of course, cigarettes and scotch remain legal whereas the use of steroids and HGH without a doctor”s prescription is blatantly illegal.
Drug testing begins on golf”s major tours in 2008. It is the politically correct thing to do, but unlike Clemens, Bonds and Merriman, my thinking is that the game”s top guns and biggest names will come up squeaky clean.
