According to legend, Dr. Faust traded his soul to the devil for knowledge and magical powers. In an updated version of the legend, Damn Yankees, an avid Washington Senators baseball fan makes a similar deal to become a home run hitting star who leads the Senators to a pennant over the Yankees.
That's one context for the latest exhaustively documented revelations that Barry Bonds broke the home run record of another cheater, Mark McGwire, by using an elaborately designed combination of steroids, growth hormones and other drugs to build muscle and power. For most watchers of the game, the new book, Game of Shadows, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams (excerpted in Sports Illustrated) just confirmed and added interesting detail to the obvious: Bonds's late career change in appearance and his emergence as the greatest power hitter in the history of the game was the result of "juice," the slang term for illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Apparently, he began pumping up his performance and his body in 1999. That means 210 of his 708 home runs were illegal and that his true lifetime batting average would sink below .300.
Bond's record of 73 homers in a season, his unprecedented string of Most Valuable Player Awards for 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004, and his batting average titles for 2002 (.370) and 2004 (.362) should be, but won't be, expunged, though they will surely be demeaned by a footnote.
He will probably never be adjudicated a cheater in a court of law, but the evidence is good enough in the court of public opinion, and he will surely end his career in disgrace. And so he joins scores of prominent athletes sentenced to the Hall of Shame for trading honor, reputation and, perhaps, their souls for the fool's gold version of immortality—the adulation of sports fans and the glory of setting records.
At the root of these unwise and immoral trades with the devil is the cheaters' illusion that satisfying an obsessive lust will create lasting pleasure, and that, in the end, they will find a way to cheat the devil, too.
The lessons go well beyond sports:
Never do something that will work out only if it is never found out,
never trade honor for glory, and never trade the future for today.
-character counts
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