We want our sports heroes to be demigods. The stories of Hercules, Persueus and Odysseus have been replaced by those of Usain Bolt, Michael Jordan and Mohammed Ali. We recount with reverence Jordan’s shot in game six of the 1998 NBA Finals to clinch his sixth title. We look on with awe as Bolt seemingly glides across the track while breaking every sprinting record in human history. We stand and roar with our brethren as Patrick Willis carelessly throws aside a 300-pound offensive tackle while hunting down the opposing team’s quarterback.
These are our legends, our myths, our heroes. And for that, we build them cathedrals named Soldier Field, or Fenway Park or Camden yards. We display our allegiance to them with their jerseys and we retell stories to our children of the time when we “were there on game seven when…”
And for this adulation, we expect our sports demigods to be faster, stronger and more agile than the generation before them, and the generation before that, and the generation before that. And in pursuit of this anointing by us, the fans, they destroy their bodies and sometimes their minds and sometimes their health, risking everything to be remembered the way Babe Ruth, Pele or Wayne Gretzky were remembered. The ancient Greeks called this Kleos. It was their principle pursuit.
But there is a particular Greek myth that warns against going too far in our search for glory: the story of Icarus. Enraptured by the glory of flight, Icarus flew higher and higher, until the sun became so hot that the wax holding his wings together melted and he plummeted into the ocean and died. Icarus was cocky, he lost his head; his pursuit to reach the glory of the sun led to his downfall. This, the ancient Greeks called Hubris. It was their greatest sin.
The list of athletes who have reached too far to find greater and greater glory is long: Lance Armstrong, Marion Jones, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rudy Gay, Barry Bonds. Alex Rodriguez — A-Rod as he’s affectionately known — is just the latest to be caught dipping into the well of performance enhancing drugs to prolong his career.
A-Rod was recently suspended 250 games by Major League Baseball for his part in the Miami anti-aging clinic Biogenesis’ scandal involving at least 12 current MLB players and over a dozen South Florida High School athletes. The fact that A-Rod was suspended 250 games while the other baseball players were suspended 50 is two-fold. One, A-Rod refused to settle with MLB as the other player had. And two, well, he’s A-Rod. He’s the name, the big fish, the example.
Alex Rodriguez has been under enormous pressure — not just from the fans of the Yankees, the team he plays for, but from all baseball fans — to restore integrity at the top of the home run chart. Barry Bonds currently sits atop the all-time list of home runs with 762. Bonds has been tagged a steroid taker, a cheater. No one wants him there. He is an affront to the baseball gods, to the men who played the game the “right way,” like Hank Aaron (755), Babe Ruth (714) and Willie Mays (660). These three are the trinity of baseball. The fact that Barry Bonds has surpassed them as the homerun king is a sacrilege that must be corrected.
So enter Alex Rodriguez. He is the only current player within striking distance of Barry Bonds’ record, sitting at 648 home runs. He is a media darling. He plays for the biggest club, on the biggest stage, in the biggest city in the country — the same city Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Jackie Robinson played in. In the prime of his career, he was averaging 47 homeruns a year. He became the hope of the entire baseball community to restore balance to the top, to make baseball pure again. And had he continued hitting like he was between 2001 and 2007, he would have.
But he began to age and battle injuries. The furious pace of home runs began to dwindle then trickle. In his last two seasons, Alex Rodriguez hit a total of 32 home runs, missing over 100 games. This season, he’s only played in six, battling a nagging knee injury.
Like so many before him, he turned to Biogenesis, to human growth hormone, and its promise to speed recovery and hold back time in an effort to prolong his career, to reach the pinnacle of baseball lore, to become the homerun king and win our undying adulation.
He was primed to return to the lineup just before MLB announced they were going to suspend him 250 games. That’s the rest of this season, plus all of next. He will be 40 before he can take the field again. He will be a shell of his former self, Barry Bonds’ record an unattainable dream.
We want our sports heroes to be demigods. But they aren’t; they’re just human beings.
