Hypocritic oath

Perhaps this will please fellow Sun employee John Hughes:

Miami Dolphins' defensive end Jason Taylor was the first NFL personality to finally step up and call a spade a spade on the NFL's blind-eye hypocrisy to steroid use.

One day after Jim Caple made a brief mention of it in his ESPN.com Page 2 column, Taylor went on record to call out the league's idolatry over San Diego Chargers linebacker Shawne (Lights Out) Merriman.

For those unaware, Merriman was suspended for four games this season for violating the league's policy on performance-enhancing drugs.

Here's Taylor's paraphrased take:

"You really shouldn’t be able to fail a test like that and play in this league, to begin with. To make the Pro Bowl and all the other awards, I think you’re walking a fine line of sending the wrong message. ... You fail that test, I think it’s not right, it’s against the rules and ultimately I think it’s sending the wrong message to the youth in America and the people who look at this game not only as entertainment but also to learn lessons from it."

But for whatever reason, the NFL and its fans have a very short-term memory and convenient amnesia is prevalent. While the likes of Jason Giambi, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa (etcetera, etcetera) are under constant scrutiny for their use (or alleged use) of performance-enhancers and perhaps will never again be looked at by fans without a tinge of skepticism, here's a player who was caught breaking the rules but yet is back in the league with everyone forgetting it ever happened.

In his Page 2 piece, Caple surmised that the reason the baseball players are taking it a lot worse than the NFLers (or more accurately the NFLers are getting off so much easier than the ball players) is because baseball is a sport married to its individual statistics and the historical importance that they hold. Undoubtedly he's right. The most sacred aspects of the American national pastime are the records, the ones earned decades prior when the game was pure and still an intrinsic part of American sports culture. Roger Maris' home run record was the ultimate of those marks, the one almost-untouchable feat that — whenever challenged — was sure to capture the awe of baseball's followers.

When it was broken, and the subsequent steroid allegations came on like wildfire, the sport and its athletes had forever sewn their seeds with an already cynical following who felt betrayed and were, rightfully, peeved at being duped. That was that and even the likes of good-guys Ryan Howard or David Ortiz are placed under the same unflattering spotlight that exists because of their cheating predecessors.

But the NFL is different. Perhaps of the rough-and-tumble nature, perhaps because you expect your favourite players to be nearly unhuman masses of muscle, perhaps because you just don't care what they're doing to get their shape so long as they can outrun, outhit and outlast their opponent. Yet it's foolish to ever think that all these muscle-bound men who get bigger and faster and more freakish by the year are all doing it simply with a solid commitment to workouts and healthy diets.

The nature of the NFL is different than the laid-back, easy-going world of baseball where a 5-foot-7, 165-pound David Eckstein has no problems competing against a landmass like Big Papi Ortiz. He can still be a big part of that team even if he doesn't jack 40 bombs a year. An Eckstein-ian player in the NFL? He'd better be able to kick.

That there are fundamental differences between the two leagues doesn't excuse the blind eye, of course. It just serves to explain why a guy like Merriman can skate and avoid public scorn even when he's been publicly identified as an offender while Giambi, or Tour de France champion Floyd Landis are verbally stoned by a hypocritical sports public that seems to find their transgressions infinitely more indefensible yet can provide no reasons why.

For the record, here was Merriman's rebuttal to Taylor's words:

"The NFL will always have the level of integrity. That’s what makes the NFL. In my situation, everything happened in an appropriate way. I sat out my four games, my money was taken away from me, my four games were taken away from me, and I came back and played my rear off.

"If I wasn’t having the kind of season I’m having, this wouldn’t even be a conversation."

But Merriman is having the season he's having and his successes should be scrutinized just as any other cheater who's been forced to face-up and answer the questions of their integrity. But he's not. He's back on the field, he's in the Pro Bowl, heck, he was this week's AFC defensive player of the week. By not only allowing players right back in the league but also rewarding them with these individual honours, the NFL extends a tacit approval of their actions and essentially says that streoid use isn't a paramount concern.

U.S. Congress was so intent on exposing the dirty secrets of baseball and the major leagues took a significant step in disciplining the offenders with harsh sentences for those found using performance-enhancing drugs.

It's likely time for the NFL to start waking up to it as well instead of slapping wrists and staying silent while it takes one of its player who actually gets it to stand up and say what everyone should have already known.