Annikan Rodriguez: Posterchild for the Media's Pasttime

This past weekend, Sports Illustrated published a leaked report that Alex Rodriguez tested positive for using banned substances in 2003.

Today, in an interview with ESPN's Peter Gammons, Rodriguez admitted using illegal performance enhancing drugs.

Now what?

Now Rodriguez utilizes the media to try to rebuild his name and image. The same media that built the altar on which he carries himself. The same media that placed the millions of fans at is knees. The same media that lead both Texas and New York to pay him an economic stimulus package for a salary.

Indeed, whether it's irony or poetic justice, ARod will use the same medium that built him up, and is now destroying him, to try to save face.

Please read my opinion not as an apology for millionaires to use naivity as a crutch for ego. The media is not to blame, but one cannot assess the culture of which Rodriguez speaks without the context of the media that made millions of dollars a reality.

Baseball is a game that is centered on, and continuously surrounded by, history. The entire reason people are mad about players like ARod, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens using PEDs is because of the place their career statistics put them in the context of the national past time.

Let's give ARod credit for one thing. He, unlike Bonds and Clemens, and likely Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, has the intestinal fortitude to admit to doing something wrong. While it takes a moron to use the substances in the first place, it takes at least a man to admit to doing something wrong.

But let's step back into the greater presence of baseball's past. We can now look back at the greats and see that there have always been flaws with our heroes; Mickey Mantle drank and liked the company of women, Ty Cobb was a racist, Babe Ruth was an overeating cigar smoker. We know that now.

But Mantle, when he was kicked out of bars at two o'clock in the morning, didn't have ESPN's cameras waiting for him to stumble out. Sports Illustrated didn't have reporters waiting at the Old Country Buffet with a calorie counter when Ruth arrived. Cobb didn't have CNN to have their panel of experts break down his body language when he slid into third with his sharpened spikes at knee height.

While these idols of ours can claim ignorance and "not knowing" all they want, the reality for fans and the average American is that we're looking at sports now in the same light as everything else in this country.

Ethics are bankrupt. Banks are losing money, the stock market is falling, people are losing their homes. Furthermore, what have been perceived as solid relationships in every walk of life are crumbling as people stab each other in the back.

But let's be perfectly honest with ourselves. If you sign the contract, you know the expectations. If you want, with all your heart, to be a public figure, you get to deal with both the rewards and the negatives of the role. It isn't like these players, CEOs, and government officials don't know that their lives are under a microscope.

Someone much more wise than me once said that from those to whom much is given, much is expected. Rodriguez will now, painfully, deal with his new reality. He's been called out by Jose Canseco, Joe Torre, and now Sports Illustrated. He's answered the bell, and will continue to deal with what will evolve into his life.

The media is not going to shrink. Our wanting to know everything is not going to go away. We won't ever have the luxury, if you will, of suspending our need to know everything about our heroes for the sake of loving them while they're between the lines for a few hours.

But now we are beginning a new reality in America. Admission of hubris, of wrongdoing, and of failure to honestly do business is upon us in a reality that makes everyone wonder what comes next. When will the bottom truly fall out? When can we trust again? When can we look at elders and leaders and respect again?

Rodriguez might be the posterchild for a decade of deliberate naivity. I wish our future good luck.