Simmons: Full, immediate biological passports for every pro athlete

Over the course of Simmons' career, millions of people have apparently been grabbed by the proverbial nuts, resulting in the generation of millions of dollars.

Look, the 2nd part of the column reminds me of when my dad launches into his Flat Tax thing. Eliminate the IRS! It's pure fantasy. Same with the idea of a PED Passport. Interesting idea, not gonna happen.

But I loved the first part of the column. Honest, self-critical, real.

SoCal brings up a great point about libel. I'm sure Simmons thought of that, but really these guys are public figures. The bar for libel's in the stratosphere. So why not come out and say what everybody's thinking? Plus he uses all those words to sort of dance around and say, hey, Adrian Peterson could be cheating... in an artful way. Hard to make a case for libel, right there.

We at SJ kill Verducci for his shenanigans with cheaters like Clemens. Simmons seemed to want to get it on the record that he's not that guy.

I enjoyed it. For me, there's lots to think about, particularly in the first part of the column.

 

They don't? They festoon the front pages of almost any newspaper. They're littered all over TV. Drug crime -- and the people who fight it -- are a consistently popular TV topic.

And I'm not necessarily suggesting it's right, that sports fans would care so much about athletes testing positive for XYZ drugs, but your confidence that they don't really care...well, I don't share it.

 

The only reason it wouldn't happen is because unions resist it, and owners could, in theory, use the public's disdain for hiding steroid use as leverage. I suspect the owners would win that debate among fans.

Among journalists? I'm not sure. I learned quite long ago that few like big sporting events more than the people who cover them. They get great seats, free food, fun access. They don't particularly enjoy cluttering it up with moral snags and will play the relativist -- to the hilt -- to avoid said snags.

 

The interesting stories are, but steroid litigation is so rarely made into an interesting story. Part of the difference is we're generally spared the ham-fisted social commentaries when it comes to the war on drug cartels (if not the war on drugs) because most people tend to think drug cartels are bad.

 

That's assuming the use of performance-enhancing substances is a clear moral wrong. I think a lot of people in and out of media wouldn't take that as a given.

 

Fans care when it's a player or team they have a stake in.

When David Ortiz was named, the Red Sox fan said, "WHY is the media covering this?!?!!? Such a stupid story!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

When A-Rod got nailed, it became "Er-ah! A-Rod's a cheetah! How ya like dem apples!!!!! Yankees suck!!!!!!!!!!"

Media members don't want to lose their access. It's more beneficial to their own careers to kiss athlete posterior than it is to do any less than kissing athlete posterior.

 

I'm unconvinced that biological passports are the magic bullet that Simmons suggests. Historically, the most effective way of uncovering PED use in sports has been invasive, aggressive police work.

By which I mean: involving actual police.

For better and worse, we've had a low-level War on Sports Drugs for a while, and in a way, catching Lance Armstrong is to that war what killing Bin Laden was to the War on Terror.

To borrow from the end of Zero Dark Thirty: where do we want to go?

 

As Dooley points out, why should we assume the majority of fans want to "clean up" the NFL? That would almost assuredly mean seeing your favorite players play less or at a lower level. If I'm a Vikings fan and I think AP juiced to get back, do I really give a crap? Should I have preferred he was average all year but beholden to some arbitrary and constantly shifting standard of morality when it comes to "playing clean?"

If you tell me Payton Manning can take steroids and look like Peyton Manning again, or he can be "clean" and retire at 36, why do you think I care that what he might do is "wrong" while what Kobe Bryant and Tiger Woods do with blood spinning is "acceptable?"

People got up in arms about baseball because there was a bunch of phony sanctimony about protecting the integrity of the record book, even though records like Maris' record didn't come against a talent pool that included guys like Pedro Martinez.

Football isn't about "records." It's about survival. Playing every Sunday.

Simmons touches on a very good point early in that column comparing AP to Ray Lewis. He wants to believe AP because he loves watching him and finds himself questioning Lewis because he's loathsome. I sense a lot of fans feel the same. Nail the PED users I don't like, but don't touch the ones I do like, especially on my team please.

 

Your argument essentially pits one's intellectual construct of self-interest against human nature; that is, that a Ravens fan would process their disgust for the moral prosecution of a Raven who took PEDs over their desire to click on every Ray Lewis deer antler spray story they could find. I think human nature wins in a landslide.

And that isn't to say that you cow to nature on everything. But these are banned substances, they have been known to cause bad side effects, and you can play sports quite well without them. Dying on the PED hill out of fatigue for covering the subject is a little like a firefighter refusing the two-alarm house fire because the house is empty and, hell, why can't a real arsonist strike this city?