The real-world effects of A-Rod’s steroid use
My car gets disgustingly dirty sometimes. Between the coffee cups, newspapers, magazines and books I leave laying around, it can really start looking like a homeless person’s makeshift home.
But nothing — no mold-filled cup or crusty piece of paper — will match the nastiness of the time I was cleaning out my car and I unknowingly picked up a piece of medical tape with pubic hairs hanging off of it.
Let me explain.
It was 2001. I was living in Pacific Beach and going to San Diego State University. A roommate of mine had her old friends from high school visiting one weekend and they — like most under-21 college kids — wanted to go to Tijuana. We knew they wanted to drink and go clubbing, but it wasn’t until after we’d crossed the border that we discovered their ulterior motive — they were jocks and they wanted to buy performance-enhancing drugs (yep: steroids).
The first pharmacy they hit up didn’t have any on hand, but the second did. The “pharmacist,” if he could be called that, immediately took the boys in the back of the pharmacy, sold them the steroids then showed them to the bathroom and handed them a roll of white medical tape.
“You have to tape them to your balls,” he said, without a hint of a joke anywhere on his face.
The boys complied. They didn’t want to chance getting caught at the San Ysidro border crossing the illegal drugs back in.
The tape-drugs-to-your-balls method paid off, because they made it back through without a problem. The second they got back in my car, though, they painfully ripped off the tape and transferred the steroids to their backpacks.
And there you have it — that’s how I found the pube-infested tape in my car that oh-so-memorable day way back when.
So what’s the moral of my little story? No. 1, I should learn to keep my car clean. No. 2, (and I think this is the bigger moral of the story here), is that high school and college-age kids all across the United States and the world look up to sports heroes. If assholes like Alex Rodriguez continue to do and get away with doing steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, what’s stopping the little wannabe jocks from doing the same?
A-Rod and the rest of the Major League Baseball players out there doing that crap should be more than ashamed, they should be fired.
TMI.
it seems to be all about competition, winning at all costs, so it’s hard to blame players that shoot up; is their job to be sports stars or is it to “play the game”
The stars abuse trickles down to all of us. While females have had the burden of vain, superficial insecurity for a while, now males can enjoy the same pressure of expecting their bodies to conform to an idealized image that is unnatural and ultimately unhealthy.
Hilarious story about the nut tape and insofar as A Rod wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire I too bear him no particular adoration, no more than I do any other athlete who earns more money than an entire zip code full of teachers, counselors, and EMTs while cotributing fuck-all to this society. So much for that, however.
You do know, do you not, that there’s not one single solitary scientific study linking steroid use to adverse effects for healthy adult men. That’s the truth. Check the shit out. Nary a study. Not one.
Anabolic steroids are bad for women and for pre-adolescent boys. No question. They’re bad for those groups and studies prove it. But there’s nothing to suggest full-grown competitive male athletes shouldn’t use them – nothing except a rule book, a rule book that gets violated on just about every play of every major sports game in America.
I personally hope athletes keep taking the juice until they’re hitting 100 home runs a season, until they’re running sub-nine-second 100 meter dashes and until they administer tackles that kill their opponents. That sort of thing is what I (and I dare say most people) watch those pricks for in the first place.
As long as ours is a society in which a pair of sneakers is worth $200 because of a value system that accepts the fame of Michael Vick, Mike Tyson and Lance fucking Armstrong without flinching, athletes will do whatever’s necessary to get an edge and earn a buck. If kids emulate them, it’s a shame. But who else would they emulate in such a society? Scholars? Physicians? Statesmen? Please.