Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Jason Whitlock-- Genius

No other sportswriter can pack so much good sense into a few words:


A-Rod comes clean — now baseball needs to do same

[A-Rod] even expressed respect for the most clueless and potentially most dishonest commissioner in the history of professional sports, Bud “Iceberg” Selig, who had a front-row seat for McGwire and Sosa and was repulsed by Bonds. Selig pimped the ’roiders for relevancy when the game was in the toilet and now claims he was a victim of the steroids era.
Please let this end. The discussion of performance-enhancing drugs in sports is clearly the most deceitful, unintelligent, unsophisticated and hypocritical debate ever held in sports journalism.
We’ve done virtually nothing to rid football, baseball, basketball, hockey, golf, tennis, soccer — or any other sport performed for large sums of money — of performance-enhancing drugs. We’ve crucified and jailed a few high-profile athletes. We’ve made a few sportswriters wealthy and famous, or in the case of A-Rod’s hunter, Selena Roberts, we’ve hyped her tell-all book about the third baseman and given new life to her floundering back-page column in Sports Illustrated
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As a journalistic outsider, i think Selena Roberts's role in this deserves greater scrutiny. How was it, exactly, that she obtained the results of "confidential" drug tests. Who broke their word to give her the hot info about A-Rod?

Over 100 players failed those tests, yet Roberts published one name. Oddly enough, that one player she outed is the subject of her forthcoming book.

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