ShareThisI'm not ready to blame Alex Rodriguez for giving baseball a black eye.
He's not the sport's first superstar to gain an edge by cheating and, besides, baseball has been taking punches thrown by its own for the past 90 years.
(Anniversaries That Won't Be Acknowledged This Year by Major League Baseball: The 1919 White Sox conspiring with gamblers to lose the World Series.)
I'm not even ready to call the details about Rodriguez's introduction to steroids -- "my cousin got me into it," he essentially told reporters earlier this week -- a complete crock, though I can envision Lt. Columbo's expression of incredulity upon hearing how the highest-paid athlete in North America was duped into inserting a needle into his behind by a cousin who got the substance in the Dominican Republic.
"It was amateur hour," Rodriguez recalled. "It was two guys doing a very amateur thing."
Two guys did this very amateur thing twice a month, for three years, until the season Rodriguez turned 28? This is his version of amateur hour?
"That's again part of being young and stupid," he insisted. "I'm here to say I wish I went to college and had the opportunity to grow up at my own pace. When you're young and stupid, you're young and stupid, and I'm very guilty of both."
The young-and-naive defense is absurd, and while I'll accept the premise that Rodriguez has had lifelong issues with stupidity, it seems to me A-Rod is "very guilty" of one thing:
He's altered the mood of February.
February is the shortest month, and for sports fans, it always had the distinction of being the silliest month, too. If May is a crossroads of classic events (the Kentucky Derby, the Indy 500) and October represents a confluence of everything at once (basketball begins, baseball ends, football is in its prime), February used to be a four-week time out for blindfolded slam dunks during the NBA's All-Star Weekend and Bill Murray throwing bystanders into the bunker at Pebble Beach.
February was for dog shows and the Pro Bowl, not that there's a difference. February was the reason behind such doomed pro-football ventures as the USFL and the XFL. February gave the fiercest hockey players in the world a chance to meet on a rink and play an All-Star Game decided by a score of 14-10.
The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue debuted in 1964. Why would a publication devoted to showcasing the work of terrific writers and photographers put models in poses usually seen in a liquor-store girlie-magazine?
Because it's February.
(True confession: I looked forward to the annual swimsuit issue when I was a kid, not so much for the swimsuit issue itself but the angry letters from disgusted mothers that followed.)
February was the inspiration behind some of the worst TV shows ever produced, such as "Superstars." (Elite athletes associated with one sport flail and gasp while attempting to perform another sport.) And "Battle of the Network Stars." (Celebrities associated with television flail and gasp while attempting to perform any sport.) And the "World's Strongest Man" competition. (Anonymous behemoths dragging freight cars down a track.)
These beyond-dumb shows were never taped in February, and didn't debut in February. But they were conceived because of February -- the month sports fans took a time out to stretch and yawn and consider, say, the ramifications of Groundhog Day.
Only in February could the concept of a Groundhog Day be possible.
The silliness that was February became a necessary interlude in the sports cycle. The blindfolded slam dunks and 14-10 hockey games and swimsuit issues and celebrity golfers goofing off at Pebble Beach preceded the basketball madness of March and the grand opening of The Show, at a ballpark near you, in April.
February was the springboard to the real world, the lull before the storm, a chance for everybody to catch their breath before the epic-showdown game between Duke and North Carolina actually, like, matters. Thanks to February, we were off and running.
Not this year. This year, Sports Illustrated didn't need 14 pages of models on a tropical beach to provoke controversy. This year, Sports Illustrated identified the presumptive all-time home run king to be as much of a cheater as the incumbent all-time home run king.
"I didn't think they were steroids," Alex Rodriguez said of all those shots he took for three years. "All these years, I never thought I did anything wrong."
Oh, for the old February, when the only talk of dope was about the dope, eager to be recognized as the World's Strongest Man, pulling a freight car down a track.
(Contact John McGrath at john.mcgrath@thenewstribune.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
columnMust credit the News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.
