I Call Your Bullshit

It’s rare that I read something so fucking retarded, that I feel the need to comment. When i read this, though, it got my blood boiling. What follows is something that I wrote, slightly intoxicated at about 1:30am. It’s mostly rambling, but this is seriously one of the most irresponsible and blindly accusatory things I’ve read. So when the big PED’s in basketball scandal hits next season, I can look back at this and see how stupid and naive I was.

If we as sports fans succeed at any one feat in particular, it is that of myth making. We form narratives that call for super-powered heroes to save the game, to save the day, to save the city of suffering fans. Our compulsion with creating larger-than-life figures owes a great deal to another habit exhibited by fans of all sports: self-delusion.

Great, so if I don’t agree with you, I’m self-delusional. If I believe athlete’s are, you know, actual freak specimens of nature, then I am delusional. There are no exceptional humans, only drug addicts.

We mislead ourselves all the time. We tell ourselves that changing the channel will impact the outcome of a game thousands of miles away. We swear that owners care about the fans thatpay for season tickets. On and on, such half-truths and contrived dishonesty continue.

Right. Knicks fans totally thought Isiah cared about the fans. Warriors fans completely believe that Chris Cohan is giving a shit about the team. Seattle Supersonic fans always believed that Clay Bennett cared about the

Nowhere is this more obvious than on the subject of performance enhancing drugs and their (unquestionable) place in the games we love. For years, baseball fans acted oblivious toward the mounting validity of claims that the game was wrought with cheating.

Yes, but baseball had a minute assemblage of evidence that there might be cheating. If you provide that, I’m on board with you.

Fans closed their eyes and covered their ears when confronted with the truth, in a feeble attempt to protect themselves from the reality that players are not righteous demigods who are pure of heart and without fault. They are not immaculate. They are not incorruptible.

I don’t think anyone thought that McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, or any other player were without fault. However, the average fan didn’t really care as long as there was exciting baseball going on.

Baseball fans have tried to protect themselves from this truth. NFL fans continue to ignore the mounds of evidence pointing towards steroid abuse. The only question left to ask now is: are NBA fans doing the same thing?

Wait!! Are you going to provide any sort of evidence of NBA PED use? After Jose Canseco, one of the sleaziest players in baseball history, became the most trusted word on steroid use, I will accept an anonymous source who was an intern for two months with the Oklahoma City Thunder training staff who just heard something from another intern.

It would seem to me that NBA fans everywhere have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion. Players may be deceiving them, but in reality they are only deceiving themselves if they truly believe that no one in the league is using performance enhancers. The probability that at least some players have used PEDs (specifically HGH) is too overwhelming to tune it out forever.

Right! I mean, they are athletes. Olympians, cyclists, baseball players, anyone in the NFL, they all do PEDs. If your paid to play sports, you have to be using! Now, let me here your evidence of this.

Certainly, I have nothing but observation and a distrusting nature that leads me to this conclusion. I have no smoking gun, no inside sources, no informant that has lead me down the rabbit hole towards this odious viewpoint.

WTF!!! You have no evidence, other than circumstantial and your own non-expert observations from NBA on TNT?

Investigations must happen before anything can be said with any real certainty. Once the facts are had, we can distort them however we choose to. We can play them up, or set them on an angle, or misrepresent them altogether. Sourced, hard information must come before anyone is accused in earnest.

So, the NBA should waste money on their version of the Mitchel Report, which cost Major League Baseball $20 million? When there is no evidence of any wrong doing?

But with that said, please have a look for yourself at photographs of the body types of NBA players in the 1980s compared to those today. Hell, look at those as recently as 2000. There is a very clear trend: players are bigger, stronger, faster, and more athletic than ever before.

Look at Ben Wallace and compare him to power forwards of yesteryear: Kevin McHale, Kurt Rambis, Horace Grant. Gaze at LeBron James and appreciate that he is the size that Karl Malone was in 1998, when the Mailman was the most physically dominant power forward in the game. Examine Dwight Howard next to classic photos of Patrick Ewing and try to explain how improved weight-lifting techniques could account for such changes in growth.

Yes, athletes are bigger, faster, and stronger. Just as Lance Armstrong was the most tested athlete in history, and still rode a bike throw French hills faster than anyone for seven years. Just like, despite passing several drug tests, Usain Bolt ran faster than any human being in history. Just like, despite constant testing, Michael Phelps swam faster (in several different styles and distances) than any athlete in history. Fuck, lets investigate Tiger Woods, he’s way too good. Same thing with Roger Federer and Raphael Nadal, they’re both way too food. Let’s forget that the science of medicine and physical training have advanced in the past twenty years. That has nothing to do with it.

Again, I am not accusing these specific players of anything. I merely use them as examples to prove my point that the public is reliving the lie it lead in 1998, when we were all so enchanted with the Chase for 62 that we never stopped to ask questions. The NBA now features the biggest, strongest athletes it has ever had, yet no one questions this.

