When we were growing up, Wheaties were considered a performance-enhancing substance.
The top athletes of the day in every major sport would appear on Wheaties boxes eating heaping mounds of the stuff.
None of these athletes were ever called cheaters or drummed out of their sports for enhancing their performance by pumping their bodies full of substances with suspicious names such as riboflavin and niacin.
But wait, you say, the ingredients in Wheaties were proteins, vitamins and minerals and other really good stuff. They were perfectly natural. Well, what could be more natural than a hormone that is naturally produced in the bodies of all healthy human beings? That’s human growth hormone, or HGH, which was called out in the report on socalled “doping” in Major League Baseball by former Sen. George Mitchell.
The report made HGH sound like one of the most sinister substances of all time because there is no known test to determine whether someone has been taking it, since we’re all chock-full of it anyway.
Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, rather than dreaming of a cure for cancer or world peace, has declared his undying commitment to overseeing the development of a foolproof test for HGH.
That sounds a lot like O.J. Simpson’s publicly announced intention to spend the rest of his life pursuing his wife’s real killers.
The only reason to bother testing for natural substances in our bodies is to add more names to a list of baseball players to be demonized for committing the latest unforgivable sin in sportsattempting to improve their performance.
I don’t get it. I understood when Major League Baseball belatedly started testing for steroids after counting on “juiced” balls and “juiced” ballplayers to fill ballparks in record numbers as fans witnessed home run records fall on an hourly basis.
Steroids, after all, do long-term damage to the physical health of baseball players, a valuable commodity in which the owners invest millions of dollars.
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That fact also provides a simple solution to a related problem that concerns many of uswhether the practices of professional athletes will promote the use of dangerous drugs among young children seeking athletic success.
All we have to do is educate young people about the effect of steroids on their future sex lives, mentioning little side effects such as the shrinking of sex organs to microscopic proportions. The only thing teenage boys care more about than sports is sex.
Something Odd
But there was something odd about the expansion of the Mitchell report to include the use of natural substances that were not even banned from baseball at the time many baseball players were accused of using them.
It provided an opportunity to pad the report to include many more names, including the Milwaukee Brewers’ new closing pitcher, Eric Gagne, and their previous closer, Derrick Turnbow.
Gagne was accused of using HGH in 2004, the year before it was banned from baseball. Turnbow tested positive in training camp for the U.S. Olympic team in 2004 for “andro,” another natural substance that was not illegal in baseball at the time, but was against Olympic rules.
No one has dared ask this out loud, but if there are natural substances that are not harmful to the health of ballplayers that can improve their performance, what is wrong with using them?
How is that any different from intense physical training that makes athletes in peak physical condition perform better than overweight, hung-over ones?
Actually, when baseball players began discovering the benefits of weight training, some out-of-shape players thought that was cheating, too.
We all may be considering the personal benefits of performance enhancement sooner than we realize.
As science learns more about how to treat the deterioration of our minds from Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, we can envision the discovery of safe supplements that could enhance the mental capacity and performance of all of us.
Millions of people use vitamins and supplements now in the beliefusually unproventhat they are fending off diseases or improving their overall health.
If there were a proven, safe supplement that would allow us to fulfill more of our natural potential, mentally or physically, what possible objection could there be to using it? When you’re paid to compete, it might even be considered irresponsible not to.
We want athletes in competitive sports to do everything possible to make the best use of their natural talents. When they fail to do so, we call them lazy bums. Sportswriters, light-years away from ever competing at a major-league level, say performance enhancement creates an unlevel playing field.
But if Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the best hitter and the best pitcher in baseball, both enhanced their performances to be the very best they could be, that sounds pretty even to me.
May we all enhance our performance every day.
