'Juice' me up

As a little girl growing up in a household of a sports columnist father and a sports fanatic brother, there was no way to avoid talking sports 24/7. At the breakfast table, dinner table or different sporting events on TV, sports were everywhere in my life. \nMy brother had a cardboard cutout of Frank Thomas, posters of the great teams of Duke and he loved Grant Hill. Like most little boys he idolized these larger than life sports figures. With bulging muscles, eccentric attitudes and great stats, my brother was completely obsessed with the sporting world.\nThough I did get sick of sports talk growing up, I do miss those days. Those days before the steroid talk and baseball greats having their achievements called into question because of these performance enhancing drugs. \nDrugs and cheating are becoming a part of our favorite American past time. The saddest part of the steroid scenario is that children everywhere will still love and long to be like these glorified cheaters.\nSure, Rafael Palmeiro got a 10-day suspension for testing positive for steroids, but he didn't "knowingly" take them. Sammy Sosa used a corked bat in 2003 and got suspended for eight games. But he grabbed the wrong bat, it wasn't his fault. \nExcuses, excuses, excuses. \nIf it's your baseball reputation on the line, wouldn't you be a little more careful about exactly what you're putting in your body and which bat you are grabbing? Ignorance is not an excuse in the real world. \nLet's say I was going 40 mph down 17th St. and got pulled over. Do you think the officer would let me go because I didn't know how fast I was going? "I am sorry officer, I didn't knowingly speed. I just looked down at the speedometer and it was at 40. It won't happen again. I promise."\nExcuses like that don't work outside the realm of fantasy. \nIs it that sports fans don't care how these athletes perform, as long as they put up big numbers? Is this the message that these baseball players want to send to little league players everywhere? \nPalmeiro will serve his suspension and sports analysts will continue to talk about him and speculate about others' use of steroids. But Palmeiro will still probably get into the Hall of Fame for his achievement of being one of four players to have 3,000 hits and 500 home runs in his career. Those big numbers always dazzle people -- whether legit or not. \nBut behind those big numbers is the truth, as painful as it is for most to admit. In one of the first episodes of VH1's reality show, "The Surreal Life," surreal-lifer Jose Canseco had a signing for his book, "Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, & How Baseball Got Big." Baseball fans lined up to meet Canseco and take cheap shots at him. One man even thanked him for ruining baseball and making false statements about Mark McGwire taking 'roids. \nThat's right, little man, blame Canseco for single-handedly ruining baseball and forcing all these other players to 'juice it up.' But where I come from and the sports house I grew up in, we were always taught to tell the truth and take the blame for our actions, whether we knowingly did it or not.