Most terrifying words an athlete can hear: “Special Agent Jeff Nowitzky is on your case.”
Nowitzky is the super sleuth from the Food and Drug Administration who bagged the BALCO drug cheaters, including baseball superstar Barry Bonds and sprinter Marion Jones and was the first copper to uncover evidence against pigheaded blowhard and baseball pitcher Roger Clemens.
Jones is out of the federal slammer after doing a sentence for perjury and is an off the bench WNBA player.
Bonds faces perjury charges related to his 2003 grand jury testimony and has a trial set for next year. Clemens is newly indicted for lying under oath to Congress about using PEDs.
Message therein, don’t mess with SA Nowitzky.
Which got me to thinking the unthinkable. what if Manny Pacquiao (not under investigation except in the imagination of USADA bombastic bloodhound Travis Tygart) got caught cheating?
What if it came out, let’s say, that the Pinoy Idol and newly sworn Congressman was using HGH for endurance purposes?
My original thought was, if this ever transpires, Pacman’s image and aura would be wrecked. Lately, though, I’ve changed my mind.
Unlike the swaggering Bonds and the bully Clemens (I think he once threw a hot dog or a bun or something at boxing scribe George Kimball.
Pacquiao has a huge reservoir of good will built up among the public and the media.
(Actually, it turns out Clemens, after calling Kimball a bad name, “rolled” him. Here’s Kimball in The Boston Phoenix recalling the one-sided food fight:
“On July 18, 1992, in a celebrated post-game meltdown at the Metrodome in Minneapolis, the pitcher formerly known as the Rocket expressed his displeasure over a column I had written (but that he had not actually read). After calling me “a horseshit lowlife,” Roger Clemens attempted to pelt me with the contents of the post-game buffet that had been laid out on a table in the visiting-team clubhouse.
“When people bring up the “hamburger buns” episode ? and it still happens, at least once a year ? I usually find myself explaining, “Yeah, that was me, but no, they weren’t hamburger buns.”
Think about it for a minute. How far and how accurately could you throw a hamburger bun? And if you did hit somebody, would he even feel it? This is not to suggest that the hard rolls Clemens used for ammunition that day were any more lethal, but they were a bit easier to control. Even in his sputtering rage, he managed to hit his target ? me ? once in three tries. (Alas, The Rocket That Fell to Earth perpetuates the inaccuracy: in what appears to be one of his few certifiable errors, Pearlman has me being struck by “a Wonder Bread hamburger bun.”)
(That’s nothing, as Cardinals slugger George Hendrick once pursued me with a bat in St. Louis after I had the temerity to ask him about Lee Mazzilli of the Mets. I think Hendrick wanted to use me for BP but teammate Bernie Carbo interceded, thus preventing the then National League leading hitter from walking away with a bloodied bat.)
Bonds and Clemens had Lake Erie-sized pools of ill will, especially among the media types who covered their illustrious on field achievements.
Pacman is more like cycling superstar Lance Armstrong, who is being probed by the feds as to doping usage by he and his then United States Postal Team colleagues.
There’s even a numerical comparison between the “Live Strong” cancer survivor and Pacquiao. Armstrong, now age 39, won seven Tour de France crowns.
Pacman has won world titles in seven different weight divisions.
So, if the government nails Armstrong, will he fall from grace among his now adoring public, many of whom are more taken with his charitable activities than how he whips his bike across cobblestone streets in Europe?
One expert who says no to that question was quoted in “A Champion Against Cancer, Now Under Siege,” a comprehensive piece in Sunday’s New York Times.
Jay Coakley is a sociologist and author of “Sports in Society, Issues and Controversies.”
(Check out University of Colorado at Colorado Springs faculty member Coakley’s background.)
Coakley said, while he has no doubts as to the guilt of “Tour de Lance,” it won’t matter to most of the world.
He said the line between using PEDs and medical treatment is totally blurred in the public’s view. “Deciding to use performance-enhancing substances and methods has nothing to do with lack of morality,” Coakley said.
“It has to do with nromative structure of elite sport, and the athlete’s commitment to his identity as an athlete.”
Either reporter Bruce Weber or Juliet Macur then asked Coakley about Armstrong’s being exposed as a liar if it’s proven he used illegal drugs.
He answered this hypothetical like so:
“If he had told the truth, he’d be gone. How much money would he have raised for cancer?”
Most of us want to think Pacquiao is telling the truth on PEDs.
But, if ever became known that he didn’t or that he told a partial truth, would it be a career-wrecking disaster?
I used to think so but now I don’t.
He might be a diminished ring hero but, remember, a hero ain’t nothing but another name for a submarine sandwich anyway.
Pacman wouldn’t lose a single voter in poverty hellhole Sarangani Province, that’s for sure. He would just be a lesser God.
In a place where the median daily income is $1.25, PEDs are not a top of conversation or controversy.
Nothing can erase Manny’s ring accomplishments even if they become clouded.
I wish I could find out what Jones, Bonds, Clemens and Armstrong think.
Maybe I should leave Rocket Rajah alone, he might be as mad as Roger Mayweather generally is.
I can’t dodge hard rolls like I used to.
