Tiger Woods: Accusations of HGH Use Are Reckless, To Say The Least

Tiger Woods was visited by a doctor who is now under investigation for possibly providing performance enhancing drugs to professional athletes.

Let’s indict Woods right now.

After we do that, let’s ban him from professional golf forever and erase his major championship victories from the record books.  After all, guilt by very slim association is more than enough to not only accuse, but make our ultimate decision of guilt these days.

Woods cheated on his wife, so he must have cheated in every other aspect of his life, right?

Just like a stockbroker who got divorced for cheating on his wife must be involved in insider trading, right?

Or that married baseball umpire who takes part in some “extracurricular” activities while on the road must be involved in an intricate baseball gambling ring, right?

Or that guy who cheated his way through high school chemistry must now be cheating on his wife with numerous cocktail waitresses, right?

Folks, despite what our gossip-hungry society deems acceptable these days, or the virtual collapse we’ve seen in journalistic integrity over the past month, accusing or implying guilt based on nonexistent evidence is not only reckless, but downright wrong.

What do we know about this current situation with Woods and the doc?

Woods was visited by a Canadian doctor, Anthony Galea, who is a pioneer of a now widely-accepted procedure known as blood-spinning.  The procedure is FDA-approved, and one that many athletes across many different sports have received.

Woods’ agent, Mark Steinberg, claims that the visits by Galea to Woods’ home in Windermere, Florida during late 2008 were for the purpose of giving Woods blood-spinning treatments to assist in his recovery from knee surgery.

Again, something done by many professional athletes as well as 55-year-old-men suffering from tennis elbow.

Maybe you believe that account of what took place in Woods’ home—or maybe you don’t—but we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever to warrant leaning in one direction or the other.

A handful of NFL players and Olympic gold medalist Dara Torres have also been linked to Galea.

If this doctor was some kind of “PED dealer,” do you not think that the Olympic drug testing procedure—which is the most stringent and inclusive testing procedure in all of sports—or the NFL’s notably strict testing procedure would have picked up on these athletes' use of HGH or other PEDs?

Unless Dara Torres had a twin sister that went into the doctor’s office in Beijing to take her blood test during the 2008 Olympic Games, there’s not a chance in the world that she could have snuck HGH usage past the Olympic drug testers.

Another widely accepted view these days is that because an athlete becomes more muscular, he must be using some form of PEDs.

First of all, if you see Tiger Woods in person, he’s not as big as he looks on television.  He’s muscular and well-defined, for sure, but far from warranting comparisons to NFL linebackers.  At best, maybe he resembles a defensive back.

Second of all, Woods didn’t leave for the offseason one November looking like Steve Urkel and come back the next January looking like Barry Bonds.

His transformation was gradual over a period of years, which is what could be expected of any young man beginning to fill out during his 20s, and particularly one who has been described by many of his peers as a “workout fiend.”

He's not alone amongst PGA Tour professionals in adding muscle mass over the past five or ten years. Golf is a much different game today than it was 40 years ago.

Phil Mickelson went into the 2007 offseason as a pudgy bowl of jelly and came back in early 2008 with bulging biceps, no neck, and no stomach to speak of.

Sergio Garcia is significantly more muscular, and well-defined today than he was five years ago.

Camilo Villegas went from skin and bones to looking like a bodybuilder in a just few short years.

Padraig Harrington is noticeably more muscular today than he was just a few years ago.

Dustin Johnson is beginning to look like an NFL “linebacker” himself these days.

And the list goes on and on and on.

So, making assumptions and accusations based almost solely on an individual's body transformation is using trivial, and more or less irrelevant, criterion on which to base implications of guilt.

Maybe Tiger Woods, Dana Torres and a handful of NFL players were receiving HGH or other PEDS from Galea.

No one has any idea—which is precisely why accusing or even implying guilt is a reckless thing to do at this point.  

But then again, when Tiger Woods brought down that fire hydrant on November 27th, he may have also brought down any remaining journalistic integrity we had left.