Dad, Everyone's Juiced
By Charles Rush
January 13, 2008
Matthew 5: 5-8
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e papers in Britain cover the Tour de France as the feature article of the sporting news each day, much like we would cover the World Series. I got to thinking about the Tour de France as a metaphor of our living recently in light of Roger Clemens' latest interview on “60 Minutes”.
This is what
one author had to say about him. “Tommy Simpson, the British cyclist, died in
the middle of the Tour de France some 30 years ago. Most years, as the Tour
turned toward the mountains, the most brutal part of the most brutal
examination of minds and bodies in sport, Simpson is remembered. His death is
recalled, celebrated, by an act of pilgrimage by his family and friends, an
ascent of the ascent that killed him.
“Simpson collapsed while cycling up Mount Ventoux, a parched and naked lump of
volcanic rock which a normal person would not consider walking. He died at the
side of the road after first uttering the words that echo throughout sporting
eternity: “Put me back on my bike”.
Words of futility, of self-delusion. Words that express all the nobility that
sport can muster. Words defiant of his personal limitations, of all human
limitations, defiant even of mortality. It is in its way the most perfect story
that sport has ever produced.
“Simpson is
remembered as nothing less than a hero, and I have no quarrel with that. But
the circumstances of his death are not entirely edifying. He was rattling with
amphetamines as he made the fatal ascent. He was, in fact, one of sport's
primordial druggies. Not that he was unique, far from it. When a secret drug
culture prevails in a sport, there is a Red Queen situation. It takes all the
drugs you can ingest just to stay in the same place. How then to get an edge? For
many ambition-crazed athletes the answer is simple: take double. Simpson took
amphetamines not to steal an advantage on his opponents, but defensively, to
stop them stealing a march on him. To level out the playing field. He died
stoned, and a hero.
“It is odd that
the other big name among sporting druggies is still and abomination in all
sporting circles.” Marion Jones, the greatest sprinter of her generation, won
Olympic gold and captured the nation with her precious smile, before she tested
positive for anabolic steroids. “Perhaps he too would be a hero if he had had
the presence of mind to die on the finishing line”.
[Jones] is “a martyr of a kind, but a living one. She
paid the price for breaking that most terrible of all commandments in our society:
thou shalt not be found out. During
her sentencing, I was not entirely surprised to learn that she passed some 160
tests during her career. It made the sentence all the more surprising because
it suggests that the system is systemically broken and therefore more likely to
be systemically abused. Instead of leniency, [She] was sent out into the desert
bearing on her back the sins of all her sport. She was a willing victim of her
own and the world's lust for superheroes.
“So Simpson died, though he did not
intend to give his life. I learned, from the garlands of prose that celebrated
the anniversary of his death, that in the course of his fatal ascent he
grabbed, as was the custom in those comparatively innocent sporting days, a
bottle offered by a spectator which, needing water, he downed in one large
gulp. It was cognac: an additional, perhaps fatal, blow to a system already
pushed beyond the limits of reason. For many years French journalists have been
fond of using analogies to Calvary during this part of the race and so when the
Italian leader of his stage fell behind with exhaustion and a groin injury, the
headlines read ‘Allameri begins to bear his cross up the hill'. And when a
French rider was forced to withdraw from a humiliating mistake that caused an
injury it was his ‘crown of thorns'. Though the French do not impress me as a
particularly religious people, during the Tour, they do worship the suffering
that comes from athletes pushing themselves beyond the brink of human
endurance.
“Put me back on my bike”, said Simpson.
The words contain something of the obsession of the athlete who exists and the
extreme end of his sport. Blind to common realities, normal rules do not apply
to him. They also contain something of the athlete's eternal and self-elected
loneliness. If only I had just the smallest amount of help from someone, I
could do the impossible: turn the race around, redefine the limits of
humankind. Put me back on my bike and death itself might begin to work
backwards.
Since our
values towards sports so aptly mirror our values towards work and success, it
strikes me as more apt metaphor for the way we live in metropolitan New York. From the hinterland of our world,
movers and shakers in Manhattan look more like Tommy Simpson than we
can see from within our culture. “Driven with an obsessive need to succeed,
overstressed, willing to make sacrifices and develop dependencies which give us
an edge that are self-destructive, deeply believing that normal rules do not
really apply to us in the same way that they apply to others, and self-deluded
about our ability to transcend our personal limits and our communal limits.”[i]
For the most part, we simply don't
see the way that we transmit these hyper-out of balance values' to the next
generation, but we do. I remember sitting in first gear waiting to pay the toll
at the George Washington Bridge on the way to the Yankees game when
my youngest son was in Middle School. I had driven from a meeting in Princeton. It took us nearly 2 ½ hours to get
to the game, with traffic at a stand still at every conceivable intersection.
