Brian Cushing Gets a Spanking

By Brian Beckner:

By now everyone knows that Houston Texans linebacker Brian Cushing will miss the first four games of the coming NFL season after testing positive for a banned substance. Although it should be noted that Cushing maintains his innocence and has reportedly passed a polygraph in his defense, but on its face it seems that the argument is moot. Cushing ingested something the NFL does not allow and was punished accordingly. Behavior begat consequences, end of story, see you in week five, Bri.

This story got new life, however, when the arbiters of all things holy, the keepers of the collective sports conscience, the Associated Press decided to revote for the Defensive Rookie of the Year awarded to Cushing after last season. Uh oh, somebody got their feelings hurt. Of course the AP has previously bestowed this honor on known steroid users but in this case they didn’t know, and if the AP is going to give an award to a cheater they damn well want to know he’s a cheater first.

If it hasn’t already, the death knell for sports journalism needs to be sounded post haste. Certainly the AP has to know that no one but them cares about their dumb award right? And when your little feelings get hurt so you take your toy away and give it to someone else, does it feel good? What statement do you mean to make? Why do you think that you’re the moral authority of everything in sports? Do you realize that in taking an award away from a known cheat, you’re just handing it to an unknown cheat? Why not just take every award and give it to a player from the 1960s when 225-pound offensive lineman didn’t mix steroids into their alcohol and aspirin regimen? Of course had PEDs been invented, they most certainly would have. This might be tough to take, but someone needs to tell you – your awards (and opinions) are meaningless. You live in a cloudy nostalgia for a world that no longer exists.

At what point will these sportswriters catch some blowback for their ever-present sanctimoniousness? It’s bad enough that these super dorks dangle their Hall of Fame votes like the Sword of Damocles over players whose choices and not performance, they deem unworthy. Entrance into a Hall of Fame is the highest honor a sport can bestow a player, and these writers keep guard of their vote as though they’re Saint Peter but Defensive Rookie of the Year? Did anyone even know there was such an award? The last time anyone heard of this award was the last time they gave it to a dude that got busted for ‘roids.

Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame will be officially obsolete the moment Barry Bonds becomes eligible and is not immediately elected. With apologies to Tyrus Raymond Cobb, Bonds might be the most arrogant, least likeable ballplayer in history. He’s also the game’s most prolific hitter. There is also no doubt that he used performance enhancing drugs. Feel free to threaten every player from the “steroid era” (news flash: the “steroid era” heretofore will be known as “forever”) with exclusion from their respective halls of fame, just know that a hall of fame is irrelevant without the best players in it.

Steroids and other performance enhancing drugs are here to stay. There is no need to debate the morality of a person choosing to trade the health effects of steroids and potential loss of very prestigious Defensive Rookie of the Year awards for a chance to maximize his/her very small window of peak athletic greatness, it doesn’t matter. Athletes will continue to use them and what’s left of the field of traditional sports journalism will continue to condemn them for it.

It’s just that everyday more people are watching bigger, stronger, faster athletes and fewer people are reading sanctimonious, know-it-all sportswriters.

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