To me, reporters occupy a unique niche in relation to the repetition of language because of the serial nature of journalism. The repetition of events and language seems particularly emphatic in sports writing, which follows sports calendars as regular as the seasons — the very word we use to describe the arc of a league’s progression.
American sports also constantly throw the epic against the mundane. Even before a game has ended, a sportscaster has no qualms declaring it ‘an instant classic.’ The past seemingly has no end as athletes and, more importantly for the present, their results, are dredged and signified again and again. This may not be as problematic or dramatic as I describe, but I do think dehumanizing athletes into formulas and categories does have consequences that need to be considered.
Let’s take as an example a phrase from William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Easter, 1916,” that you may have come across, particularly in the wake of the violence perpetrated Sept. 11, 2001: “All is changed, utterly changed; / A terrible beauty is born.”
In Yeats’ elegy of the deaths of leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, he repeats those two lines several times in a discussion of personal agency and the power of language that tries to disrupt readers’ sense of causation and responsibility.
To draw the epic, and yet mundane, institution of American sports into the discussion, the general current of the steroids controversy in Major League Baseball at this time seems to reflect, off-hand, the day-to-day sentiment of those lines.
The sport’s relationship with how we talk about steroids seems to change as every player emerges from the shadowy realm of the ‘clean’ and steps into the spotlight. Alex Rodriguez’ admission of using performance-enhancing drugs, back during his days with the Rangers when he won at least one MVP award, seems like it should resonate most with Yeats’ words because he is the crown prince of baseball. Should he be a changed man? Or do we settle for the smaller change in how we address the transgressions in sport?
It seems more like baseball fans themselves are ‘utterly changed,’ and not the athletes or the sport. Granted, there are now more stringent testing procedures and penalties for PEDs, but the way in which the general ‘discovery’ of steroid use in baseball gets presented seems more like the American public being told, ‘OK, you can take your hands off your eyes now,’ than asked, ‘Why do you have your hands on your eyes?’
The problem of blame for steroids is complex because it is unclear, like for Yeats, how to reconcile two intuitions of the athlete: the pure talent of Benny ‘The Jet’ Rodriguez and the commodity of steroid users. Yeats’ use of the passive illustrates the perceived passivity of steroid users that keeps the debate from brimming over. So, for the sake of the game, or the owners’ pockets, we do not try to look too deeply at why a player uses steroids. We can imagine the pressure and expectations players have for themselves to succeed; and when those expectations are tied with the unlimited possibility and incredible diversification of labor at the heart of the American dream, the slightest tear of the wrong tendon or the decision to ingest the wrong chemical can derail not a career but a life.
Josh Hamilton’s recovery from problems with drugs after sustaining a series of injuries that kept him off the field seems to be the exception, rather than the norm. And though I do not claim to have statistical data to back up such a statement, it does seem to correlate with our expectations about the game. Here, we confront the terrible beauty of the game: the ability of players, former and current, to strike, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Such tenacity and commitment, in the face of millions of fans, or the lifestyle supported by millions of dollars, seems to mask their humanity in statistical significance.
The question becomes then, what can be done about this? First, the terms of the debate or discussion about steroids need to transform — something that has already begun. Although government involvement like the Mitchell Report matches the public’s political power against the industry’s economic power, the government too often concerns itself with short-term, election-based results. On the other hand, it may be too much to ask for the objective truth, for what actually happened, because I am not convinced the American public would know how to properly use such information. These players have offended themselves, the game and the fans, but I think I speak for many fans when I say strict legal remedies seem to take the offense too seriously. This is a game after all, just one that happens to produce billions of dollars of revenue every year.
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