Burn the Sports Books!

There are many evil people and many evils in the world of sports. There are players who have raped women, assaulted people, killed people, sold drugs, bought drugs, used drugs, and just about anything else someone can do. We have steroids and college sports where amateurs in select sports have gotten a tremendous raise in their salary. Things in sports aren't great right now, but the biggest danger to the status quo and the biggest evil in sports is an obvious one — books.

Books are a major reason we are in the crap storm we face in the sports world today. If not for Jose Canseco, do steroids become the problem they are today? They were always a problem, but we wouldn't know about it like we do now. It was Jose who decided to roll on former teammates and rat out everyone in his tell-all book "Juiced," drilling baseball with the biggest PR disaster they have had in the last decade.

Thanks to a book, we now have lost the epic home run battle between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa — the same homerun chase that brought many fans back to the game. Childhood heroes are now setting examples that lead to childhood death. The worst part isn't the steroids; fans have shown they really don't care about that. The worst part is we can't get away from the whole scandal. Thanks to Jose's book, steroids has become a mainstream issue and fans feel forced to care, especially when Congress has to get involved.

The media world pushed Barry Bonds off a bridge recently, and one of the most damaging testimonies against Bonds came from his mistress, who rolled Bonds in her own tell-all book. Barry might still be playing now and wouldn't have had to use his son as a prop if it wasn't from the latest backlash after his mistress came forward (and there's still the, uh, "knee injury").

Lance Armstrong is in the middle of the steroid issue now, as well, ever since a Frenchman decided to slander Lance in a book. Now Lance is forced to deal with this instead of living strong and getting ready for another Tour de France. If I was Lance, I wouldn't any more afraid of a Frenchman wielding a pen than one wielding a gun, but it's still an inconvenience.

Johnny Damon is another person who has been affected by books. Of course, he was stupid enough to describe his marital infidelities in his tell-all book, so it's still not going to end well for him. The business of high school hoops has also been exposed, courtesy of, naturally, Ian O'Connor's book.

I think it's pretty clear what the common thread here is. Books are the true evil. For the sports world to be truly healed of the ills they face, we need to get back to our puritan roots and start burning books again. That may be overly harsh, but I don't think sports fans really care and because of the books, they are almost forced to care.

Too many people are just content to live in ignorant bliss when it comes to sports scandals. There are not too many people who really believed that steroids weren't used widely in baseball during the '90s, but no one had to deal with it because there was never any hard truth to it. It is much easier to believe that McGwire and Sosa are really locked in a home run race than to have to consider the implications that they were both cheating.

It's the same deal with amateur sports. There can't be many intelligent people left who think amateur athletes at the top of their game aren't getting certain advantages and privileges, that's just how it is. Is it wrong? Maybe, but it's not something we want to deal with. People can bask in the beauty of an Ohio State national championship because its kids playing the game for the right reasons, or at least that's what people want to believe. The reality that what happened with Maurice Clarett really isn't the exception to the rule can be conveniently tucked away until they just can't keep ignoring it any more (see steroid hearings in Congress).

We desperately need a scapegoat and books can fit that category perfectly. We can merely discount anything in a book as it's only in there to sell more copies. I think it's much easier than dealing with the alternative. Besides, who can read when we keep our heads buried in the sand?

Mark Chalifoux is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Tuesday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Mark at [email protected].