So Rick Ankiel (that’s pronounced with three syllables, Martha, it said so on the front page of the Post-Dispatch) received shipments of Human Growth Hormone in 2004 when he was recuperating from an injury, according to a document-based report last week in the New York Daily News.
The product was not banned at the time by Major League Baseball, yet Ankiel had to face the press alongside Cardinals GM Walt Jocketty because of the witch-hunt atmosphere that permeates professional sports at the moment when it comes to anything approaching steroids. This frenzied scrutiny continues even though, for years, most media members turned a blind eye to the rampant abuse of performing-enhancing substances that fueled sports for more than a decade. It was obvious to almost everyone, except sports journalists when they were filing their copy or doing their on-camera spots.
The return of the repressed, as Sigmund Freud taught, comes with a vengeance.
Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds and now poor Rick Ankiel have discovered this fact painfully. (Well, the discovery probably wasn’t painful for Bonds, whose ego has even more substantial armor than the Darth Vadar gear he wears to protect his left arm so he can crowd the plate.)
Shame on the media regarding the new Ankiel story, for overplaying what was at worst the legal and sanctioned use of a product that is still legal, though no longer sanctioned by MLB.
But it must be said that Ankiel faced the press with a patent piece of crap for an explanation, which he seemed to have taken from his agent, Scott Boras, because Boras mouthed versions of it as well.
What was this piece-of-crap explanation? Patient-doctor privilege. Why is this explanation a piece of crap? Because the legal privilege in question applies to the doctor (or therapist), not the patient. Doctors are legally protected from disclosing certain potentially incriminating things if they learn those things through a course of treatment.
But the patient – in this case, Ankiel? It’s the patient’s own privacy in question, so his only protection under the law for remaining silent is the 5th Amendment. But, then, “I plead the 5th” sounds even more incriminating than the “patient-doctor” line of bull he was peddling.
By the way, Ankiel failed to keep straight the line he had been fed, referring to his alibi for silence once as “client-patient privilege,” which is not only crap, it’s pure nonsense. It’s a mash-up of doctor-patient and attorney-client privileges, and as such a kind of Freudian slip, assuming that it was Boras who coached him on his alibi for keeping his trap shut.
Shame also on Joe Strauss and his editors at the Post-Dispatch for reporting and publishing Ankiel’s nonsensical argument without pointing out that it’s nonsense. If Ankiel said he wouldn’t comment because Martians (or Jose Canseco) had stolen his vocal cords, would the Post have printed that without a critical comment?
Ripping Roy Williams
A number of polls, including one by NFL players, rate the Dallas Cowboys’ Roy Williams as the game’s most overrated player.
Fort Worth Star Telegram columnist Jennifer Floyd Engel, who is affectionately known as ‘The Little Ball of Hate’ did not hide her dissatisfaction with Williams’ play in the Cowboys’ 45-35 win over the New York Giants.
“The Cowboys safety was the most vocal of the off-season whiners, noting how improper use by the previous regime had prevented him from being a bigger factor with bigger numbers. Here’s the catch, though, Roy, you actually have to kick butt now.
When helping out in coverage, he reverted back to his role as an absolute liability. Your safety does not have to be Deion Sanders in coverage, but he can’t lose the ball, his man and all sense of space and time every time he finds himself dropping back.
Roy loves to publicly point fingers at everybody not named him. Remember his off-season remark about how he was not the one out there getting burned? He has no such alibi for Sunday.”
Local sports columnists are quite tepid in comparison to Engel. It would probably do the St. Louis Rams – and St. Louis Cardinals – some good to face a pithy writer like this after pitiful performances like last weekend’s.
