Robert Lipsyte, America Juiced on Sports

In 1975, Robert Lipsyte -- by then, a sportswriter for fourteen years and a New York Times sports columnist as well -- published Sportsworld, An American Dreamland, a fabulous, acerbic, goodbye-to-all-that. In it, he wrote: "By puberty, most American children have been classified as failed athletes and assigned to watch and cheer for those who have survived the first of several major ‘cuts'… Sportsworld heroes exist at sufferance, and the path of glory is often an emotional minefield trapped with pressures to perform and fears of failure. There is no escape from Sportsworld, for player or spectator or even reporter, that watcher in the shadows who pretends to be in the arena but above the fray."

And then, as if to prove his point, Lipsyte, an addict like the rest of us, came back and did it all over again at the Times -- even better. In fact, from Muhammad Ali to NASCAR racing, he's never stopped chewing over the subject of sports and American life.

Oh, and he was also part of a cadre of novelists who broke the staid field of Young Adult fiction wide open back in the 1960s. My kids grew up on his novels: The Contender, The Brave, One Fat Summer. I read them myself in those years. Lipsyte has always tested the boundaries of the Young Adult form. This season he's done it again with his newly published Raiders Night, a down-and-dirty locker-room tale of Jock Culture and high-school football at its well-tested worst, of how one jock, one team captain, tries to deal with the pressures of juiced-up sports parents, enhancement drugs, and sex as brute domination. Like the best of Young Adult fiction, stripped down to narrative and ready for action, it's absolutely gripping.

Of course, I'm a sports-watcher like most of the rest of male (and increasingly female) America and it always seemed to me that some essential part of our lives, our culture, our strangeness would be missing from Tomdispatch if the spectacle of sports didn't take a bow here from time to time. That was a dream. Now, Lipsyte makes it a reality with the first of what will be periodic missives from the sports front. So check out the steroid scandals and a host of other sports matters, Lipsyte-style. Myself, I wouldn't miss it for the (sports)world. Tom Engelhardt

Shooting Up on Jock Culture
By Robert Lipsyte

I was shooting depo-testosterone the other day, imagining how good the juice would make me feel and how it would power my pedaling up the Ram Island hill, the toughest test on my 15-mile bicycle ride. The hill is my Alps and so my feelings about Floyd Landis testing positive this past steroid summer after winning the Tour de France with a ruined hip are so mixed as to be almost incoherent. Like all super-elite athletes, including Barry Bonds and Marion Jones, Floyd is a freak of physique and will. I could double my dosage, shoot up every day, and never ride in his shadow.

So consider what follows just random notes from Jock Culture by a recovering sportswriter.

Denial and Demonization

I do understand my own complicity in the superstars' need for the needle; we -- fans, coaches, parents, owners, media -- demand that they attempt superhuman feats to thrill us, authenticate us, make us rich and proud, and naturally they need superhuman help to satisfy us. (We also want our Whole Foods before they rot, which is why long-haul truck drivers pop speed.)

And we don't want to know about the process. When it's jammed in our faces, when athletes come up "dirty" in testing (or truck drivers jackknife on the interstate), we demand that they be punished and expunged from our fantasies.

This pattern of denial and demonization is our problem, not theirs. Steroid use in sports is a symptom of our disease more than theirs, and a fascinating, if tinted, window on Jock Culture, on its connection to the complicated, dangerous, exhilarating way manhood is measured in America from the field house to the White House.

"Athletes certainly have no ethical dilemma about doing steroids," says Dr. Michael Miletic, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose Detroit-area practice includes high school, college, and professional athletes. "Steroids are totally embedded in the sports culture. We need to get past the finger-pointing. There's been a wholesale abandonment of critical analysis."

There isn't even a solid body of scientific information about performance enhancement in sports to analyze. Exactly which performances are enhanced, and how, and by which anabolic steroids, androgens, human growth hormone, Erythropoietin (EPO), or whatever else athletes shoot, swallow, and sniff? What are the long-term or short-term effects? Are those enhancements and side-effects different for adolescents and adults, for men and women?

And how can we justify teasing out sports performance from all the other ways we try to enhance ourselves?

"Performance-enhancement is in a gray area," says Dr. Robert L. Klitzman, a psychiatrist and faculty associate at Columbia University's Center for Bioethics. "Would you include new technologies to improve cognitive abilities? How about access to SAT prep coaching? Assisted pregnancies?

"It‘s going to get even more complicated as techniques for screening embryos and scanning brains become more sophisticated. Scientists will be looking for stupidity genes and smart pills. Cosmetic psycho-pharmacology is an area where people with money will have advantages over people who don't. Is that fair? In an ideal world there would be a level playing field. Exactly where does cheating begin?"

Cheating begins at the beginning, of course, with our kids.

Enhancing Childhood

I've heard about normal-sized kids getting human growth hormone just to give them a leg up, and I've watched four and five year-olds taking golf and tennis lessons, or racing cars. This is childhood enhancement, the sports equivalent of getting your kid into that pre-school whose starting blocks are on the track to a prep school that feeds Princeton. It makes just as much sense in sports; by pre-adolescence, the competition is fierce and the youngster whose killer instinct hasn't been honed simply won't be advancing to the finals.

My accountant moved to Florida because his eight year-old showed talent on the golf course. He swore he would be doing the equivalent if his son were a whiz at math or the violin. As parents, he insisted, we have a duty to give our kids every chance to discover the limits of their possibilities. No argument there, which makes it harder to argue about the limit of that duty -- and where it becomes child abuse.

Of course, even if as a teenager my accountant's kid bumps up against the limits of his golf game, he'll probably be good enough to be admitted to a selective college that has a golf team, and afterward to work his way up the corporate ladder with joke-a-stroke putts.

Meanwhile, the poor kid who mortgaged his soul for a hoops dream has a lot less to fall back on. As sports reformers keep reminding us, the possibility of a high-school football or basketball player actually playing big-time college ball, much less reaching the pros, is a lottery shot. But coaches, parents, and inner-city educators herd them through school -- and keep them under control -- drugged by the dream. The stereotypical poor jock, who winds up without an education, becomes so much sports trash.

And then we have those little car racers. Since at least the 1950s, quarter-midget and Go-Kart racing as a gearhead little league -- the cars can go 30 miles per hour and up on tiny dirt tracks -- has been a regional phenomenon, primarily in the southeast. In the past half-dozen years, it has followed the NASCAR boom to success. There's serious money, real jobs, and the chance for corporate networking in anything NASCAR-related now, and not just for the drivers on the major and high minor-league circuits. The pit crew that jumps the wall for a top team can make $100,000 each. No wonder those quarter-midget dads have been known to slip illegal additives into their kids' fuel supply.

I recently attended a race where an official pointed out such a dad, whose kid went on to win. But no one wanted to make a fuss and bring down bad publicity. Soon enough, I was told, the kid's victories would lift him into a higher classification and that dad would become some other official's problem. When I asked a few of the officials and crew-chief dads what all this was teaching the youngsters, they looked at me as if I were what I obviously was, a man out of touch.