The Chris Moeller Archives

Human growth

Peyton Manning has been linked to Human Growth Hormone by a reporter from Al Jazeera America, but the Denver Broncos quarterback has something going for him that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Mark McGwire have never had—the institutional support of his bosses and his colleagues.

His supporters were out in force on four television networks Sunday. They point out that the man who was secretly recorded claiming that he sent HGH to Peyton’s house in 2011 quickly denied his own statements when the story blew up over the weekend. (The man in question is an anti-aging clinic intern beautifully named Charlie Sly.) The denial led numerous NFL talking heads, many of them former players, to dismiss the allegations as unreliable. A well-known former coach, Mike Ditka, went after the messenger. Apparently he's one of those many Americans that gets Al Jazeera confused with Al Qaeda.

I’m not sure what’s so far-fetched about the allegations, however. A then-35-year-old quarterback, only slightly younger than Barry Bonds was when he swatted 73 home runs in 2001, has a shipment of HGH delivered to his Indianapolis McMansion under his wife’s name. (I'm sure it was intended for her. Who does she play for?) The supplier brags later about it when he doesn’t know he’s being recorded, and then, most realistic of all, the supplier claims that he fabricated the story when he finds himself cast into a media whirlwind. Which pharmacist do you believe? The one chatting, unsuspectingly, into a hidden camera, or the one talking into the multiple cameras of a media horde, fearing that he’s just become the next Kirk Radomski? I lean towards the first.

Despite the denials, Manning fits as precisely into our preferred profile of a PED user as any athlete I can immediately conjure. Like Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Mark McGwire, his greatest successes on the field have been belied by his advancing years, and even unlike Bonds and Clemens, his physical end came about (this year) suddenly and dramatically, as we’re told can often happen with PED use. (It’s possible that if Bonds was still playing, he’d be as dominant as ever with a bat in his hands-- his blacklisting preceded his decline.)

It’s much too early to tell, but I cannot imagine a scenario in which an HGH link like this keeps Manning from, say, being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame at Canton, Ohio. Then again, our nation’s football hall of fame doesn’t have a ridiculous, so-called “character clause” for enshrinement, as our baseball one does. O.J. Simpson is in the football hall of fame. Nobody that I’ve heard is yet advocating that an asterisk be placed next to the NFL’s recently-established all-time passing record. Nobody in the United States Congress, as yet, has spoken publicly on the matter, let alone issued a call for public testimony.

Football is treated by its participants and its observers as a “man’s game,” an event for warriors. Within it, anything goes. When retired Broncos and Raiders scumbag, Bill Romanowski, found himself knotted in the BALCO scandal nearly a decade ago, there were yawns. Oh, really? Bill did something to his body that was unhealthy? Like play football with it? Bill has since written a best-selling book about his career and appeared in several films. Meanwhile, you and I equate the BALCO scandal with Barry Bonds. The slugger found himself unable to get a job on the field in 2008 despite a ridiculous .480 on-base percentage in '07. Then it got worse for him. He was indicted by federal investigators for perjury and obstruction of justice. All charges were later dropped and convictions overturned.

While these are remarkable double standards in the public consciousness, I pin much of the blame on Major League Baseball. The league craps its proverbial bed basically every night, then makes that bed, and lies in it, proverbially. Rather than rally around the flag, league officials constantly attempt to undermine the reputations and legacies of their brightest stars and most iconic figures. Baby boomer journos and fans all but hijacked the National Baseball Hall of Fame from subsequent generations ten years ago in retaliation for the destruction of their boyhood heroes' most hallowed records, laying shattered thanks to bigger, stronger, better players. The Hall has coupled its hypocritical character clause with something called the “permanently ineligible" list.

Each of the other three major sports leagues promote the large salaries that its players command as evidence of the industry’s robust financial health. Major League Baseball teams routinely claim that their players are bankrupting them. MLB constantly promotes itself as a game for little kids, a strategy which denies the true nature of the sport itself, often denies the players the chance to behave and make decisions as adults, and alienates the all-important marketing demographic of teens and college-aged adults that don’t wish for the world to view them as children.

Manning and the other HGH gridiron conspirators should stop their denials and come completely clean. Major League Baseball slugger Ryan Howard has been linked to these HGH shipments as well, and you can lay odds that his employer will use the headline to attempt to wiggle out of the $35 million obligation they still have to him, but there is virtually no potential for the damaged legacy of an NFL personality as far as precedent is concerned. Roger Goodell is still a league commissioner that's popular with his bosses despite several P.R. black eyes in respect to domestic violence, and his attempt to publicly discredit the medical research that connected brain damage with the sport. (A story playing now at a theater near you.) Bill Belichick and Tom Brady still sit at the top of the football world despite Spy-gate, Tuck-gate, and Deflate-gate. Nearly every football fan believes that O.J. killed his wife as well as her friend, and they don’t like him, but they walk with bated interest past his bust at the Hall of Fame in Canton because you gotta admit that the man could ball.

Why are these guys so worried about reputations that are incapable of being soiled? Baseball players are merely men. Football players are gladiators. Their brains may bruise, but their industry never does. And the playoffs are about to start.

posted by CM @ 8:02 PM