Say It Ain't So, Joe
The recent doping scandal involving cyclist Floyd Landis is yet another example of how big money corrupts everything and everyone it touches. With millions of dollars at stake, for Landis and his sponsors, winning isn’t everything, it’s the ONLY thing. It doesn’t matter how many tests prove he took synthetic testosterone to help him win the Tour De France, he says he’s innocent, he’s an American hero, and that settles it. After a thousand examples of sports “heroes� being caught taking performance-enhancing drugs, how can anyone really think professional sports (including the Olympics and “amateur� athletics) are any cleaner than our filthy political system?
Following the 1919 World Series fix, when eight of the Chicago White Sox players agreed to throw the series for $100,000, slugger Joe Jackson was supposedly asked by a young fan to deny the charges, the implication being if the young fan’s hero denied the allegation, it never happened. The same can be said of Landis, or Barry Bonds or Pete Rose. . .the country is in denial that these things happen all the time. I would argue there are three reasons for this. First, that we desperately need someone or something to believe in, to the point where it becomes a religious question, an issue of belief rather than fact. Yeah, there was no reason to invade Iraq, but do you support the troops or not? Second, after swimming in a fetid cesspool of lies, spin control, and advertising for many years, the fact of a lie or deception has lost any real meaning. We say now “Yeah, it’s a lie. So what?� Or the liar, when caught, says his accusers are liars, then it ends up moot whether he lied or not. The net result is the belief that both are liars or that none are liars. Third, there are those so fed up with lies and their reporting they no longer pay attention to either. Their ability to live with the resulting cynicism has worn away to nothing..
This inability to deal the real world is precisely why we're obsessed with contests: Reds vs. White Sox, Bush vs. Gore, The People vs Michael Jackson, Italy vs France, the Apprentice, Survivor. Why do we care? What does an Italian soccer player bonking a French player with his head have to do with us? It seems like the more weirdness pervades our own lives, our children’s our parents’, our communities, the more we hide in the world of make-believe. Of drugs, of radical religions, of TV, of patriotism, of money. The line between reality and reality TV becomes so blurred that, in a world without edges, there isn’t a difference anymore. Arnold Schwartzengger IS the Governor AND the Terminator. Floyd Landis IS the cycling champion. Barry Bonds IS the home run king. And Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay are just a couple of hard-working, patriotic Americans.
The point is, in sports or politics or the rest of our lives, it’s not the truth that matters, it’s the perception. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
And if, as Joe Jackson claimed years later, no kid really said “Say it ain’t so, Joe,� and it was just made up by some sports writer, it’s no big deal. It sold a lot of papers, because that’s what people needed to believe.