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Timothy Egan is a dumb ass, and it makes me sad that his little logo is a cowboy (he's not even in cowboy country! he's in Seattle!). The gist of his column today (stop using young and stupid as an excuse) was his most obvious, like-duuhhhh-inducing yet, but his examples pissed me off.
Now I have an unusual view of the whole drugs-in-sports thing. Cheating doesn't upset me very much. I don't hate Lance Armstrong because he supposedly used performance-enhancing creams, or whatever - I hate him because he left his wife, who had stood by him through cancer, started dating Sheryl Crow, broke up with her when she got cancer, dated Ashley Olsen, then Kate Hudson, and now has some other chick pregnant (all, and I mean all, blondes). Using performance-enhancing drugs, in my opinion, is a problem that goes way beyond personality flaws, beyond some lust for bodily perfection, monetary greed, or trophies. It speaks to the way we treat sports as a culture. We expect perfection and get mad when they lose. The athlete hears that winning is everything, winning at all costs, win win win or no one will love you, and as the pressure builds they turn to pills. Then we pull back with these puritan gasps - "oh no, we didn't mean that!" See Doug Glanville's column for a first-hand account of A-Rod's journey through steroid land. If we're going to get upset that they're on steroids, we need to get upset with students who take prescription pills - or drink coffee - to get their work done. We need to get mad at our own government for putting soldiers on God knows what to get them to kill better during wars. And why stop there? What about the people on meds to work through chronic pain? They're just trying to fulfill expectations too.
The illusion of "tainting the sport" is even more pathetic. Sports are already tainted past the point of recognition, not even by drugs but by powerful donors, millions of dollars, advertising campaigns, vastly unequal training facilities, ridiculous media attention, the fact that the NBA is now scouting for players in junior high schools... I could go on and on. The search for purity, for this holy sport as American as apple pie, is a wild goose chase and nothing more. And sports are tainted because we want them that way. We like hype. We want it bigger, better, and more confrontational, like Alien Vs. Predator.
Usually when Timothy Egan is a dumb ass everyone calls him out on it, but this time everyone's all "clap your hands say yeah", which I presume is because everyone in this country except me and Lucia are obsessed with Michael Phucking Phelps. Seriously, I have always hated this douchebag. Look at him. He fails the douchebag test. I refused to watch most of the Olympics because of him. The fact that he took pot, well, who on the New York Times is going to get mad about that? As long as drugs are for fun, they make you cool! It's when you take them in order to live up to ridiculous expectations of an unstable fanbase that you become "evil", a slave to the man... as well as imperfect and incapable of winning as a "robo-athlete", on the virtue of your God-given DNA. Phelps is everything the fanbase wants, isn't he? Not only talented beyond the point of what should be called grotesque (hey, he's no Federer, he's no Baryshnikov, he's a compilation of muscles repeating the same action over and over - which is why I don't give much of a shit about swimming), but fun. Popular. He parties. He's chill, man, doesn't have a stick up his ass. He's just a normal kid, smashing mailboxes and tipping cows and getting DUIs and chasing skirt. As much as sports commentators salivate over the religious missionaries in athletics, let's be honest: if Tim Tebow didn't have pictures with hot girls, would people like him as much? Hey, it's not like we want a fuckin' Mormon as our national idol, you know what I mean? We're red-blooded Americans! We need proof of their youthful vigor and manly virility, to sort of quote Teddy Roosevelt, who's apparently one of our most popular presidents. Boys will be boys! If not, what are they... gay?
Losers?
We may be all about the bootstraps in America, but if you don't know how to have a good time (wink wink) there's something wrong with you. So be both, athletes. Be the hard-working, supremely talented, totally fair, party animal student-athlete who scores with all the girls (just like, you know, America, the anti-colonial imperialist? or rather, just like "America", because we are so not as hot as we think we are). Be perfect. Okay? The whole country's counting on you.
I feel worse for the athlete (not necessarily A-Rod, but say, a college athlete) that doesn't have Phelps' natural talent and slaves and slaves at training camp and never gets the praise that his "better-endowed" teammates get, and so takes steroids, gets called out on it, and is made a public pariah for people to throw tomatoes at. I don't feel bad for an overprivileged Adonis dickwad who takes drugs purely to party.
Whoooaaa, A-Rod. Stop the tape. For the record, he was pumped up on steroids and other drugs from ages 26 through 28, while the highest-paid player in baseball, with a 10-year, $252 million contract.
