You know, Murphy’s Law always wins out. Just when I decide I’ve got to lighten up on the blog, perhaps write something totally lighthearted or something related to my profession, this pops up:

 http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/Womens-groups-urge-CBS-to-drop-Tebow-Super-Bowl-ad-012510/?gt1=39002

 For those of you who haven’t clicked the link and read it, allow me guess what you’re thinking: GoDaddy.com had another advertisement banned for having too many scantly clad women. (Or, one woman too scantly clad.)

 No this article is about an ad featuring 2007 Heisman Trophy Winner Tim Tebow and his Mom. It seems back in 1987, Tim’s Mom was a missionary and got sick while pregnant in the Philippines. The doctors advised her to have an abortion. She didn’t, and you guessed it, had a Heisman Trophy Winning son.

 It sounds like a story that should leave you feeling all warm and fuzzy. Here’s a kid who’s likely headed to the NFL who almost didn’t exist. Instead, what’s the reaction?

 Various women’s organizations want CBS to drop the ad. I suppose they could have argued that this is a sexually oriented topic, and wasn’t appropriate for a family hour, but they didn’t go there. Here’s a quote from the above referenced article:

 The protest letter from the Women's Media Center suggested that CBS should have turned down the ad in part because it was conceived by Focus on the Family.

 "By offering one of the most coveted advertising spots of the year to an anti-equality, anti-choice, homophobic organization, CBS is aligning itself with a political stance that will damage its reputation, alienate viewers, and discourage consumers from supporting its shows and advertisers," the letter said.

 That’s a lot to absorb in one shot. Even assuming that everything the Women’s Media Center said is true, I wonder what ever happened to “The views expressed in this commercial do not necessarily reflect those of this station or its affiliates.” Did they throw that line away? What makes it null and void?

 The argument actually deteriorated from here:

 Terry O'Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, said she had respect for the private choices made by women such as Pam Tebow but condemned the planned ad as "extraordinarily offensive and demeaning."

 How do you make that argument with a straight face? “I respect your choices, even thought I think they’re offensive and demeaning.” “I like this beer, even though I think it tastes like elephant urine.” It’s a direct and transparent contradiction. I know that the greatest sin of all in American society is being close minded, but you can’t look open minded by saying stuff like this.

O’Neill continued:

"That's not being respectful of other people's lives," O'Neill said. "It is offensive to hold one way out as being a superior way over everybody else's."

Really?

In America?

Does Terry O’Neill really want to break out the duct tape and silence anyone who doesn’t agree with Terry O’Neill?

Duct tape is great stuff folks. It doesn’t care where it’s applied. It’s cheap. Anyone can get it. If you can put it across Tim Tebow’s mouth, you can put it across Terry O’Neill’s mouth…and my mouth…and your mouth.

Perhaps that’s the goal. Get society where you like it, and tape everyone up so it can’t change. It’s not a new concept. The founding fathers were wise when they included the First Amendment in the Constitution, but they weren’t clairvoyant. They knew that societies will oppress when allowed.

The funniest part about all of this is that the article was actually censored after it was posted. They took out a comment made by Gregg Doyel of CBSSports, which is how the article originally ended. He called Super Bowl Sunday, "the holiest day of the year" and stating that "February 7 is simply not the day to have that discussion." I didn’t get a chance to write my blog until after that pristine comment was deleted from the article, and I had to Google the comment to find it again:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/pc_double_standard_on_abortion.html

Lewis Black has a Skit to the effect that he has no religion, but he always watches the Super Bowl…and it’s on a Sunday, so at least he’s trying. This sounded so much like that skit, I thought perhaps at first Lew might have cried copyright infringement.

What was the original purpose of ending the piece that way? It sounds like this was the paragraph that was supposed to include our opinion—as if most people are running around like children with their hands over their ears saying “La, La, La, I can’t hear you” over and over.

This leaves us with another question: Why did they delete the comment? Was Doyel being profound and illustrating the insanity of the whole thing? His remarks imply that the everyday man wants to remain ignorant and enjoy his pastimes. Did he slide this by everyone at first, until the editors realized what he really meant?

 Or did he really believe that ignorance is bliss and people only want to be ignorant right now?

If he’s wrong, he’s merely insulting his readers. If he’s right, he might accidentally shake people out of their bliss.

