In A Rage Over 'Roids

Vince McMahon, the owner of professional wrestling, is again about to crack-down on steroid and drug use in his entertainment sport. It’s not a “real” sport, mind you. It’s a circus of body-building caricatures of men and women who sacrifice their bodies to advance story lines and drama to people who are out of shape emotionally and financially. I was once very much into professional wrestling. That was about 14 years ago.

I’ll cut through the crap here and get to the opinion part of this Op-Ed piece:

Professional Wrestlers should be forced to used steroids, even at low levels. They are there purely to entertain. Steroids are the CGI, the special effects, the Light Sabers and Pixar programming of the human body. I think they should be legalized, but also tested-for in professional sports. If you want to level the playing field, either a full ban where everyone gets tested, and the positives get banned for life, or it’s agreed-upon up to a certain level of use, and anything over certain levels wipes out a player’s season. Kind of like a gun. Given the right to use one, would the right ones use?

Like any drug, ‘roids come with their own pecadilloes. Testicular shrinkage as testosterone rockets through the body. Hairloss in men. Women get more manly in the voice and growing a penis.

Erupting, fertile fields of back acne, or "Bacne".

High cholesterol. “Roid Rage.” Buying every Pantera t-shirt you can find and tearing off the sleeves. And there are some bad things, too. Becoming a Raiders fan, for instance.

But in Pro Wrestling, they went through this in the late 1990s. The wrestlers looked softer and more “normal” and less like the “superhumans” they are marketed as. Attendance lagged like Ric Flair's 61 year-old man boobs. Right now, WWE wrestlers look like they are about to split their skin.

But now, with the onslaught of Mixed Martial Arts, watching a guy take a fake punch from a guy in pink tights is less intriguing than seeing a 200-lb man get put to sleep with a real punch. The Sleeper Hold is nothing compared to a Guillotine Choke. Watch this MMA Kick vs. this WWE Kick, and tell me which made you say “HOLY JAMES EARL JONES” faster.

If you could take a pill or slap on a patch that made your job easier, how fast would you do it? What if the side effect of heavy use was that you would lose your fingernails and really like Nickelback, but moderate use – and taking 10 days off of it every month – meant you’d probably just have bloodier-than-usual stools from time to time? But hell, look at all of your collating and calling and cross-referencing! Like all-world levels. I would double-hand-grab the chalice of enhancement, hit a knee, and glug till I saw daylight through the bottom. While blaring Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”

If it’s natural, great, go that way. Nature has a cure for every ailment, except being a total ho-bag. Oh wait, STDs, nevermind. So anywho, where was I…

I don’t really care what happens to WWE. I have no stock – financial or emotional – in the organization. But when it comes to what we as a public wanting to be entertained by athletic feats, in sports real and imagined, remember that those men and women sacrifice a LOT to put on a show for us. Many of them do not live very long after their careers. And last time I checked, steroids and the like were called “performance enhancing” drugs. Two-tenths of a second faster in football. 10-pounds more muscle. 6-inches more vertical height. For Glory. To wear The Belt. For example, had I enhanced my performance with caffeine, this blog wouldn’t have batted .189 and left 2 men on-base.

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