He was a man in full, but wants us to think of him as a boy. He was a corporation unto himself, a very calculated one at that. He cheated to get an edge. Then he lied about it.If anyone deserves a young and stupid pass it’s Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer who was caught in a pose not unknown to anyone his age — snout inside a bong.
Phelps seemed contrite in trotting out his young and stupid defense. “I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way,” he said.
More like youthful and appropriate. I have a hard time going after him for taking a hit of pot after he spent most of his life as a robo-athlete.Now I have an unusual view of the whole drugs-in-sports thing. Cheating doesn't upset me very much. I don't hate Lance Armstrong because he supposedly used performance-enhancing creams, or whatever - I hate him because he left his wife, who had stood by him through cancer, started dating Sheryl Crow, broke up with her when she got cancer, dated Ashley Olsen, then Kate Hudson, and now has some other chick pregnant (all, and I mean all, blondes). Using performance-enhancing drugs, in my opinion, is a problem that goes way beyond personality flaws, beyond some lust for bodily perfection, monetary greed, or trophies. It speaks to the way we treat sports as a culture. We expect perfection and get mad when they lose. The athlete hears that winning is everything, winning at all costs, win win win or no one will love you, and as the pressure builds they turn to pills. Then we pull back with these puritan gasps - "oh no, we didn't mean that!" See Doug Glanville's column for a first-hand account of A-Rod's journey through steroid land. If we're going to get upset that they're on steroids, we need to get upset with students who take prescription pills - or drink coffee - to get their work done. We need to get mad at our own government for putting soldiers on God knows what to get them to kill better during wars. And why stop there? What about the people on meds to work through chronic pain? They're just trying to fulfill expectations too.
The illusion of "tainting the sport" is even more pathetic. Sports are already tainted past the point of recognition, not even by drugs but by powerful donors, millions of dollars, advertising campaigns, vastly unequal training facilities, ridiculous media attention, the fact that the NBA is now scouting for players in junior high schools... I could go on and on. The search for purity, for this holy sport as American as apple pie, is a wild goose chase and nothing more. And sports are tainted because we want them that way. We like hype. We want it bigger, better, and more confrontational, like Alien Vs. Predator.
Usually when Timothy Egan is a dumb ass everyone calls him out on it, but this time everyone's all "clap your hands say yeah", which I presume is because everyone in this country except me and Lucia are obsessed with Michael Phucking Phelps. Seriously, I have always hated this douchebag. Look at him. He fails the douchebag test. I refused to watch most of the Olympics because of him. The fact that he took pot, well, who on the New York Times is going to get mad about that? As long as drugs are for fun, they make you cool! It's when you take them in order to live up to ridiculous expectations of an unstable fanbase that you become "evil", a slave to the man... as well as imperfect and incapable of winning as a "robo-athlete", on the virtue of your God-given DNA. Phelps is everything the fanbase wants, isn't he? Not only talented beyond the point of what should be called grotesque (hey, he's no Federer, he's no Baryshnikov, he's a compilation of muscles repeating the same action over and over - which is why I don't give much of a shit about swimming), but fun. Popular. He parties. He's chill, man, doesn't have a stick up his ass. He's just a normal kid, smashing mailboxes and tipping cows and getting DUIs and chasing skirt. As much as sports commentators salivate over the religious missionaries in athletics, let's be honest: if Tim Tebow didn't have pictures with hot girls, would people like him as much? Hey, it's not like we want a fuckin' Mormon as our national idol, you know what I mean? We're red-blooded Americans! We need proof of their youthful vigor and manly virility, to sort of quote Teddy Roosevelt, who's apparently one of our most popular presidents. Boys will be boys! If not, what are they... gay?
Losers?
We may be all about the bootstraps in America, but if you don't know how to have a good time (wink wink) there's something wrong with you. So be both, athletes. Be the hard-working, supremely talented, totally fair, party animal student-athlete who scores with all the girls (just like, you know, America, the anti-colonial imperialist? or rather, just like "America", because we are so not as hot as we think we are). Be perfect. Okay? The whole country's counting on you.
I feel worse for the athlete (not necessarily A-Rod, but say, a college athlete) that doesn't have Phelps' natural talent and slaves and slaves at training camp and never gets the praise that his "better-endowed" teammates get, and so takes steroids, gets called out on it, and is made a public pariah for people to throw tomatoes at. I don't feel bad for an overprivileged Adonis dickwad who takes drugs purely to party.