Either way we can’t have that. Someone might be offended.

Jon Paul Morosi wrote a scathing piece about Mark McGwire today. You can read it at:

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/Morosi-mcgwire-confession-comes-too-late-for-Hall.

Let me say first that I don’t disagree with him on his specific points about steroids. McGwire stated he only used steroids to stay healthy. Translation, he was trying to keep the performance levels that he had in his twenties going for a bit longer than the abuse of professional sports will normally permit. That window is really how records are set. How many home runs can you hit before your body wears out? If you stretch that window in some unnatural way, then you’re cheating pure and simple.

However, there is one aspect of this that never seems to get discussed. More and more it seems that just about every player from the era was taking steroids. To quote Morosi:

“I’m not currently a Hall voter. But if and when I join the electorate, I will apply a different standard to hitters who played during the Steroid Era. That’s the period that roughly coincides with McGwire’s playing career (1986 through 2001).

It pains me to say this, but the sluggers who played during that time are guilty until proven innocent, at least when it comes to the Hall of Fame. Through the reports and the books and the Mitchell Report, an overwhelming amount of evidence points to the same conclusion: A lot of players took steroids.”

If that is the case, then one has to ask why. I’m not absolving anyone of their individual decisions, but Major League Baseball is as much a company as any other. They were rewarding players that use steroids with huge contracts and essentially punishing the utility men batting .230, making it harder to get on the team and giving them less pay. All during the “Steroid Era” there were calls for testing, and it wasn’t until Jose Canseco came out with his book and brought the wrath of congress down on MLB that anything was done.

How much money did MLB make during 1998, when McGwire and Sosa were dueling for the home run title? I know I wasn’t going to be watching the Cubs or Cardinals otherwise. Heck, at the time I hadn’t properly followed baseball since Mike Schmidt was slugging for the Phillies. To say they made millions from McGwire and Sosa’s abuse of drugs is both chilling and an understatement.

And yet, there are those such as Mr. Morosi, who believe that McGwire and his ilk should be kept out of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Listen folks, I don’t want to reward cheating, but I don’t want to reward exploitation either. If we keep these men out of the hall of fame, this allows MLB to sweep this period of history under the rug.

What we need is a “Steroid Era” wing of the Hall, that lets people remember the most cutthroat years of baseball. Induct McGwire, and track his health progress. When he passes, note if he had cancer or heart damage from the steroids.

Have a specific display that describes the long term effects of steroids, and another that describes what MLB does to discourage their use. (To do that, first they have to discourage their use in some spectacular way. Otherwise they’ll look as lame as they are.)

The NFL went through a similar period, before the effects were understood. Those players became object lessons for athletes of every sport, as so many of them died from health problems related to steroids. They were guinea pigs that demonstrated both the upside and downsides of the drugs: fame, fortune, and an early death. There were shades of Faust in every story.

The NFL, hardly the perfect example of an organization that cares for its people, began testing for steroids in 1987. Note how close this was to the beginning of baseball’s steroid era as quoted by Morosi. Surely the NFL had more to gain by not testing than baseball did. With access to the same body of knowledge, why did MLB wait until 2004? It’s almost as if when the NFL announced they were going to test for the drugs, MLB said, “What’s that? The stuff works? Hey, I got to get some of that.”

If inducting such players sends the wrong message, then we need something else—so that this era is not forgotten. Perhaps we need to build a memorial in front of each hall of fame. We could inscribe on it the names of all the players who sacrificed their careers and life spans so that the fans could have high scoring games and sports leagues could make gobs of money from them.

Before you get high and mighty on Big Mac or anyone else, remember they did it because they knew you’d be watching.

I got an interesting glimpse this week into the mind of the professional athlete. It’s nothing new really. It’s the same glimpse that we get whenever we see one of these people do something that seems patently self destructive in order to win a game.

 It happens all the time really. So many people have been caught taking steroids and other chemical enhancements that we don’t even get shocked anymore. “Oh, another one cheating to get ahead.” It doesn’t really hit us anymore. And we don’t really feel any empathy because they’re cheaters who got caught. Everyone loves the stories from yesteryear about NASCAR racers trying to find “an edge” with illegal modifications to their cars. But let a modern day guy get caught a quarter of an inch too low after the race, there’s an uproar.