We were listening to the game on the radio, the windows down, because the air
conditioner is about dead. Trucks roaring all around us, buses, people honking
their horns just so other people can be as miserable as they are. I looked over
at him, and I said, ‘Ian, where would you rather be right now, here, or back up
on some peat field in the highlands with sheep and Highland heifers, right near a trout stream?'
He looked back
at me with that screwed up face and said ‘Here, of course'… We are drawn to
this crazy life we live like a lover who knows that his beloved is bad for him
but he can't let her go nevertheless.
I do not
pretend any expertise on Roger Clemens. His achievements put him in an elite
circle, arguably one of the best 5 pitchers ever to play major league baseball.
I read with interest George Vescey's Monday morning commentary on the Sport's
page of the New York Times, following Clemens's interview with Mike Wallace on
‘60 Minutes'.
Vescey,
probably the elder editor in sports journalism these days, said that Clemens'
performance on ‘60 Minutes', his vigorous denials combined with his inability
to account for inconsistencies within his denial, reminded him of President
Clinton's emphatic “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” and
Vice-President Richard Nixon with his dog Checkers from an earlier. Without yet
being able to prove it, Vescey discerned an acute ability to compartmentalize.
Indeed, later asked about him, the trainer that says he gave growth hormones to
Clemens remarked, “I think Roger actually believes himself to be innocent.”
Perhaps this
helps us understand the findings recently in a study that has been done over
the past 5 years by Junior Achievement with the help of Deliotte and Touche.
They have been measuring the attitudes of teenagers towards ethics and the
workplace, presumably in order to better understand the rising generation about
to enter the workforce. They report this anomaly in their broad survey. 71
percent of the respondents believed themselves to be moral people and expressed
confidence that they could make critical moral decisions. However, when those
71 percent were asked to answer a set of follow up questions, nearly 40 percent
also reported that they believed that they had to “lie, cheat, plagiarize or
even behave violently to succeed in school.”[ii]
A quarter of those surveyed said that it was acceptable to cheat on a test.
Asked for the rationale for cheating, over half of the respondents thought that
the desire to succeed was a sufficient reason.
The
conventional wisdom is that we need to do a better job of teaching our children
ethics. I've been hearing this for over a decade now and I'm beginning to
wonder if perhaps our children aren't exactly reflecting what we are teaching
them already. Perhaps we are developing a generation of sophisticates with
advanced skills in compartmentalization. They are kind, good neighbors,
mannered and able to provide themselves certain exemptions when it comes to
competing in this very difficult terrain where every other student appears to
have some edge- whether it is from tutors, coaches, parents, technology,
whatever. There are the morals for the normal world and the exceptional morals
for this inordinately competitive environment for admission to college which
can't be negotiated at the top tiers without some extra juice- er, some extra
help.
This comes
through in another part of the survey that is characteristic of this
generation. They distinguish their cyber-selves from their physical selves.
Almost 60 percent thought that it was not right that employers could look up
material you have posted on the internet about yourself, say in Facebook,
though this is routine nowadays. Not surprisingly, nearly a quarter said they
would delete material from their Web pages if they knew employers were going to
review it. Perhaps, the rising generation is simply becoming adroit at
bifurcating their personal lives, their virtual lives, and their professional
lives. Personally they may well view themselves as ‘great guys', virtually they
seem themselves as outrageous and devilish, professionally they see themselves
as competitive and aggressive.
Like Vescey, I
was struck listening to Roger Clemens' defense. He didn't attempt to dismantle
the evidence against him. He had no answer for why his former trainer and
confidant would suddenly invent a bold lie about him. Instead, he trumpeted the
assertion that he worked very, very hard to get where he got and that he cared
about winning and succeeding with a tone of exasperation that his commitment to
competition ought to be enough.
The bluster,
the confusion over the moral question, the near complete inability to parse the
elementary syntax of ethical grammar have an eerily familiar ring to them. Ten
years ago, as the internet bubble was bursting, the press started asking
ordinary traders why they kept telling their clients to buy stocks that their
banks were shedding. At the time, the few traders that sent ribald e-mail proclaiming
their clients to be just stupid, were lifted up as an example of moral
cynicism. They made great headlines even as they were caricatures of what I
suspect most Main street people in the heartland think Wall Street titans are
really like. But the actual story was less sensational, more complex and
worrisome than that. When you read the bulk of the interviews, when these
traders were asked the moral question, they simply couldn't engage on that
level of reflection. No, things that were happening were not good and the whole
direction of the market gave evidence of this on multiple levels. Yes, I am a
moral person and I think morals are important. Did I do anything wrong? I mean,
the whole sector was… I mean, everybody was… I don't know what to say.
