BETHESDA, Md. – Five years from now – after having spent $5 million to prove golf’s cleanliness and answering 5 million questions about why drug testing hasn’t netted an offender, either high profile or otherwise – PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem will step to a podium and announce his circuit to be drug free.
That the Teflon Tour had to jump through all of the anti-doping hoops on the way to this above-it-all crossroads was a waste of time, money and character. But what’s a little smudge during the age of chemically induced asterisks?
However reluctantly the Tour was pushed, poked and prodded to the specimen cup, there is no escaping the commonly held belief that these guys are good
and clean.
There was no need for all that heavy lifting and heavy spending to prove otherwise. But as Finchem figured Wednesday afternoon at the AT&T National, the likely site of the start of the anti-doping era, there was no way of ducking the doping cloud that has consumed other sports.
“With the highlight (of doping) in cycling and baseball in recent years, it’s become intense with the involvement of Capitol Hill in all sports of what they are doing in anti-doping,” said Finchem, the first to undergo testing at Congressional Country Club on Wednesday in order to learn how the process will impact his players. “We just felt we had to go down this road.”
From the outset, Tour types were less concerned that testing would turn up the “clear and the cream” – the performance-enhancing and masking agents that became infamous during Barry Bonds’ doping drama – then they were with the “cold and the coincidental.”
The seemingly boundless list of prohibited substances is dotted with elements that can be found in over-the-counter cold medication or medication for high blood pressure. Players were warned that the innocent-looking energy supplement they’d been taking for years accidentally could have been spiked with a taboo substance.
And the horror stories chilled the Tour masses to their Softspikes. An accidental positive test would mar more than just a single player. One misstep and the entire Tour would be painted with the steroid brush.
An intense education process ensued, and after a year of explaining and teaching, officials are confident those types of incidental black eyes will be avoided.
“I really do think the message got across,” said Richard Young, the Colorado-based lawyer who helped create the Tour’s anti-doping program. “There has never been another sport that made sure athletes understood what was going on. I would be very, very surprised if anyone had any problems.”
What seems to have been overlooked as the Tour inched closer to the specimen cup, primarily for the sake of landing golf in the Olympics or appeasing naysayers who still will have doubts (even after Finchem makes his “all-clear” announcement five years hence) is that there are no performance-enhancing drugs in golf.
Not because players wouldn’t be interested in longer and straighter, but because those qualities don’t come in a needle.
“People assume every sport is the same and that steroids will make you better. But it’s not the same,” said Greg Rose, a co-founder of the Titleist Performance Institute, the sport’s leading center for golf fitness.
“There are so many components to golf. This isn’t the long-drive Tour where all that matters is how far you hit it. The short game is more important, and things like steroids can affect your flexibility, your attitude and your personality. Bad things. You want things to slow you down.”
There are a litany of penalties for a positive test, a lifetime ban being the ultimate price for a called third strike, but if a player does test dirty after more than 12 months of training, Q&As and media hype we would suggest a lobotomy for that wayward soul.
“I’d be shocked (if someone were to test positive),” Rose said. “If someone gets caught, I’d like to ask them, ‘Do you think this helps you?’ ”
It’s a question that also would double as a suitable follow-up five years from now when Finchem awards the Tour a clean bill of doping health. Does Finchem & Co. really think this helps?
Concedes the commissioner: “If you’re not getting positive tests, somebody is going to write a blog saying you’re doing it wrong.”
The Tour’s not doing it wrong. Instead, maybe a sports world bent on bending or breaking the rules prompted the Tour to do the wrong thing.
Posted: 7/2/2008
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