No I don’t entirely understand the psychology of it, but that’s a blog entry for another time.

What I saw this week did not involve cheating. Instead, it allows us to see something of the culture of professional athletes, which I think we will find is a far more intense place than any fan realizes.

I’m a huge Pittsburg Steelers fan, and one of my favorite players is Hines Ward. He’s inspirational. He goes out, does his job, gets hit really hard, and comes up smiling—consistently. He gives it as good as he gets it, and blocks for his teammates as hard as anyone in the game. He’ll do anything for the team. Corporate managers should have posters of him in the hallways, getting up from a brutal hit smiling, or helping one his teammates with a maximum effort block.

We’ve all been “blindsided” by one situation or another. How important is it to get up smiling?

And again, what manager doesn’t want his employees giving their all, even when another team member will get the glory?

We, the fans, never really give a thought to what’s driving Hines to be such a good football player. We just accept that he is just that, and enjoy the game. Well, we got a little glimpse of that this week, and it was a bit startling to the uninitiated.

In the last game, Ben Roethlisberger took a knee to the head. He was tackled, and one of the defensive backs accidentally bumped him in the head with his knee. I’m not sure what it’s like having a couple hundred plus pounds of muscle run at you as fast as he can and smack you in the side of the head with his knee unintentionally. I’m not guessing it’s any kind of fun.

At any rate, Ben got a concussion. It wasn’t an obviously bad concussion, and the next day he felt fine. He was asymptomatic. He planed to play against the Baltimore Ravens. Later in the week, he started getting headaches after practice, and the doctors decided that the concussion wasn’t healed yet—hence, no football for young Ben.

This wasn’t decided until the day before the game, which seemed to annoy a certain percentage of the Pittsburgh players. In a way I can understand that. My initial reaction when Ben got hurt was that no matter how he felt, he shouldn’t play against the Ravens. The odds of getting another concussion when playing the Ravens are always good, and getting a concussion on top of a concussion is not conducive to a long, happy and productive life. Even from a football perspective it’s a bad idea, because Ben could be lost for the season—or forever if the hit is career ending.

What was somewhat surprising to me is that Hines seemed to say that Ben should have lied to the doctors about how he felt so that they would let him play. Hines says he’s done it, and other players do this all the time. For all we know, Hines had a concussion in the game as well.

Consider that we’re learning more and more about concussions, largely as a result of the increasing number of retired NFL players developing serious brain maladies. I’m sure Hines does. He’s not unintelligent or unaware I’m sure. He’s just operating at a level of competitiveness that goes well beyond the comprehension of the average fan (like me.) 

You see, I love to see the Steelers win, but I’m still a fan if they lose. I’m a fan of the players, the coaches, the history, the work ethic. I’m not just a fan of the wins. I don’t want to see the players hurt, because I’m a fan of them. I don’t want to see the future of the current team mirror the fate of the Steelers from the 1970’s. A lot of those guys ended up dying young or with permanent physical or mental problems because we didn’t understand certain dangers in the game. Back then we didn’t know better. Now we’ve got no excuse.

I know players like Hines want to win. They’ve got an incredible drive, or they wouldn’t be competing at that level. It’s just that simple. However, someone has to start reinforcing the fact that if they damage themselves it’s bad for them, their team, and the sport. If you’re hurt, be honest and sit out. If you don’t care about your own health, then consider this: at some point there is going to be a body of data that the NFL is destroying all the players that fans like me care about, and then you’ll hear calls to Congress for regulations. From there, it becomes “If we can’t make it safe we should do without it.” Eventually, stories of our favorite players—like Mike Webster dying at 50 (http://espn.go.com/classic/obit/s/2002/0924/1435977.html)—will sour the game for people, and it will lose popularity. I grew up watching Mike Webster—those teams helped forge me into a Steelers fan. I can’t help but feel bad and almost guilty. I cheered him on while he was used up like a commodity.

By saving yourself, Hines, you’ll be saving your sport in the long term. If I start reading obits of current Steelers within the next couple of decades, that’s really going to turn me against a game I love to watch..

If the nature of the games is going to destroy people, and there’s nothing we can do about it, then perhaps it’s time for a new game. If we’re going to keep playing the game, it’s going to require participation from the players to make the game safe enough to play.