All puffed up

By Bob Gaydos
“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
-- John 8:32
Alex Rodriguez is a prisoner of his own mind. Blinded by pride -- the mother of all sins -- and unable to speak, perhaps even to see the truth, he has managed to turn what might have been the greatest baseball career of all time into a traveling sideshow of contradictions, disappointment and lies. So many lies.
So engrossed is he in protecting what he regards as most important in life -- his image of himself -- he could not even allow a confession of wrongdoing, a moment of humility, to be simply that. Exposed by a sports writer as one of baseball’s growing number of steroid users, Rodriguez had the good sense not to deny what was evident. Yes, he had used a substance for three years when he was playing in Texas, he said.
“I screwed up,” he said at his recent press conference. He was “young,” he said. He was “naive,” he said. He was “stupid,” he said. It was a “loosey-goosey” period in baseball, he said.
Were you cheating? he was asked. “I’ll leave that to others to decide,” he answered.
Of course he was cheating. That’s the whole point of using illegal performance enhancing drugs -- to gain unfair advantage against one’s peers. It doesn’t matter if others were doing it as well, it was cheating. And when he told Katie Couric on TV that he had never used steroids, he was lying, because he thought the evidence would never be made public. And by his own admission, he only stopped using steroids when Major League Baseball instituted a test and penalties for steroid use. There is nothing admirable in that.
Nor was there a lot to admire in his confession/apology. He gets points for saying he did it, unlike others who continue to deny. But if that’s the case, why did he need a prepared statement to read to the press? Just tell your story. This is not a stupid man. This is not a naive man. He was no kid when this happened. This is a world class superstar whose physical condition is his fortune and whose private life is front page news as much as his baseball exploits are back page news. He knows what he did. He knows how many times he did it, how he did it. Why he did it. It is not believable to say otherwise. He probably remembers every home run he hit in Little League, every touchdown pass he threw in high school, yet he would have fans believe he did not remember the first time his cousin, or whoever it was, injected an illegal substance into his buttocks, where it happened, what it felt like and what the drug did for him as a baseball player? Absurd.
Maybe the only genuine moment in his press conference came when he began to thank his teammates for showing up to support him. He choked up and couldn’t say anything for half a minute, finally managing a “Thank you.” The toughest skeptics have claimed it was staged, that he was acting. I don’t believe that. I believe that Rodriguez, a man so unused to letting down his guard and showing genuine emotion in public was truly overwhelmed by what he had to know was a strong display of support that he did not deserve, something he could only imagine giving in lip-service terms. After all, he had betrayed these teammates, cast further doubt on the performance of all baseball players and, as he has ever since coming to New York, made everything all about himself again.
Of course, the Yankees need Rodriguez to perform well on the field and he has nine years left on his contract, so they would like him to perform in a manner befitting the highest-paid player in the game. Judgments on the records and the Hall of Fame can wait for now while he tries to salvage his reputation. That will not happen if he continues to nourish his pride and protect his ego. Half-measures will not do.
Which brings us to the so-called rehabilitation of A-Roid. The Yankees and their third baseman announced simultaneously with the press conference that he would be lending his support to the efforts of the Taylor Hooton Foundation to combat steroid use by young athletes. The foundation was established by Don Hooton after his son, a high school athlete, became seriously depressed from taking steroids and committed suicide. And just what is Rodriguez going to do for the foundation? Give it money? Fine, it can use it. That’s easy. But, hey, Mr. Rodriguez, didn’t steroids help you get that $300 million contract? Didn’t they help hook you up with Madonna? So what’s your message to high school and college athletes? Don’t be naïve, don’t be stupid, don’t mess up, don’t get caught?
Why is it wrong to use steroids without a prescription, Alex? Are there serious physical risks? Mental risks? Do they become addictive? Besides being illegal, is it unethical? Does it rob you of your self-worth? Does it diminish your accomplishments? Is it for crying out loud, cheating? And does it leave you, ultimately, worrying solely about how you appear to everyone else and utterly clueless about who you really are?
Until the greatest ballplayer of his era can answer those questions honestly --and he hasn’t even tried yet in public -- he has nothing of value to tell young America.
* * *
“In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.” -- John Ruskin

