|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
1 4 - 0 3 - 2 0 0 5 Out from under cover, he hopes game will wake up
Mike Lupica
He grew up a Cubs fan in Chicago, and watched the home run summer of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa from that vantage point, from his own childhood and his own memories. So even though he was living in Michigan by 1998, he was still a Sosa guy. His son was 6 that summer, too young really to understand what all the fuss was about, why the country, four years after a World Series had been canceled, followed this remarkable home run race the way it had not followed once since Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in 1961, the year Maris set the home run record McGwire and Sosa were trying to break. Now his son is 13. The father now takes the son to Tigers games. And even with what Bill Randall knows now about steroids, the questions he has about what he has been seeing on the field these past few seasons, he still enjoys the games. Mostly, he says, because his son enjoys them. Randall wants what all fathers want for their children at the ballpark. Even knowing everything he knows, he still wants the games to be magic. "Am I jaded?" Randall was saying yesterday. "Yeah, you'd have to say I'm at least a little jaded, coming from where I come from on this. But it doesn't mean that I question the talent and athleticism of the people on the field I'm watching. See, that's one of the problems with steroids. You never really know, do you?" Randall is the retired FBI agent who was part of the historic anabolic steroids undercover operation called Operation Equine you have been reading about the last couple of days in the Daily News, one that resulted in 70 trafficking convictions in the early 1990s. Of course the big headline in our story was McGwire, the slugger who helped bring baseball back, who broke Maris' record. A couple of dealers from Operation Equine told The News that a man named Curtis Wenzlaff provided McGwire and Canseco with illegal anabolic steroids. McGwire's people issue a statement and say that we're supposed to consider the source of these allegations against the former home run king of baseball. That means we are supposed to dismiss them. Except nobody dismisses the charges, and the detailed account of the steroid cocktail the FBI informants say McGwire was using, any more than people have automatically dismissed Jose Canseco's claims about. McGwire just because Canseco himself was the source of them. That ship has sailed now. Randall was right in the middle of the original investigation, the likes of which the country has not seen since. His undercover named was Eddie Schmidt. He posed as a Chicago gym owner. He wasn't after ballplayers with Operation Equine, even after Canseco's name turned up in it. This was 15 years ago, before all the home run records were broken. Randall was after the supply and the suppliers. "When we finally closed (Operation Equine) down in '91, it barely made local headlines," Randall said yesterday. "That what we did then would make headlines like this in the Year 2005 would have been the farthest thing from my imagination." Like the home run numbers we have seen from this baseball generation. Randall has seen what the rest of us have seen. And even though he still wants baseball to still be the same as it always was for him, even though he wants to be as open to the game he is watching as he ever was, it is different now. "I'm not thinking that every guy is juiced," he said. "It's not like that. What's in the back of my mind is kids. I sit there sometimes and wonder if the kids watching these games, in New York and Chicago and Detroit and Cuba and the Dominican Republic, if they think they might have to juice themselves up someday to compete with the big boys. Like: 'How juiced up do I have to get to do that?' "I frankly don't worry about McGwire or Canseco or any of those other guys. They're adults. It's different with kids, especially with them growing up in the quick-fix culture of Americana. Take this pill to lose weight. Take this pill to lower cholesterol. Is it surprising that in sports guys would jump at the chance to take a pill to help them hit more home runs?" Randall was asked yesterday what he thinks is the best possible end game here, after the congressional hearings have been held on steroids in baseball, and maybe Senate hearings after that; maybe even the full investigation from baseball itself that commissioner Bud Selig hinted at yesterday. A Dowd Report on steroids this time instead of Pete Rose. "I want kids to stop thinking that to reach their own expectations, in baseball or anything else, they have to be on the juice," Bill Randall said. "That they can do whatever they think they need to do to keep up." There was another pause. Now the retired FBI agent was back to being a baseball fan, one who grew up in Chicago when a 6-1, 180-pound converted shorstop named Ernie Banks was one of the greatest home run hitters in the world. "We all come to sports for the same reason, wanting to believe that certain people can do superhuman things," Randall said. "In that way, I'm no different than anybody else. I just want the magic to be real." |
|
|
[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
