If gamesmanship is what we do to them and cheating is what they do to us, one of the reasons steroids are despised in America is that our enemies used them first. Do you remember 1976, when our graceful women swimmers were routed at the Olympics by East German amazons with mustaches? That calamity put steroids on the map as a commie tool.
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To syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer Ankiel was more than “Young Musial.” He was the second coming of Roy Hobbs, the vanished phenom who reemerged years later to hit towering home runs with his magical bat Wonderboy in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (and in the sappy Robert Redford movie based on it). Ankiel’s return, wrote Krauthammer, “is the stuff of legend. Made even more perfect by the timing: Just two days after Barry Bonds sets a synthetic home run record in San Francisco, the Natural returns to St. Louis.”
But a better literary model might have been Joe Hardy, the slugger from nowhere who back in the 50s transformed the Washington Senators in Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant and the musical Damn Yankees. Hardy was the sculpted Adonis a middle-aged fan had become in return for selling his soul to the devil. On September 8, New York’s Daily News reported that in 2004, when Ankiel still regarded himself as a pitcher and was trying to recover from a serious injury, he’d received a year’s supply of human growth hormone from a notorious warehouse in Florida. Just like that the spell was broken and the devil collected his debt. Ankiel scratched out two singles in his next 29 at bats, and the Cardinals lost nine straight games to fall out of the pennant race.
A new paper by three endocrinologists in Ireland and Britain tells us that “although it is clear that GH abuse by athletes is widespread . . . there is no evidence of its efficacy.” The next study demonstrating that it enhances either the strength or endurance of healthy athletes will be the first. According to two American endocrinologists I’ve talked to, there’s also no evidence that HGH does what Ankiel apparently wanted it to do–accelerate the healing of bones and muscles. But the jury’s still out. “Anabolic steroids were widely abused for more than 40 years . . . before they were definitively shown to increase strength,” the Irish/British paper cautions, adding that the administration of HGH and steroids in combination remains a particularly unstudied topic.
So Passan wrote another column to explain. Citing the Food and Drug Administration Web site, he said that HGH has been approved for “children with growth problems and adults with growth hormone deficiency,” and that Ankiel fell into neither category. “He said he received it to help rehabilitate his arm,” but rehabilitation wasn’t an FDA-approved application of the drug. “I have no doubt Ankiel’s health improved because of human growth hormone,” Passan wrote. “Whether that makes it right is an area that remains gray. But the FDA doesn’t allow it.”
Because, his column went on, “we have more than enough circumstantial evidence to raise another doubting eyebrow at yet another suspicious athlete.” The evidentiary standard for raising a doubting eyebrow is so extraordinarily low that I’d like to think no court takes it seriously but the one parents convene when cookies disappear and children are on the premises.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Rick Ankeil.
