The Decline of the American Sporting Ethos

Prof Rosen:

If I heard you correctly, I believe you gave a qualified endorsement to performance enhancing drugs. Your exclusion was children, but I believe you said that once in adulthood, the decision to take drugs should be that of adults if they think it is in their best interests.

If I misunderstood what you said, please clarify your point.

However, if this is what I heard, my comments are the following, which exclude considerations of the negative medical effects of drugs.:

Sports performance is remarkable because it is a reflection of the potential of the human being. A few, rare humans excel in sports and thus serve as role models to what the human is capable of. Values are portrayed, character is demonstrated. The whole beauty is that it is a pure human performance, not a outside agent performance.

Drugs are an outside agent introduced artificially into the athlete. Drugs are not a part of the natural human being. If taking performance enhancing drugs becomes acceptable, then what is the next step, because there always will be a next step unless a line drawn and limits created. If performance enhancing drugs are accepted, will we then look to implanting bionic arms as the next step of performance enhancement?

Sports are about people, not chemicals. Sports are about the sport, not records. Why do we want to reach beyond the very beauty of what sports are - human performance, not chemical performance.

Why does our culture find it so difficult to make rules and stay true to them? To describe drug enhancement as inevitable and not manageable is confusing to me, and seems a totally erroneous statement. Athletes are under extreme scrutiny by their coaches and their teammates. There is a built-in monitoring system already in place through these two entities. What about values and peer pressure? What about honor to one's craft? The parallel between sports drugs within the controlled population of athletes, and alcohol within the general population is invalid. The two populations have different responsi-bilities and functions.

I believe you are participating in the current cultural position in our country that is a piece of what has been with us since our unfortunate beginning of how we settled our country through the guiding philosophy of Manifest Destiny. You seem to be an ascriber to Entitlement.

PS You will notice that somewhere after 1968, the word Character dropped out of our lexicon.

Sincerely,

Kit Barry, curator

Ephemera Archive of American Culture
Brattleboro, Vermont
802: 254-3634

Dear Laura, I agree with Kit in the first letter. I would add that we could have 2 divisions in each professional sport, one made up of athletes who take drugs( steroids, etc.) and the other athletes who do not. The competition is fair within each division and spectators can decide which they prefer to watch and support.

The other comment I'd like to make is about Magic Johnson. I think you said he fell from grace because he contracted HIV-AIDS. If you say that then the idea that he and many athletes had sex with hundreds or even thousands of women during their careers is OK. It was getting caught by acquiring a disease that was wrong! I don't agree with that.
Actually, I don't think Magic fell from grace. He made mistakes, he acknowledged them and went public discouraging random and unprotected sex. He helped the public see that people with AIDS were't to be feared, hated or shunned. And he showed people with HIV that they could live healthy, happy lives. I don't know of any allegations of steroid abuse by Magic. I think he gracefully and courageously redeemed himself after his sexual history was revealed.

Enjoy your shows,
Paddy

Hi:

I was Monday’s guest on “The Exchange” (30 July) and would like to briefly address the two letters posted on the site:

1) I have never endorsed the use of steroids. My position is that they are quickly becoming a fact of sport (Frank DeFord has reached a similar conclusion), and that to continue to police them in the current fashion will only ratchet up the ill-will and spite that we the public and they the media harbor for sports, athletes, and the games they play.

I also mentioned emphatically that the pairing of children and PED are absolutely wrong. In fact, I told my son that I’d rather go ahead and break his arm rather than allow him to throw curves and sliders before he was fully grown because it would shorten the inevitable process that would ruin his arm before his athletic prime! This would be the same issue relative to PED and underdeveloped young bodies. Thus, I am quite sensitive to the issue of drugs and youth in this particular argument and do not accept the premise that I have endorsed their use at all.

2) My point about Magic is that his situation is in many indicative of the sorts of discussions of players and misdeeds that haunt the sports world today. I was not attacking Magic himself. What I was saying was that the Magic saga has become the new benchmark for our expectations that our athletes will someday fail us. Thus, when I talk in terms of his fall from grace, and this does not take into account his dramatic distancing from any suggestion of homosexuality, which I find most unseemly, I do not feel that Magic is the issue per se. Rather, his story has become the foundation for most discussions of player conduct and its ramifications.

Perhaps in the future, the new benchmarks will be Bonds and Vick, but that is certainly to be seen.

Finally, and in a general sense, I’m not advocating anything—either in my book or through my appearance on “The Exchange”—except that we halt the process of using sport and athletes and fans as pawns in a most unseemly socialization scheme that at the end of the day serves only to remind us of our powerlessness and our allegiance to those who have positioned themselves as our moral arbitrators who use their authority capriciously and without regard to what’s best for us either individually or collectively.

Sincerely,

Dr. Joel Nathan Rosen, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Moravian College