Stand up and boo.
That was the advice to fans from legendary sports columnist Dick Young when then-New York Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden returned from a drug suspension in 1987.
There are a few guys today who deserve the catcalls even more.
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Grand jury testimony leaked last week revealed the game's most spectacular run producer, Barry Bonds, and New York Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi as admitted cheats, even if the forthrightness of their admissions varied wildly.
Giambi flatly told a grand jury investigating a San Francisco business accused of creating and distributing steroids that he'd juiced up in just about every conceivable fashion, from injecting human growth hormone into his stomach and testosterone into his behind, to rubbing a steroid-laced lotion referred to as "the cream" on his skin and dropping a liquid called "the clear" under his tongue.
Bonds also admitted using the cream and the clear, though he denied knowing there was anything illegal in them.
This, even though the man who gave both men the cream and the clear, Greg Anderson, wasn't Bonds' personal trainer. He's someone the man chasing Hank Aaron has described as his best friend.
Giambi's pinstriped teammate, Gary Sheffield, also testified that Anderson gave him the cream and the clear, though he also invoked the Bonds defense, denying that he knew the substances contained steroids.
That alibi stretches the credibility of all three beyond the breaking point. Giambi's 2004 salary of $12,428,571 makes him the lowest-paid of the trio, with Sheffield getting $13 million and Bonds collecting $18 million from the San Francisco Giants.
The notion that men making that kind of money, or even a tenth of it, would risk their future earning potential by haphazardly applying and ingesting mystery substances without bothering to learn their contents leapfrogs preposterous and lands in the realm of ludicrous.
That's also the home of the claim made by all three men that the substances didn't help their performances. Look at their numbers. All three have always been tremendous talents. But the numbers produced by Giambi and Sheffield leap from All-Star to Hall-of-Fame status. And Bonds jumped from Hall-of-Famer to consideration as the greatest hitter ever. At least if you look at his stats after the age of 35.
In 1999, at 34, Bonds missed 60 games. He hit just .262, with a .389 on-base percentage. Last season, at 39, he hit .362 with a stunning .609 OBP, a number fattened greatly by the 120 intentional walks issued by pitchers afraid to put the ball anywhere near the plate.
The increase in Bonds' home-run production is even more marked and mysterious. Over the first 14 seasons of his career, he averaged 31.8 per season. Over the past five, that number jumps by nearly 20 blasts per season, to 51.6.
Those numbers alone don't prove anything. But taken in context with the wild transformation of his body from lean and lanky to impossibly powerful, as well as his grand-jury testimony, only the most naive could reasonably believe him innocent, or all-natural.
And spare me the misguided notion that steroids don't make baseball players better. Tests have shown human-growth hormone to markedly improve eyesight, a hitter's most vital trait. Steroids not only increase strength, they allow athletes to work out more and longer, with less recovery time needed.
While Bonds avoided implicating himself as damningly as did Giambi, he did nothing to exonerate himself, either. The rest of his testimony serves only to reinforce his place as the least-beloved superstar in any major sport. Once again, he revealed himself as arrogant, paranoid and, to borrow a phrase from psychology and "The Sopranos," utterly incapable of joy.
Worse, he's perfectly happy to blame any impropriety completely on Anderson, his alleged friend.
Like him or not, and believe him or not, there's no doubt about this much -- Bonds cheated.
So did Giambi, whose 2004 season was truncated by mysterious ailments and hit a career-low .208 when he could play.
So did Sheffield.
So did scores of their peers, whether we ever learn their names or not.
The revelations of recent weeks are already having a ripple effect throughout baseball, as teams start looking a bit differently at potential acquisitions. The New York Post reported late last week that the Mets have cooled on Sammy Sosa, another slugger whose bulk and home-run numbers drastically increased at a point when most normal humans have stopped growing, but whose productivity dropped off markedly over the past two years. Which coincides with intensified discussion of the prevalence of steroids, as well as baseball's long-overdue formulation of an anti-juicing policy.
