Steroid Use Is Putting Pro Leagues to the Test

When it comes to steroids in sports, athletes urinating into plastic cups aren’t the only ones being tested.

Every sport -- the people who govern it, the media who cover it -- can be measured by how it stacks up on the issue of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.

The NFL quakes through its version of ‘roid rage, lashing out at ESPN and bullying the network into canceling “Playmakers,” because the league wants to drive home the point that it has zero tolerance for any kind of steroid usage, even the fictional kind.

Steroids are small potatoes in the NBA, which has a raft of bigger concerns -- namely, marijuana, cocaine, LSD, PCP and the hormones that raged in a Colorado hotel room last summer.

The NHL has no mandatory drug testing, at least for its players. The league, however, has cracked back on the freakish size of bloated goalie pads, denouncing them as performance-enhancers, and is threatening to sideline every player on every team next season -- a strategy that suggests NHL officials need drug testing more than the players.

International soccer is in denial. FIFA President Sepp Blatter says he is shocked, simply shocked, by the number of positive tests in his sport, insists that steroids “do not add anything” to his sport and would much rather talk about shrinking the size of the shorts worn by the female players in his sport.

Baseball, meanwhile, is in its own little world, as usual. The current landscape resembles the Old West, with hapless Sheriff Selig shaking his head while the bandits get away with murder, prompting the local citizenry -- many of them card-carrying members of the Baseball Writers Assn. of America -- to form posses and turn vigilante.

No group of writers is more protective of its sport’s history than baseball’s, as Pete Rose painfully continues to experience. As the commissioner’s office turned a blind eye to the home run boom of the late 1990s -- hey, it was good for business -- baseball writers and broadcasters began to fret over the sudden onslaught of 50- and 60-home run seasons and the potential fraud being ravaged on the game’s record book.

A baseball writer asking questions about a curious jar in Mark McGwire’s locker first raised the issue of androstenedione’s place in the sport. Did it belong in baseball? If not illegal, was it at the very least unethical?

Again, the czars of the game looked the other way, partly because they had canonized McGwire after his pastime-saving 70-home run season. St. Mark was untouchable after 1998.

So was Sammy Sosa, or at least he was until he popped the cork in his bat last summer. Other sports have banned andro, but not baseball. It couldn’t afford the retroactive tarnish to the most celebrated home run chase of the 20th century.

Three years after McGwire’s 70 home runs, once an unimaginable amount, came 73 by Barry Bonds, who had never hit as many as 50 in a previous season, and hasn’t since. Many writers made note of this. They also compared photos of the 2001 Bonds to versions from the 1990s. The newer model looked oddly super-sized.

But when suspicions were raised, they were quickly knocked back on charges that the media didn’t like Bonds, or worse, were racist.

Then came the federal investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. Bonds testified before a grand jury last fall. So did Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield. This was a different type of hot-stove gossip, and when training camps opened this year, so did a different kind of spring scrimmage.

Giambi was carefully scrutinized by the New York tabloids, which wanted to know how many pounds the New York Yankee first baseman lost during the winter. Fifteen? Twenty? Thirty?

Giambi claimed he had only dropped four pounds, said he stopped eating burgers, that’s all. The tabloids were skeptical. A Newsday back-page headline read “The Thin Man.” The New York Daily News: “Slim Fast.” The New York Post: “Here’s The Skinny.”

On the same field, Giambi’s new teammate, Sheffield, was fielding similar BALCO-related questions. Sheffield came up with a quick way to defuse the controversy: Bring on the drug test. If anyone wanted to challenge Sheffield to a test, he said, “I’ll be the first guy up there and won’t back down.”

Newsday baseball columnist Jon Heyman took the challenge. He lined up a doctor for Sheffield, set up a drug test.

The next day, Sheffield backed down. He told Heyman to “Talk to the Players Assn.” He ordered him to “Get away from my locker.” Later, Sheffield went on ESPN to denounce the writer for his “negativity” and having the nerve to spoil his first visit to Yankee training camp.

In Arizona, Bonds was digging in for his own fight. After Colorado Rockie reliever Turk Wendell told the Denver Post that Bonds “obviously” took steroids, Bonds shot back by indicting Wendell on the worst of all possible crimes: Consorting with the media.

“If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face,” Bonds told reporters last week. “Don’t be a little [coward] and talk to the media.... I’m tired of that. I’m tired of guys chirping through the media.”

Tuesday, the San Francisco Chronicle published its story, reporting that Bonds, Giambi and Sheffield had been given steroids and human growth hormone by BALCO. Suddenly, three more players weren’t talking to the media.

Meanwhile, Jose Canseco was in Vero Beach, Fla., ostensibly trying out for the Dodgers while gaining publicity for his upcoming book, ominously titled, “Dare To Truth.” In 2002, Canseco charged that 85% of big league players used steroids. In 2004, he promises to name names.

It’s going to be a long, hot summer out on the wild frontier.