KELLER'S TAKE KELLER: Today's report on steroids in baseball should be studied by pro wrestling industry Dec 13, 2007 - 3:18:32 PM

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By Wade Keller, Torch editor

Today's George Mitchell Report on steroids in baseball should be read closely by pro wrestling's powerbrokers in WWE and TNA.

While there will be people who disregard the correlation between baseball and pro wrestling, because baseball is a sport where winners and losers are not predetermined, those people miss the point.

In his press conference today, Mitchell said: "[Players who used steroids] distorted the fairness of competition by trying to gain an unfair advantage over the majority of players who followed the law and the rules. They, the players who followed the law and the rules, are faced with the painful choice of either being placed at a competitive disadvantage or becoming illegal users themselves."

There is nothing about that statement that doesn't also apply to pro wrestling. Pro wrestlers compete for roster spots, and there are a select few top roster spots with high six-figure or seven-figure incomes. The culture of pro wrestling has long rewarded musculature. It is therefore a logical advantage for wrestlers, who are otherwise close in terms of their talent and charisma and appearance, to take steroids to either get ahead or keep up in terms of appearance and performance.

At today's press conference, Prof. Richard McLaren, who assisted Sen. Mitchell in his investigation, stated that an effective state of the art steroid program must be "administered by a truly independent authority that holds exclusive jurisdiction over its structure and administration," "a transparent program that keeps complete records from which reports are produced enabling the public to judge its integrity," and "adherence to best practices in drug testing, and in particular, adequate unannounced year-round testing."

WWE's Wellness Policy, as original drafted and implemented, does not meet this criteria well, mainly in the area of transparency and independence. There is no way for the public to judge the integrity of WWE's testing, even with the new policy of announcing publicly any failures. There is no way to know how often wrestlers are being tested, for instance, and whether over time that pattern appears to be fair.

The baseball report addresses privacy issues for athletes (pg. 304): "Drug testing programs must respect the privacy rights of the athletes who are tested. Yet to instill public trust and ensure accountability, they must be as transparent as possible consistent with protecting those rights. Transparency can be achieved by such actions as submitting to outside audits, and publishing periodic reports of de-identified aggregate testing results, retaining records of negative test results so that confirmation is available to correctly interpret subsequent tests, which may inure to the benefit of a player charged with a positive result in a later test. A transparent program should provide the public with aggregate data that demonstrates the work of the program and the results achieved by it (but that does not reveal or permit the determination of individual identities)."

WWE, if faced with Congressional Hearings, would need to establish exactly how independent Dr. Black and Aegis Corp. is. The Mitchell Report addresses independent in this manner (pg. 303): "There are a number of methods by which true independence may be achieved. The precise form is for the parties to decide through collective bargaining. The independent program administrator could serve for a substantial fixed term, not subject to removal except for good cause. Alternatively, the parties could establish a self-perpetuating, non-profit corporation that is completely independent of the parties. There may be other alternatives. Whatever form they choose, the independent program administrator should hold exclusive authority over all aspects of the formulation and administration of the program."

The report also says this about transparency (pg. 265): "Transparency is essential to demonstrate the integrity of any drug testing program. In this context, transparency means disclosure of sufficient information about the operation of the program to ensure that it is operated fairly and in accordance with the expectations of interested parties, including fans. The need for transparency must be balanced against a player’s right to privacy. A hallmark of a transparent drug testing program is the issuance of periodic reports of its operations. These reports do not identify individual test results but, in general, disclose the number of tests taken during the year, the number of those tests that were determined by the testing laboratory to be positive, the disposition of each test, the substance found in each positive test, and information regarding other violations of the joint program. The ability to audit a drug testing program also is essential to show that positive tests are handled appropriately and are not suppressed. In any drug testing program, there are a number of stages at which violations can be ignored or suppressed; this is generally referred to as 'results management.'"

As for the oft-cited argument by WWE that athletes/performers should be held accountable for their choices, the Mitchell report addresses a similar argument as it relates to baseball: "Obviously, the players who illegally used performance enhancing substances are responsible for their actions. But they did not act in a vacuum. Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades – Commissioners, club officials, the Players Association, and players – shares to some extent in the responsibility for the steroids era. There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on. As a result, an environment developed in which illegal use became widespread."

Regarding therapeutic use exemptions, which has been cited as a potential major loophole in WWE's Wellness Policy, the Mitchell report stated: "(T)herapeutic use exemptions have been a significant loophole in some drug testing programs."

I expect that the media will point at the named players in the Mitchell report and call them liars and cheaters, but the point will still be lost that the list of players named is not exhaustive. It's not that players are cheater and liars, but instead they have been submitting to a system and a culture in which, to survive, widespread compromises are common.

This idea that players who are named for using steroids shouldn't be allowed into the Hall of Fame, or that teams that won championships with players named as using steroids at that time should have asterisks next to them in the record books, again is missing the point. Steroids have been a widespread part of the culture. It was part of the game. In a sense, due to lousy drug testing system in baseball for decades, the playing field was even. For 20 years or more, players have taken whatever they could, and they all were able to rather easily. And the usage of it was more widespread and common than the sports media establishment has fully grasped or accepted. Until they get that the players aren't cheaters, but instead the system itself cheated them out of an ability to survive and compete without using them, this story will be sidetracked by attempts to shame individual players. The real story, in baseball and pro wrestling, is the system rewarding drug use and not working diligently enough to prevent it, not the individuals who did what the system demanded of them or rewarded them for.

The lingering difficulty in this story is growth hormone and the difficulty and expense of testing for it compared to steroids. The Mitchell Report brought that to the forefront of discussion today, which is a plus, because the health effects of longterm growth hormone usage should be a major concern, also, as so many athletes today are human test tubes for various concoctions.

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