“And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.”
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Pride attaches undue importance to the superiority of one's status in the eyes of others; And shame is fear of humiliation at one's inferior status in the estimation of others. When one sets his heart on being highly esteemed, and achieves such rating, then he is automatically involved in fear of losing his status." -- Lao-Tzu

“Pride goes before destruction,
a haughty spirit before a fall.”
--Proverbs 16:18–19

The Adventures of Tom and Huck

Grandchildren and Twisted Lips
By Beth Quinn

With the arrival of grandchildren, one tumbling into life after another now, the dogs in our family have had to trade in their erstwhile peaceful existence for one fraught with excitement and some danger.
None of the children actually means to cause a dog any harm, with the possible exception of our 2-year-old granddaughter Devon, whom I recently caught standing face to face with Tom, our yellow Lab. She had his lips gripped firmly in her little hands, and she was twisting them backwards, causing Tom to have a most peculiar and unnatural smile on his face.
Tom rolled his eyes toward me in a mute plea for help. He dared not move a muscle lest she tighten her lip grip. I saved him from the enfant terrible, and he will forever love me for my intervention – and for the time-out Devon had to serve in hopes that she will reform.
(She claimed she was “thorry” and they kissed and made up, but I suspect she will have to serve a few more time-outs before she fully embraces the notion that she’s never allowed to hurt a dog.)
That Tom, he’s a good dog. All the Labs in our extended family are – Tom and Huckleberry, Gus and Little Mac. Not one of them would harm a child no matter what body part that child poked or prodded or twisted. Soon after the lip-gripping incident, I watched the care Tom took with Devon when she climbed onto his back to play horsey. Tom slowly lowered himself to the floor, then gently rolled over onto his side to unseat her.
She had to serve time for that infraction, too. No riding the dogs, I told her. Again, she was “thorry” although she stuck out her lower lip to pout for the duration of her sentence this time. I sensed she thought my rules were “thupid.”
But the dogs also manage to inflict punishments of their own, though I’m certain they don’t mean to. Huck’s tail, after all, is just the height of a toddler’s eyes, and there’s no managing the thing once it’s revved up to full wag speed. Devon has developed a defensive blink when she’s in the same room with a dog. Her older cousin Sam did, too, during his own toddlerhood.
Now Sam has twin baby brothers, and the wagging Lab tails have created a problem of a different sort. The babies were premature, weighing in at 1 pound and change, each barely bigger than an ear of corn. They had to finish cooking at the hospital, and when they were finally sent home a couple of months ago, they arrived with oxygen tanks and monitors and tubes and wires.
My son’s house looks like a nearby hospital exploded and rained durable medical supplies into their living room.
The Labs went into nanny mode when the babies got home. There isn’t a Lab on this earth who doesn’t get involved when a baby is in the house. Sit down with a twin and a bottle, and there’s Gus on the couch next to you, resting his chin on your shoulder to supervise the meal. I’m sure Gus would remind me to burp a baby if I forgot to.
And Little Mac. Well, the very prospect of a lickable baby in the house – two lickable babies! – brings out the whirling dervish in him and sets his tail wagging faster than you can see it moving. It practically hums.
Therein lies the problem, of course, when there are wires all over the place connecting two babies to oxygen and monitors. After Little Mac has been through the room, it’s not uncommon to discover a wire just dangling there, just hanging from a twin, unmoored from an oxygen tank by the swipe of a dog tail.
Oh my, we say when someone discovers an unattached wire. Who’s not getting oxygen? Is there a twin turning blue in here?
Fortunately, neither Austin nor Bryce has ever turned blue and, really, they don’t seem to need the oxygen all that much. Still, Little Mac gets a time-out of his own whenever this happens, banished to the yard to wear out his exuberance by chasing a squirrel or two.
And while a Lab never pouts while serving his time, I’m certain that, on some level, he’s “thorry” too.
Beth Quinn can be reached at huckquinn@gmail.com.