Right, there wasn’t the minor controversy of McGwre and androstenedione. No one had the slightest inkling that McGwire and Sosa weren’t on the level. Or maybe no one cared.

What’s more, these athletes are recovering from injury and age in ways no one has ever seen. Procedures that once put a career in jeopardy are now relatively safe. Recovery times are accelerated ten-fold, and players that seemed on their last legs suddenly seem to be as spire, nimble, and healthy as ever. If Dwyane Wade were a baseball player and experienced the sort of career rebirth and physical rejuvenation he has this season after his shoulder and knee looked completely spent 12 short months ago, we would be suspicious. Not so with basketball.

Dwayne Wade is 27. It’s perfectly reasonable that he come back healthy. I don’t think anyone thought his knee was completely spent.

HGH is banned by the NBA, but there is no reliable urine test to detect its presence. Billy Hunter, the NBA player’s union executive director, has said he will let never players be blood tested for HGH.
“My guys are tested enough…We don’t participate in a sport where there’s a need for human growth hormone.”
Really, Mr. Hunter? It might not be in a basketball player’s best interest to recover more quickly from injury, or to increase the density of fast-twitch muscle fiber in his legs?
HGH assists users in becoming bigger, stronger, faster while helping them recover quickly from weight preparation and the grind of continuous stress (like, perhaps, 82 games a year of profession-level basketball). While HGH is produced naturally in the pituitary gland inside the brain, using artificially high levels of the hormone will rejuvenate the body in astonishing ways, aiding healing and slowing the signs of aging.

Alright, I’ll budge. HGH is banned, they should test for it.

PEDs may not help a three-point shooter with his accuracy. They may not improve his court vision. Yet it might allow him to recover more quickly from knee surgery. Or to fight off recurring back issues. Or to improve mobility and speed at an advanced age…

So it doesn’t help any measurable skill, but it might help some subjective measures?

Yes, I am not-so-subtly raising an eyebrow at the seemingly-magical healing powers possessed by the Phoenix Suns’ training staff. Lauded as the league’s best operation, they have allowed Amare Stoudemire to recover from multiple career-threatening surgeries quickly, have strengthened Steve Nash’s ailing back considerably, have allowed Grant Hill to achieve level of sustained health he had not experienced in decades, and rejuvenated Shaquille O’Neal to a mobility and fitness level he hasn’t shown since his time as a Laker.

Right! I’ve always thought Nash was on ‘roids. And Stoudemire didn’t sit out a year, just like Greg Oden who also had microfacture surgery. And O’Neal’s weight LOSS has nothing to do with his increased mobility. And Grant Hill can’t have one season where he’s not hurt. And the Suns can’t hire a particularly talented group of trainers. It’s definitely HGH.

Where there is smoke, there needn’t be fire, but there still might be.

There might be, but there’s no evidence of fire. There isn’t a flame in sight.

Mark Woods of Great Britain’s Guardian has written at length about how open the NBA’s testing system is to abuse. He has cited that David Stern does not want to conduct a “witch hunt” for players using PEDs, and that the league lags behind other operations in terms of testing and enforcement.

Again, I’ll budge. The league’s testing isn’t up to the same standards as the NFL or Tour de France. But, even if there was widespread steroid use, it wouldn’t be as big a PR problem as widespread pot use for the NBA.

Stern is among those that wrongfully point out that steroids would not improve a player’s game, as the sport is more about coordination and motor skills than sheer power or force.

Do you have any statistical evidence of PEDs making a player better?

Yet as a certain point-power forward/linebacker in Cleveland can attest, muscle and strength equals power. To highlight what a serious advantage this is would be redundant.

Again, do you have any statistical evidence of PEDs making a player better?

It has been said that no one can wear a mask for long. Eventually, everything comes into the light, and we see things for what they truly are. If this is the case for the NBA, what is it exactly that we might see? Could it be that, in fact, we are baring witness to the greatest collection of physical specimens this or any other profession sporting league has every seen, athletes so rarely blessed with a combination of speed and brute power that they define traditional positions?

Yes, it definitely can be. The redefinition of basketball positions actually happens a lot in the NBA.

Or is something else happening here? Something darker, something that, deep down in places we don’t like to talk about, we already know if we are honest with ourselves and put aside the great myth of sport that all athletes are saints, that they are all honest, and that they are all noble.

No one believes that athletes are saints or noble or honest. It’s constantly thrust in our face. Up until a couple weeks ago, I thought Jason Richardson was the pinnacle of character in the NBA.

Let it not be that our love blinds us. Let us seek the truth, whatever that may be. Perhaps there is no concealment, and all players are clean. But we must make sure. We cannot let our love for the game continue to manufacture a sense of self-delusion that everything is virtuous and reputable only to justify the trouble we take to follow basketball.

Let’s say, for a second, that there is a widespread problem. Does this mean that players are better for juicing? Because this hasn’t been proven in baseball…

That is not fair, that is not enough. We need just the facts, not adjusted facts.

Yes!! Facts!! Something you provided none of!!
Congratulations asshole. You got me blogging again.