Ditto Enron
about 5 years after that. It was also true that the company was apparently led
by a management philosophy of ‘win at all costs' and that philosophy was
embodied by some infamously swaggering senior executives. But what struck me
were the 30 year old traders in California who were actually vested with
implementing the new futures trading. They certainly thought they were moral
people. Everyone they worked with was a great guy. They understood that they
were manipulating a loophole in the system that they were clever enough to
figure out. They did not overtly intend to have power shut down in various
counties in California. They did not overtly intend to hurt individual
consumers by driving the price through the roof. At some level, they seem to
have implicitly justified the morality of what they were doing that they were
the bottom feeders forcing a broken market to repair itself.
When they were
asked the moral question itself, (“Was this the right thing to do?”), they had this
glazed over stare, not too different from the gaze executives get when they ask
the tech guys how an IT system actually works. They have this glazed look that
says “I know this is an important question. I know this is complicated. And I
know that this is way, way more than I really want to think about right now.
Thank you”. Can we get advertizing in here asap please?
We'd rather not
really actually know the details here. We just need results. Perhaps, at some
subliminal level of deep communication, this is what our children are actually
hearing from us without our saying it directly or exactly.
We tell them
that education is the key to their future, and there is nothing wrong
with that in an of itself. We tell them that they are exempted from quite a few
household chores if they excel in this one area of their lives. We offer
abundant resources in the form of tutors, computers, sports teams with coaches,
and as I was recently soberly reminded reading the annual Christmas letter- a
dizzying variety of enrichment experiences abroad in their teenage years, the
list is quite extensive. Providing resources is good in and of itself.
If they run afoul of the law,
particularly if this infraction involves drugs and alcohol, we will hire
lawyers and plead directly with school administrators that whatever penalties
be meted out, they do not besmirch the official transcript in any way.
It is true that along the process,
they hear us talking casually as well as directly about the adequacy of certain
schools: the A list, the A prime list, the A- list. During High School we
engage in an enormous amount of kitchen chatter about who is where and how are
they doing.
If these polls are accurate, what our
kids appear to be hearing from us is the deeper message that success in this
one single area is important enough that they have to deliver here- don't give
me the details on how you get it done, just get it done- and, yes, everybody
else is getting help. And, yes, you have to be at least as successful as your
parents or more so because all of my generations anxieties about their
self-worth are now pinned on you in addition to the anxiety you come by
naturally.
So if you are
sitting at the breakfast table reading the sports section with your son and you
say, ‘What do you think about Roger Clemens?' Answer is, “Dad, everybody's
juiced.” The whole maddening metropolitan culture is juiced and dammit we need
to do something about it and we will… just after my kids get into college.
Spare us the
sanctimony of incredulity among the press as to how we came to this impasse.
And it is not as simple as just teaching your kid ethics at home either… In
this regard, we are like lemmings running towards the cliff together. And
Warren Buffet is right, ‘lemmings as a species have a bad reputation, but no
individual lemming has ever been singled out for bad press.' You probably know
that his personal stationary features a cartoon from the Far Side with all
these lemmings herding together in the same direction. And one, only one,
looking straight at the reader, with a life preserver on. Some caution, but it
acknowledges that even with a life preserver, he'll run over the edge with
everyone else.
I cannot
resolve this, so I read the simple admonition of Jesus in the Sermon on the
Mount in Matthew. “Blessed are those who have an honest and accurate appraisal
of themselves, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger
and thirst trying to do the right thing, for they will be filled. Blessed are
those that are merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are those who
have integrity, for they will be filled.”
Jesus blesses
us with the assurance that God loves us and we are loveable, so that we can be
free to accept ourselves and find our genuine center in God. We are anxious
people. We are worried that we are not good enough, that our kids aren't good
enough. We aren't powerful enough, not influential enough, not looked up to
enough. We push ourselves beyond our capacities because we want to be more than
we are, not just the best we can be, we actually want to be someone better than
we were born to become.
The truth is
that God only wants you to become the person you are supposed to become. The
truth is that you can only find internal peace by fulfilling your potential and
accepting yourself as God accepts you, seeing yourself as God sees you, loving
yourself as God loves you. My child, this is the truth on how to live.
“Yeah, right. I
know what you mean. Hey, Dad, that's great. Thanks… that's very helpful. Dad,
it's good talking to you. I appreciate it. And Dad, one more favor before I
go?”
“Sure son, what
is it?”
“Put me back on my bike.”
[i]
This comes from an article, if memory serves, from the “The Economist”. I read
it on sabbatical, somewhere in Europe, in 2002. I had the sense to copy a piece
of it because I was not in a position to save the original. It will take more
than a perfunctory Google search to find the author. My apologies.
[ii]
Ami Kaplan, a Managing Partner for Deloitte as reported in the “Newark Star
Ledger” (December 21, 2007), p. 27.
© 2008
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
