Man-Rule: Don't Take Performance-Enhancing Drugs

So Lance Armstrong says he’s going to stop fighting the doping charges against him and move on with his life. This will likely mean he’ll lose the record seven Tour de France cycling titles he won, but he’ll get to keep the 13-inch thick callouses on his butt he developed during his career.

It’s just one more nail in the coffin of sports heroes everywhere. You’ll recall our earlier discussion of the need for sportsmen tochange their last name if it starts with P and ends with O, due to some unfortunate role models in that regard.

Lance, at least, is still claiming he did nothing wrong. He says he’s just tired of fighting the allegations that have dogged him for more than 14 years, so he’s giving up. Apparently in the cycling world, if you can’t prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you didn’t snort heroin off the backside of a French hooker and/or poodle while you pedaled through the Alps, that means you’re automatically guilty. I admit I might be missing some of the legal nuances here, but that’s the impression I get.

So it’s a dark day for the 23 people worldwide who follow cycling, and a happy day for 65 million French people, all of whom hate Lance Armstrong with a passion, because he’s not French.

At the risk of depressing you further, I think it’s time I came clean about my own experience with performance-enhancing drugs during my stellar sports career. Yes, after more than 30 years, I’m finally admitting it: I was juiced during the 1976 and 1977 seasons of Farm League Baseball in Childersburg, Alabama.

As you no doubt remember, I was the starting pitcher for the Braves, and for the two years of ’76 and ’77, we were the terror of the 10-team Farm League. Other teams hated to play us. They CLAIMED it was because once our winning streak began, we didn’t wash our socks, and after a while our entire team smelled like a French poodle’s backside. But the real reason was their fear of my pitching. Not to brag, but very few batters were able to hit my pitches, because of one simple fact: I was brilliantly, consistently erratic. One pitch, I would look like Greg Maddux, painting the corner of the plate with a fastball that had been clocked as high as 28 miles per hour; the next pitch, I would look like Greg Brady, painting the corner of second base because I tripped during my windup and threw the ball backwards. It was impossible to tell where the ball would go once I threw it, and as a result very few people got a hit while I was pitching.

So none of the batters liked to face me. And it was all because of my illicit use of a highly addictive substance: Lik-m-Aid Fun Dip.

If you were a kid in the 70s, you probably remember this stuff. Two candy “Lik-a-stix” came in a pack with three pouches of flavored sugar powder. You licked the stix, and then  dipped it into the powder to get it stuck on there so you could lick it off, and then you spent the next hour bouncing off the walls from the sugar rush, every cell in your body vibrating with  sucrose-fueled energy.

I THINK I ate something other than Lik-m-Aid  Fun Dip during the 1976 and 1977 baseball  seasons, but I don’t really remember. I’m sure  my mother would have insisted on vegetables at  mealtimes. Maybe I used a stix to scoop up  mashed potatoes or something. I’m not sure. It’s  lost in a Lik-m-Aid haze.

I got so brazen with the Fun Dip that I’d dose myself in the dugout between innings while I was pitching. I’d come off the field, fling my glove into a corner, and vibrate my way over to the bench, where the tremors of my hand from the sugar high would cause me to spill at least half the contents of the pouch. Sometimes I’d go through an entire package in a single inning, and then I’d vibrate my way back out to the mound, pupils dilated to mere pinpricks, throwing two or three pitches to the first batter before he’d even made his way to the plate.

So now you know – my athletic career is tainted, my brilliant record pitching forever clouded by the shadow of Lik-m-Aid Fun Dip. Although I regret that I wasn’t forthcoming about my addiction at the time, it’s something of a relief to admit the truth now. I can stop living this lie that has consumed me for the past three decades.

From one great athlete to another, let me say: Lance, stay strong. You’ll get through this.

And kids: Don’t do drugs.

 

(c) 2012 John Puckett