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Friday, June 9, 2006
Happy to be in this hall
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
There are halls of fame, and there are halls of fame, but my question here refers to the Hall of What? Halls of fame generally celebrate guys who scored the winning touchdown, hit a World Series home run, won the U.S. Open or were in Secretariat’s saddle. Henry Aaron belongs. Bobby Jones belongs. Tommy Nobis, Dominique Wilkins, and two more Bobbies, Dodd and Cox, are in the inaugural class of the Atlanta Sports Hall of Fame.
But some guy who makes his living using two fingers? Who looks at the world through bifocals? Who looks at golf from the left-handed side — and was doing so before Phil Mickelson was born? Who has been watching stock car races since before drivers started crawling through the window to get to the steering wheel? Who still can’t recognize a balk when he sees one? And has yet to actually see a hockey goal? And can split an infinitive with the best of ‘em.
That guy?
A few weeks ago, a man named Larry Winter called and told me I had been elected to the Atlanta Sports Hall of Fame. “Me?” was my response. “You must be scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
“Oh, no,” he said, “this is just our second group, and you were a unanimous choice.”
Larry must have a lot of time on his hands, but I don’t see how. He’s in the real estate business and real estate is booming in Atlanta. I know, because I’ve started checking the stock quotations before the sports section — or did. You could have bowled me over with a bowling ball, for I’ve never been so sure that Jesus’ close friend, Matthew, wasn’t right when he wrote, “A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.”
Now my picture will be hanging at the airport, but I know some who’d prefer that it be the body itself. Practicing sports writing in this territory all these years, there was no way to establish neutrality. Georgia Bulldogs insisted that I was in bed with Georgia Tech, and Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets insisted I was sleeping with their enemy. When in truth, I really preferred Agnes Scott.
Nevertheless, the electorate must have dismissed my flaws and here I stood, at the pearly gates of recognition by the folks who knew me best. They have high regard for my sense of barbecue, understand that I don’t cheat at golf, have never really mastered the art of homerism, but they overlook the most important thing that I’ve done in life — that is, raise three sons from the ages of 9, 8 and 4 as a single parent, and that they responded with honor. That’s something that doesn’t figure into the sports equation.
I’ve just gone on from one column to the next, about 15,000 of them by this time, trying to tell it as I see it. Baseball was what triggered all this, from hick town back lots to World Series — what a book title — but in addition to the balk, I still have trouble identifying the infield fly rule. There is a lot of stuff in life that are still mysteries to me, like inflation, high post and low post, why we must have Democrats and Republicans, all those Stallone repeats, and the Einstein theory. I do know Charlie Einstein from Albert. Albert could never have written a sports column.
Well, just think of it, walking onto the stage with a man who won 318 baseball games throwing with his knuckles, another man who has been the heavyweight champion four times, the coach who resuscitated basketball at Georgia Tech, a woman who won Olympic gold medals with her feet, a baseball player who played when only the ball was white (a purloined line), and this old dude who got here in 1950 and still won’t go away. Phil Niekro, Evander Holyfield, Bobby Cremins, Wyomia Tyus, James “Red” Moore and the guy who has made a career of semicolons, prepositions, adverbs and the worst foe any in newspapering ever had to face, a deadline with 15 minutes to write.
That’s it. Nothing like honor in your own precinct. I’m just relieved that I wasn’t required to draft some old pal to be my inductor. You see, most of my vintage have departed this earth, or are now living in a second home somewhere on a beach or on a mountain. I’m just happy to have been invited to the party.
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Grimsley story a tip of the iceberg
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Nothing is impossible, but this is pretty close: Knowing for sure that any athlete you name isn’t doing something other than eating all of his or her vegetables between lifting, running, jumping and twisting to become prosperous.
With apologies to our founding fathers, everybody involved with sports these days is guilty until proven innocent when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs, and for good reason.
Let’s just say that there isn’t a better reason to think otherwise. You can blame such skepticism on The Jason Grimsley Doctrine, which states: If an obscure relief pitcher with modest physical looks can spend years using various types of illegal substances, then we really have a mess beyond a mess throughout sports, and that mess will last for an eternity.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, Grimsley surged out of nowhere to become as famous (or infamous) as, oh, say, Barry Bonds. That’s because Grimsley just told on a lot of people. And, no, I’m not referring to the names of present and former baseball players whom he delivered to the feds after they traced a package of human growth hormone (HGH) to his home and confronted him at the front door.
Listen closely, because this goes further than just one guy’s progression of drug use in search of prominence. After all, Grimsley’s story is that of many. He used anabolic steroids until baseball began testing for them. Then he switched to amphetamines. After they became a primary target for the game’s testing program, he became an HGH guy.
Neither baseball nor anybody else has a definitive test for HGH. Not only that, the best way to determine whether somebody is using HGH is to give them a blood test that requires the use of antibodies, and antibodies are in short supply. Even if there were a test that would detect the use of HGH or anything else, it wouldn’t matter. The serial cheaters would find another substance to use, because they always have, and they always will.
Take gene therapy, for instance. According to a Web site called “Human Genome Project Information,” gene therapy is a technique for correcting defective genes responsible for disease development. According to baseball insiders, gene therapy is the next “something” that players will try to exploit to increase their ability to hit, pitch, field and run.
That means baseball will have to go someday from urine tests to blood tests (if the players association ever will approve them) to DNA tests (which the players association never will approve) to hiring their version of Dr. Frankenstein in attempt to stay within a couple of test tubes of the cheaters’ technology.
To be fair to baseball and to the modern athlete, this is an old story that just has new characters. See the sham that was those athletes from the former Soviet Bloc nations who won a slew of gold medals during the 1960s through the collapse of the Berlin Wall. During the last few years, Communist leaders admitted that they regularly gave kids as young as 11 years old so-called “vitamin tablets” that actually were anabolic steroids. Now many of those previous users are adults, and they are suffering from everything from bulimia and tumors to heart defects and depression.
Well, those who aren’t dead.
Former Braves infielder Ken Caminiti was among those in this country whose use of performance-enhancing drugs contributed to his early death. The same was true of football standout Lyle Alzado. Still, given the combination of money and fame that blinds common sense, you’ll continue to have an epidemic of users, which means you’ll continue to have an epidemic of doubters.
For instance: Nobody can throw as hard as Roger Clemens at 43 without a little help, and his head has expanded as much through the years as that beleaguered slugger for the San Francisco Giants. All of these 300-pound linemen in football didn’t just arrive at the turn of the century on a really big space ship. How can Marion Jones keep running that fast with legs over 30, a dinosaur age for sprinters?
We’re back to the Jason Grimsley Doctrine, authored by somebody who entered his 15th season in the majors this year with a 4.76 ERA and 41-56 record after playing for eight different teams. Guess he figured he needed to take stuff to remain at least mediocre.
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