#120 Roids

The headlines are all ablaze with allegations and counter allegations of steroid use by all sorts of sports figures. Football players have taken steroids, basketball players have taken steroids, and now the final bastion of everything that is good and true in America, baseball, has been befouled with the testicular squeezings of bovine misfortune—Baseball players take steroids. The news is horrifying. The news is shocking. What will the poor youth of America, raised to honor the records of the mighty batsman of yore, steeped in the tradition of the Mantles and the Ruths and the Barry Bondsmen, what will the tender unsullied children of this great land of ours think?
My second child said it best: Yo duh...
As any high school wrestler will tell you, the pressure to enhance muscle weight and tone at the expense of other bodily tissues is old, old indeed. I remember when just before a match we would wrap ourselves in impermeable nylon suits and take a few turns around the track in hundred-degree weather to sweat off the pounds necessary to make weight. The closer you could get to optimum weight the more power you could theoretically bring to the mat. I never had much to worry about, I was all bones at that age, and if I couldn’t give my opponent a muscle bruise from having him grab me too quick on a take down I was pretty much doomed to no more than a depressing collection of escape points anyhow.
But today’s high school workout rooms are different and if it isn’t the coaches that suggest a friendly supplement doctor, it’s the parents, who want their kids to relive their glory days for them. Hey, it’s only for a few years, if they don’t get the big scholarship well hell, their liver will probably recover. And, sad truth is, when all your opponents have crowded up to the steroid bar all the other bars of performance get raised right out of reach unless you’re pricking yourself with the same concoctions.
What I hate the most though, is that they took a perfectly good word that used to refer to anal swellings and applied it to hormone injections. When I first heard that Baseball was infested with ‘roids, I thought, jeez, no kidding. I would figure that would be more of a problem with Nascar drivers. And a baseball player with ‘roids sliding into home, well, I don’t want to think about it.
That does answer one mystery, though. I was at the club the other day and one of the personal trainers was flexing his glutes at another trainer. The second trainer, with a practiced eye, was assessing the conformation of something about the first trainer’s posterior. “Nice definition,” he said, “and great vascularity.” There was a question in his voice.
“Roids,” the first one said.
You can imagine my mystification.
America, ya gotta love it.