if you're not cheatin', you're not trying
Sunday I mentioned how the universality of guilt and human depravity is easily seen in the religious, political and. . . . professional sports spheres.
Here's a great article about our collective denial about performance enhancing drugs and our continuing love for the game of football.
Why we look the other way.
A couple of insightful paragraphs. . .
we will have to publicly acknowledge that the most popular sport in the country has been kinetically altered by drugs, probably for the past 25 years. In many ways, the NFL's reaction barely matters. What matters more is how fans will attempt to reconcile that realization with their personal feelings toward the game. The question, ultimately, is this: If it turns out the lifeblood of the NFL is unnatural, does that make the game less meaningful? . . .We're all party to the farce that is the NFL.Most of the time, we don't care what football players do when they're not playing football. On any given Wednesday, we have only a passing interest in who they are as people or how they choose to live. But Sunday is different. On Sunday, we have wanted them to be superfast, superstrong, superentertaining and, weirdly, superethical. They are supposed to be pristine 272-pound men who run 40 yards in 4.61 seconds simply because they do sit-ups during commercial breaks for "Grey's Anatomy." Unlike everybody else in America, they cannot do whatever it takes to succeed; they have to fulfill the unrealistic expectations of 10-year-old kids who read magazines. And this is because football players have a job that doesn't matter at all, except in those moments when it matters more than absolutely everything else.
It may be time to rethink some of this stuff.
My prediction: Eventually performance enhancing drugs will be legalized and allowed in pro sports and we'll all be bigger fans than ever.
Seriously, how do you put the genie back in the bottle? There is no going back.
HT: Bill Lindahl
4 comments:
I'm not much of a sports fan, but my one concern with all of this is how it so unfairly takes away from the achievements of the athletes that played pre-drugs. How can you put a steroid pounding player in the same Hall of Fame as Babe Ruth? Or, how can you really be breaking a 50 year old scoring record when all of your touchdowns had the mark of drugs to help? It just seems unfair (not to mention the whole moral issue of taking the drugs) to possibly legalize their use and then put them in the same categories as those who came before?
You put the genie back in the bottle because it's the right thing to do!
As a sports fan - I think it will sports will eventually legalize supplements and enhancement drugs. It's within our nature to justify the use, but the pandora's box of athlete's lives cut short will scorch headlines in papers.
I think the degree of sports extreme is reflective of man's heart for self-affirmation and self-worth. A man's heart was meant to fight, struggle, and taste glory. God designed a man's heart to be bold, and risky asking himself the question, "What am I worth?" Be it sports, war, or video games man has an innate desire to prove himself.
When society's heart finds more glory in God, and embraces the battle against the darkness of the powers, principalities and sin sports will be a fading glory.
I wish they had performance enhancing drugs designed for over-worked and tired parents.
Oh wait... that's called coffee...
Post a Comment