However, after it has been admitted that most citizens dope themselves from time to time, there remain excellent grounds for claiming that in the matter of drug usage, athletes are different from the rest of us.

What? “Most” citizens dope themselves from time to time? That would require something in the way of at least a survey. And if that were true, why would we think athletes are any different than us?

Decades ago a survey of Olympic athletes asked if they could take a substance that would guarantee them a gold medal but would also ensure they would be dead by age 30, about 80 percent said they’d take that drug. So if Gilbert’s right about most citizens doping themselves, that survey of athletes proved they are not different from the rest of us.

Baseball fans worldwide ripped the guy because they didn’t want to hear it. Wilstein was treated as if he had stuck his hand down ol’ double-M’s pants and twanged his weiner. Fans – certainly some of them who have posted here – just didn’t want to know the truth. Let’s put the blame where it belongs – on the fans. Fans never want to admit that they are part of the problem.

Amphetimines? Jim Bouton covered that well enough in “Ball Four” to get a call from Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who demanded that Bouton say he made it up. Where was the fan outrage when that best-selling book was written?

As for Gilbert’s article, weak, weak stuff that clearly fails to connect much of anything to baseball, let alone steroids.

All the Olympic stuff was fairly well known back then, and he doesn’t even touch on vampires on wheels – cyclists who blood doped.

It’s a piece that’s easy to pick apart. More supposition and innuendo than anything. It might have been in SI, but SI did a lot of weak crap back in the ’60s and ’70s that was more air than substance.

However, after it has been admitted that most citizens dope themselves from time to time, there remain excellent grounds for claiming that in the matter of drug usage, athletes are different from the rest of us.

The Tigers’ Series hero, Mickey Lolich, was on antibiotics.

Wow. I can’t believe Lolich didn’t end up in prison for that.

?”Give me two sleeping pills,” said Los Angeles Laker star Jerry West

Unlike Marilyn Monroe, who asked for a handful. Sleeping pills. Gilbert doesn’t even say if they were over the counter.

Jean-Louis Quadri, 18, a soccer player, … 23-year-old Yves Mottin … two French cyclists…Olympic Games…Canadian national cycling team

Not only do these have nothing to do with baseball or American sports writers, none of this stuff was surprising among international elite athletes at the time.

DMSO

A substance that has been mostly available in the past four decades. I knew a doctor who gave some to a journalist for an elbow problem. It’s hardly insidious, and has been around for a century.

Bobby Baun, then of the Toronto Maple Leafs, was hit on the leg by the puck and carried from the rink on a stretcher. In the training room he received an injection of Novocain. His leg was taped, he returned to play, and he scored the winning goal in overtime. The next day it was determined Baun had a cracked right fibula….Numbing a broken leg and sending the patient out to play hockey is not a treatment any physician would follow with a nonathlete.

Who edited this piece for SI? A cracked fibula becomes a broken leg? What was it? Cracked or broken? And there is no shortage of stories of NFL players finishing games on broken legs. Buster Keaton once broke his neck doing a stunt and finished filming that day. I finished playing a pickup game of basketball once with a broken finger.

There are abundant rumors—the wildest of which circulate within rather than outside the sporting world—about … hopped-up pitchers,

If this is supposed to build a case in general, and particularly one about baseball, in the minds of readers here, it fails. “Abundant rumors” is lame innuendo, and then Gilbert doesn’t even bother to give us some good rumors.

the use of drugs in sport leads one directly to more serious and complicated questions. Is athletic integrity (and, conversely, corruption) a matter of public interest?

Of course not. If it had been, people would not have tried to crucify Steve Wilstein. People who read Jim Bouton’s book would have cared enough to make a stink about it.

says Kerlan “Situations arise where there are valid medical reasons for prescribing drugs for athletes.

And in fact there are at least a couple of anecdotes in Gilbert’s story that could fall into that category, but he blurs it for the reader.

in this country weight lifters and trackmen seem to be natural… began giving these drugs to weight lifters at the York (Pa.) Barbell Club

Again, great. And again, that hasn’t got anything to do with pro sports in general or baseball in particular. It would not be of interest to sports writers. Sports writers don’t care about some barbell club.

Plenty of stuff out there from the ’60s on this topic. It’s not that this was not a subject that was written about back then, it’s just that, as was the case with Wilstein, people didn’t want to hear it.

Great work, John. I’m glad someone took the time to find this and bring it to light. I knew there had to be at least one piece like this from 30 or 40 years ago, so thanks for finding it. And now that Gammons has brought it up on his blog, maybe some more mainstream people will talk about this. It’s pretty ridiculous that we’re all acting like this is brand new stuff.

Earlier in the comments, Keith mentions a couple of other articles to look at. I went looking for them, and posted them on my blog: Bil Gilbert’s “Something Extra On the Ball“, from June 30, 1969, and Terry Todd’s “The Steroid Predicament” from August 1, 1983.

Thanks again for finding this. Good stuff.

Thanks for the tip. I’m trying to find as much by Glibert as possible. Since my email is broken right now, if you find more, send me the links through my backtalk. I’ll keep front-paging them.

Peter Gammons reads and is now quoting you. Congradulations!

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=gammons_peter

…former Reds and Marlins trainer Larry Starr testified to.

We are all familiar with Selig’s fake indignation and hurt feelings whenver somebody accuses him of ignoring personal knowledge of anything to do with peds. If you’re not, let me refresh your memory from a quote of his last week in an interview with New York’s Newsday.

“I don’t want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn’t care about it,” Selig said. “That annoys the you-know-what out of me. You bet I’m sensitive to the criticism. The reason I’m so frustrated is, if you look at our whole body of work, I think we’ve come farther than anyone ever dreamed possible.”

No. No blind eye here. No deaf ear here either. He’s sooooooo sensititive to the criticism of some that he knew but did nothing. He was not the commissioner then. Nice bit of Clintonesque/Nixonian weasal-wording there Bud. But he was the owner of the Brewers and as John has pointed out in the past, he was busy running the club into the ground with a chintzy payroll, while collecting millions in revenue sharing. Well, here is what former Reds and Marlins testified to:

“Here’s the thing that really bothers me,” Starr said. “They sit there, meaning the commissioner’s office, Bud Selig and that group, and the players’ association, Don Fehr and that group . . . they sit there and say, ‘Well, now that we know that this happened we’re going to do something about it.’

“I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners group and the players’ association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, ‘Look, we need to do something about this. We’ve got a problem here if we don’t do something about it.’ That was in 1988.”

Heres the link for that too: The orginal FloridaToday report has been taken down since this first came out in 2007.

http://sportsonmymind.com/2007/12/18/the-mitchell-investigation-aftermath-its-time-to-get-religion/#more-1326

And just for the record, we all know who the President of the Texas Rangers was at that time, right?