You may be surprised to know that I actually participate in some lists that have nothing to do with athletics. One of them is a chronic pain list serve. Some of the participants are pretty entertaining writers. A post today I thought deserved wider attention and is particularly relevant to the ST crowd so I have copied most of the post (and left off some that is only relevant to the list serve). Credit for this goes to Joe Talley, M.D.
To All:
When Bonds hit 756 out last night, it caused me to pause and reflect on a number of related issues, including my own private battles, having to do with enhancement of performance with drugs. Do forgive me if you perceive a little touch of pride in my story.
First, let me say that I have never taken a performance-enhancing drug. (Er, well, — only once, that is, and it didn’t work. Either that damned blue rhomboid-shaped tablet was made in China, or the dose was too low, or whatever. But one way or the other, the hope-for “enhanced performance” collapsed, which soured me on the whole idea!)
But I have, for much of my life, struggled to compete against those who “cheated” by devising ways to enhance their performance. I first encountered it my freshman year at Wake Forest, in 1955, when I was on the track team. There were no effective drugs to enhance performance back then, but there were still other means of gaining an unfair advantage over your competitors – “performance-enhancing activities”, if you will. The activity most rampant at the time was hard training. And almost all the athletes did it. They would run around that stupid cinder track until they dropped, all in the hope and dream of someday breaking the tape ahead of other runners at some stupid “meet.” I am proud to tell you all that I never sank to that level. Even though everyone else was doing it. Even my coaches encouraged it. Coach Jordan would scream and threaten me with physical mayhem if I didn’t train, but I clung to my principles and resisted it. I would cut through the woods to forge a shortcut on the cross-country course. I would fake “shin-splints” when it was time to do the two-mile. I would hide in the towel locker when they were running wind sprints.
The sacrifice I made by adhering to my principles was costly for my athletic career. With everybody but me cheating, the best I ever managed was 4th place finish in the 880 yard dash at a Big Four meet (NC State, UNC, Duke and Wake Forest). But I can say with pride that I did it with the body that God gave me, not with some beefed-up, low oxygen-consuming imitation of a body forged by obsessive-compulsive, masochistic self-torture and mutilation.
And the performance-enhancing by cheating was not limited to athletics. I was appalled to see that most students, instead of just occasionally going to a class and listening to what the professor said, felt compelled to take the textbook home and study the stuff. And later in medical school, I found that this cheating was even worse. I even suspect, God forbid, that even good guys like Billy and Joel did it. They probably thought they had to, since everybody else was. But I stuck to my principles and refused to cheat. And even though my honesty may have kept me from making Summa Cum Laude, I did finish 51st in my class, and I know in my heart I’m really smarter than those 50 cheaters who finished ahead of me. (I do wish my class could have had 400 people, like West Point, instead of the 52 we had, because I’m sure I could have beaten out the additional 348, unless of course they resorted to cheating also.) . . .