Indoor Soccer Changed Everything

How My First Game of Indoor Soccer Changed My View On PED’s

Last week I participated in a charity indoor soccer tournament. A friend of mine organized it and I was looking forward to it in a big way. I was on a good team, and they were letting me play goalie, my favorite position in all of sports.

I’m an out of shape, 34 year old guy, admittedly. The gameplay, were I was expecting fun and spirited play amongst adults, turned into a ravenous firing line of shots on goal, from really good players, at a level I was not expecting. In order to stop shots I was hurling my body on the ground, through the air, getting my head kicked and shots kicked into my (ahem) rather soft belly. It was crazy, but I was having fun.

At the end of the day, I held my own, didn’t give up, and stopped a lot of shots. The aftermath of the three games that I played, however, left me knotted and sore for that day and the next few as well. I could not walk it hurt so bad. Poor out of shape me could barely walk or tie my shoes. Lesson learned. So I took some Advil, sucked it up and moved on with my day. The Advil, though, got me thinking of other athletes who are my age and play at an astronomically higher level than I did. How do they do it? How do they recover so quickly? I know they are in shape but this seems different. Which led me to thinking about A Rod, Lance Armstrong and other sports stars currently embroiled in PED scrutiny.

Through the years I have come from a sports hater to a sports lover. I never really understood sports growing up, I was and still am a nerd. I started to see the benefit of pushing oneself past your limits in business and in life so I started to watch examples of that in sports, and that is when I became a pretty avid sports fan.

I really love NFL and NHL games, and even MLB has caught my eye recently. It’s great to see individuals push themselves to the limit to gain glory over other individuals playing hard to do the same thing and beat them. It’s fascinating and motivating to me.

Yet NFL and NHL players take a beating. Multiple beatings a week, in order to provide top level entertainment for fans like me, and they have to get back up and do that year after year until they’re what, 38? 39? There is no way they are doing this without help.

I used to look down on players that took PED’s. I no longer do. I do find prolonged dishonesty about them distasteful, but what are you going to do? Lose your career over drugs that help you recover and play better?The amount of pain I was in was a fraction of what they endure day after day and let’s be honest, if a player took an aspirin back in the day to recover and perform better that could technically be considered a PED.

What is a PED anyway? Is a protein supplement with sugar or special oils added to activate certain cells to speed recovery after a game considered one? Is (as I stated above) aspirin or ibuprofen, which can cause inflamed muscles and joints to slightly subside after a game,considered a PED. To me, the whole argument against them is kind of obtuse. ”It ruins the purity of the game”, some say. Bob Costas said this:

The game was never truly pure but I think there’s a difference between using something that amounts to taking caffeine shots to give you minimal energy and shooting yourself up with steroids that can completely change the way you can perform. While it’s not always the case that steroids can make you perform better it does add elements to one’s game that were never there in the first place. At least when it came to taking greenies or pitchers scuffing the baseball it was a kind of unwritten game of “I’ll do whatever it takes to win within REASON”.

That’s the key there, all reason was thrown out the window when everyone was shooting themselves up with roids and other such substances. I mean, it was simply not natural when you saw guys who were once pretty thin but muscular to a degree turn into behemoths. I’m not just talking about Bonds either. Just look at someone like Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa. So I will say that the game was never TRULY pure but all reason was lost in the ‘90s and probably before since Canseco was said to be shooting up as early as 1988.

This is an argument from nostalgia, not morality, yet because people consider that they have the moral high ground with this argument, they refuse to defend it.

Aspirin and Acetaminophen were once cutting edge, bringing relief to those who were in pain. We now live in the age of innovation and the internet, and yet if A Rod or Lance Armstrong takes a substance (I only use them as an example because they are/have been in the news), which can cause them to recover faster after a workout or game, and remain in top shape, to (let’s face it) continue to entertain us with their physical feats, where is the harm in that?

I think it is naive to call it “not natural” as Costas says. Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen are not natural, nor are the players in the modern age. In the 60's and 70's the amount of games and the average length of career for a player was much less than the expectations of today.

The level of supplement and nutritional information we have has expanded, sure, but that does not account for the spike in expectations of level/length of play. It’s easy for a guys like Costas and the sports media, who have, for the most part, never played professional sports, to sit back and point judgmental fingers at those who do take PED’s to improve their stats and careers.

“But Lance Armstrong hid it from us! He lied!” is the outcry. Well, ok he lied. That’s wrong and I understand. He was forced to lie because these advances are frowned upon but lets for the sake of argument leave that out. I know that both Armstrong and Rodriguez are probably, in real life, GIGANTIC self righteous douche bags. I am not arguing for their benefit as far as personality goes or for their motivations (which is probably to make more money in endorsements). That probably deserves scrutiny, but I don’t think that PED’s and the motivations are 100% tied together, but that’s for another time.

What I am trying to say is that, for some reason, these drugs are being banned because of what? Why are we afraid of it? Purity of the game? Costas himself said the game was never really pure. So for what then?Why are we wasting all of this time talking about it in baseball?

The NFL and NHL are not tarnished, yet they play more games every year, and they are doing this, how? Not by eating Wheaties. I think we should be less naive/ nostalgic and begin to enjoy modern sports, played by men and women who deserve better treatment than drugs that could be improved, but aren’t because of silly bans.

If these drugs prove harmful to players, and some of them are, ban them. If they prove not to be,which some of them are not, and in fact help athletes stay healthier longer, and allow them to keep bone and muscle mass so that they don’t become crippled later in life as a result of entertaining me, well, I’ll be a bit happier with that. Happier than maintaining some sort of ambiguous “purity” to games where there was really no “purity” to begin with.

I’m really not a jerk, and a bit of a newcomer to sports, so please don’t hate me for writing this post. It was a lesson I learned and I wanted to approach it from an angle that I think we should consider when we want to point accusatory fingers at people. Athletes should be honest, yes, but lets just start thinking about positive changes that can happen when we actually start doing science out in the open and not behind closed doors/curtains.