Ignorance is Bliss

This is not a steroid post, I promise.

Melky Cabrera, Bartolo Colon, Lance Armstrong.  One week, three "heroes" "tainted."

Here in the United States of America, we pride ourselves on certain things.  Freedom, liberty, opportunity, equality.  One of the big reasons we have a problem with steroids is because of the "unequal playing field" it causes.  In theory, if everyone were juicing, we wouldn't have a problem with it.  But, we want our athletes to be "pure."  We want to believe that these guys are doing it the "right way."  We believe these guys are just like us.  Sure, they have a little more skill, luck, dedication, and hard work, but we Americans like to think that Professional athletes are grinding day in and day out just like we are at our normal jobs.

But here's the thing.  What are sports, really? Entertainment, right?  And if we can get a little inspiration or an underdog story, that makes it all the better.  And of the past decade, who could argue against Lance Armstrong being the most inspiring athlete in the USA?  He won 7 Tour de France titles in a row.  Americans know little to nothing about cycling, but we can understand numbers, and that was good.  Plus, this guy got cancer, and still kept kicking butt.  Rumors persisted though, was he clean?  Lance held that he had never tested positive for any banned substance.  And he hadn't, much like Barry Bonds.  But it's not that easy.  It never is.  Years went by, and the powers that be continued investigating and years later seemed to have enough evidence to bring Lance down.  So he did something that we never would accept from our hero.  He gave up.  He beat cancer, but he couldn't beat the stigma of being a steroid user.

The point of all this rambling is that I wonder how much "purity" is really important in today's society when it comes to our athletes.  What if we found out, 70 years later, that Lou Gehrig was taking steroids throughout his career to battle the debilitating weakness he was feeling day to day?  (Obviously this is a wild analogy, and I in no way believe this).  His speech on June 21st 1939 is one of the most inspiration moments in our country's history, not just in the sports realm.  If he were "doping" to cope with this terrible disease and ailment that he was feeling in his formerly strong body, would we be appalled?  Would we even want to know?  No, we wouldn't.  We want to look back, reminisce, remember the good old days, and think about how this guy meant so much to us.

Nowadays it is very rare for an athlete to make it through the public eye and receive that kind of admiration from society.  Brett Favre, Tiger Woods, & Michael Jordan have been close.  But they're not perfect, and people have turned against them.  We are just not able to have athletes as heroes with all the information we have nowadays.  Maybe that is why Tim Tebow is so popular.  We all believe he is a straight shooter, I know I do (at least with life, not his passes).  But who knows, maybe someday we find out he is knocking up skanks left and right, or a member of the KKK (disclaimer: previous sentence is using HYPERBOLE to make a point).  Fact is, we like to have heroes, and it sucks to have them torn down left and right, day after day.  The saying "ignorance is bliss" never has seemed more appropriate than it does in 2012.