America Cheats in Sports

Seriously, I'm thinking this living in the United States so what do you think people everywhere else are thinking when it comes to sports in the U.S. The last three months have been nothing short of embarrassing and humiliating for our professional baseball, basketball, and football leagues, NCAA basketball, and NASCAR. However its been going on for a long time, but this much surfacing in the last year is really becoming noticeable to the rest of the world.

I stop for a moment and think back to Danny Almonte, the 12 year old Dominican in the Bronx helping the U.S. team reach third place in the Little League World Series only to find out when it was all over that Almonte was actually 14 years old and two years over the legal age. Back then a child became scrutinized by the public and he disappeared forever, popping up in the Frontier League pitching one game, losing 3-2 and released by the Southern Illinois Miners a month later.

Fast forward to today and over the past year we've seen Major League Baseball taking too many liquid cocktails, the NBA have referees betting on games they worked, the NFL have the best team in the last decade get caught taping other teams all the way back to the year 2000 and "allegedly" have the NFL cover it up by destroying the tapes, an NCAA coach breaking several recruiting rules while at one school then getting hired by another and lying about it "allegedly" doing some of the same things while at his current school.

Thats quite a lot of cheating brought up in the last year that we are finding out has been going on for years. We have old NFL coaches talk about how players in the league also revolved around steroids in the early to mid 70s, we've got players that played on the west coast shaving points for his basketball team in the 20th century, we've got a legendary quarterback who took a flop for another player so they could get a record "allegedly", we've got drivers and teams being penalized for illegal cars, along with the Black Sox and Pete Rose.

Now there is a man probably sitting back laughing at everything as no one is being charged for obstructing the "integrity of the game", referees actually having separate ways to bet on games, and just screaming WTF. Then again this is our sporting world, where players like Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro can stare congress in the eye one dancing around the facts and the other sternly saying he never took steroids only to be caught later. Then we see Roger Clemens stare at that same group of people and sound and look just like Palmeiro did making us all cringe.

The domino effect continues however, and shifts to our country's leaders who are supposed to make unbiased, informed decisions in a hearing yet we have republicans "allegedly" favoring a national icon because Clemens and President Bush are good friends, and democrats that know this and try to humiliate Clemens because of it "allegedly." Then everyone thinking even if guilty, Clemens will be pardoned by the President. Which leaves us to wonder if Congress can't make an unbiased decision about baseball, how in the hell are they going to vote on serious issues of our country based on facts and not opinions.

I will leave you with one phrase that you can digest however you want to in the sporting world or politics: "Cheaters Never Win."