Since that system had absolutely no teeth until last season, there's not much that Commissioner Bud Selig will, or can, do about Bonds, Giambi and Sheffield. But even if they, and every other player, remain unimpeachably clean from this moment on, the damage has been done. When Gooden incurred Young's curmudgeonly wrath, the pitcher was hurting himself and his team. No one has ever referred to cocaine as a "performance-enhancing drug," at least when it comes to sports.
Pete Rose remains permanently banned from the sport, and the Hall of Fame, for betting on baseball games.
This generation of cheaters, though, has inflicted greater damage on the game itself than all the cokeheads and game-fixers combined.
You can't look at Bonds' 73 home runs in 2001, or any other recent homer binge -- including Sosa's 2-year home run duel with Mark McGwire in 1998 and '99 -- and not wonder.
For that matter, you can't look at any recent baseball accomplishment, by an individual or team, and not think that cheating may well have helped in its production.
You certainly can't explain to a child why athletes held up as role models, whether they like it or not, cheat to attain such glory, and then lie about it.
And you can't expect that there will be any real justice, or that this mess will be properly cleaned up.
There's only one thing you can do.
Stand up and boo.
Some people just don't know when to shut up.
Giovanni Rubio came into last month's bout against Nick Casal with the best record of any of the Niagara Falls welterweight's five pro opponents to date, with six wins in nine fights.
Rubio made what proved to be a huge tactical blunder before the match, though, taunting the unbeaten prospect with predictions of a first-round knockout while both were in the seats at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
Rubio proved to be half right. After allowing his opponent to land his first punch, Casal launched a two-fisted attack that produced his fifth knockout win in as many fights, less than two minutes after the opening bell.
To his credit, Rubio did last longer than Casal's first two first-round kayo victims, Timothy Crane and Lance Leggett. Casal dispatched those two opponents in 44 and 35 seconds, respectively, 10 days apart in July.
At 5-0, with all five wins via stoppage, Casal's next scheduled fight is Dec. 17 at Chumash Casino in Santa Ynez, Calif., against an opponent to be named.
On the same night as the Casal-Rubio blowout, another fighter with a Niagara Falls connection won a title belt.
Ian Gardner, who made his pro debut against Tommy Huff of Niagara Falls on the undercard of Joe Mesi's fourth-round knockout of Jorge Luis Gonzalez at the old Niagara Falls Convention Center in April 2001, took a majority decision from Tokunbo Olajide to earn the World Boxing Organization/North American Boxing Association's junior middleweight (154-pound) title.
Gardner, a Canadian now fighting out of Brockton, Mass., dropped Huff in the first round of their bout. While Huff got up and came on strong later in the fight, he wasn't able to overcome the early deficit and dropped a four-round decision.
Their careers have veered in drastically different directions since that night. Gardner's win over Olajide came in his 19th fight. He's lost only once, a four-round decision to Peter Manfredo Jr. in his third pro outing. Manfredo is now 21-0 and held the minor-league WBO belt before vacating it earlier this year.
Huff, meanwhile, has had but three fights since meeting Gardner, with the death of trainer Lew Ciavaglia and illness of promoter Allan Tremblay, as well as a series of fight cancellations, stalling his development.
He's won two of those three, both by knockout, with the only loss coming on a controversial first-round TKO after a cut apparently caused by a butt was credited to a punch by Dorian Beaupierre, despite video evidence to the contrary. Huff's last bout was a fourth-round stoppage of Cassius Martel in Niagara Falls, Ont., in March 2003.
Huff could get a jump-start shortly, though. Tremblay, having recovered from a battle with prostate cancer, was in town again last week, meeting with potential sponsors. He said he's hoping to produce a fight card in January or February, with both the Burt Flickinger Center in downtown Buffalo and Conference Center Niagara Falls (the former Falls Street Faire) under consideration as potential sites.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Dec. 7 2004 |