Politics and Sports

I feel I've spent enough of my time recently in life watching sports, reading about sports and going on the net to find different view points on the same topics regarding sports. I figured this would be a good outlet to let it all out...

Welcome to my first article at Hung on Sports.

We've recently spent the last few days surrounded with news on the Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee congressional hearings. Also consider the recent accusations from Sen. Arlen Specter[1] that he wants investigations into why the tapes regarding the New England Patriots Spygate scandal were destroyed.

Frankly I can't understand how these stories have even become reality. I don't know much about the internal workings of the political system in the United States (I'm Canadian btw, but I don't know much about the internal political system in Canada either), but the question on my mind is how the hell congressmen can spend any time at all on either of these subjects.

Most columns or news reports I've seen about the Clemens-McNamee hearings don't even begin to address the question of why they are there in the first place. Did Roger Clemens take steroids or HGH? Is McNamee lying about administering the needles to Roger? How many times did Clemens glance at McNamee during the hearings? Personally my opinions are Yes, No, and ? on these subjects but that's not the point.

When I actually take a second or two to think about this event, the thing I really want to know about is how the justice / political system actually has the power to bring in these individuals to answer questions. As far as I know there aren't any charges that are being brought against any of these men.

I think a popular opinion is that these senators are just using this opportunity to gain a bit of spotlight for themselves. I wholeheartedly agree with this. Are they acting inappropriately? Probably.

However, since this is the way it is and can't do anything about it, I think congress should set aside some time for other celebrity fueled hearings to put under the spotlight things we all would like to know. For example:

• Bring in Isiah Thomas and grill him on how he could possibly put together a roster as bad as the Knicks.

• See if Tony Romo realizes that the longer he dates Jessica Simpson will directly correlate to him sucking more (not to say he's a bad player, but he has now gone 0-2 in the playoffs and seriously who would date Jessica Simpson at this stage of her career?).

• Bring in all NFL linebackers and see if they take any steroids (just to double check the rock solid NFL drug-testing policy).

As a side point, how dumb were we back in the home run race between McGwire and Sosa? I remember everyone including myself coming up with various theories over how these guys were hitting so many homers. This list included juiced balls, a dilution of pitcher quality in the MLB, that general training regiments had improved massively from the early 90s to late 90s and steroids. Looking back on this, it's one of the most obvious things ever. It was a lock that it was steroids but no one really wanted to believe it.

I remember sometime during the race to 62, McGwire was caught using something called Andro which I believe was available at the time in any GNC and was relatively common. There was a minor shock and controversy over this. McGwire put on a brave face and said something like he would quit using it because he didn't want to give kids a bad example. This in hindsight is hilarious.

Along the lines of hypotheticals from above, congress should declare that McGwire be put on the show Moment of Truth and ask whether he was privately overjoyed that the media didn't beat the steroid question over him and he seemed to get away with it until the entire HGH scandal unfolded.

So I guess I don't have a satisfactory answer for why politicians are investigating these kinds of things, but I have a feeling most of them don't even think we're asking the question.

/Andrew