Well, it looks like it was a big fat waste of time to have been overly worried about the fate of TennisWorld’s demented New Orleans Bureau Chief and ranking press pariah, Joseph B. Stahl.
It turns out that while Hurricane Katrina was pounding his home town, the renegade attorney and unapologetic snob was running around in short pants, playing tennis all over New Jersey. Did you know that, the back in the day, the Garden State had a number of important, prestigious grass-court events, including those at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club and the Seabright Lawn Tennis and Cricket Club?
That’s right, dude, cricket.
Anyway, I recently sent our NOBC a top-secret internal memo, trying to discern whether he was alive, or had been slaughtered and dismembered by looters out to get hold of his TAD Davis tennis racquet or Fred Perry laurel wreath shirts.
The other day, he replied:
If you’re a hurricane freak or New Orleans junky or a NOBC groupie, you can read his lengthy piece on the hurricane and how it affected the New Orleans Tennis Club. But be warned: You gotta pay to play at Tennis Week.
In fact, I wouldn’t even have bothered to write this post if Stahl hadn’t also sent me his unique, lawyerly interpretation of the recent ITF explanation of the Mariano “Just Say Yes” Puerta doping suspension (Puerta got 8 years, effectively ending his career).
Our NOBC writes:
Now there’s an interesting idea. Let them dope out the wazoo! Who cares if the U.S. Open men’s champ has pendulous breasts, giant zits on his back, and yellow eyes? Let the strong survive! Can you imagine what, oh, Serena Williams and Marat Safin would look like if they were doped to the eyeballs, or on an intensive, 6-month steroid ingestion program? Tennis would end up looking like that famous bar scene from the original Star Wars.
While my sick and/or libertine inclinations are kind of tempted by this suggestion (show me a hand-grenade and my first reaction is apt to be, “I wonder what would happen if we took this pin . . .”), I have parted ways with my esteemed bureau chief here. I say, D.A.R.E. to keep tennis players off drugs.
Seriously, though, it's pretty clear from the ITF's statementthat Puerta plea-bargained to get "inadvertency" into the tribunal's language and, as a commentator on the last post noted, the extremely cautious language used by the ITF and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) reflects their prudence because of the ongoing nature of this legal action.
Do you all realize what a horrific--and ever increasing--string of drug-related stories tennis has been producing? Remember the Boris Becker accusations lodged at Thomas Muster? The disturbing Leo Clijsters charges about Justine Henin-Hardenne? How about the Svetlana Kuznetsova rumors out of Belgium last winter, and so on . . .
I’m serious, folks--so much so that since I started writing this blog, I’ve switched camps and now believe that tennis probably has an enormous doping problem, and it may help explain the bizarre way players lately come and go, disappearing for months at a time, between tournaments.
Here’s the money quote on how this all may have come to pass from WADA President Dick Pound:
This seems to vindicate my earlier skepticism about the credibility and even the aims of the ATP and WTA testing programs.
Beyond that, one of my main objections to the Puerta decision is that it appears that while he (and other dopers in a similar fix) must return their prize money and forfeit ranking points, their names remain in the official record--that is, Puerta will go down in history as a French Open finalist.
This is wrong. Dopers should be written out of history; the last person the doper beat should get credit for going one round further, with an asterisk.
Draconian? Yeah. So what?
Here's another tough one for the Puerta defenders to explain: the ITF statement to which I link above makes it clear that Puerta plea-bargained his offense, getting a reduced judgement (the focus of Stahl's note).
Incidentally, if you want to read a great interpretive piece (with numerous links) on this latest round in the doping scandals, check out Kamakshi’s "Scoping Anti-Doping" post at Court Coverage today.
I’ve been encouraging Kamakshi to do a little more editorializing at her indispensable website (much as I enjoy her snippy and/or witty asides), and she certainly delivers the goods here. However, her analysis vividly demonstrates an important point implicitly made in almost any serious evaluation of doping--that the entire anti-doping effort is hopelessly awash in contradictions, ambiguities, and just plain incomprehensible processes and official positions.
Or is it that the dopers want everyone, especially those who pride themselves on being open-minded, to think that the entire anti-doping effort is hopelessly awash, etc. etc.?
Well, call me a closed-minded bigot--my gut feeling is that doping is an entrenched, illicit activity, and its practitioners know how to use every possible masking agent and tool of obfuscation in order to cast doubt on positive results, confuse the public and press, and generate sympathy for the poor “victims” of anti-doping rules. They know how to use the highly scientific, complicated, and obscure protocols, rules, and definitions of the anti-doping effort in their own favor.
I hate to be the heavy here, but does it occur to anyone else that Puerta and his crew simply knew--or figured out--that they had a pretty good fallback position on a potential doping charge if they got Mariano’s wife on some form of medication that could then be blamed for a potential positive result?
It seems to me that dopers are using a different kind of masking agent now--a public relations and spin-based one.
The sad thing is that all of these murky circumstances serve, over time, to weaken the anti-doping establishment’s position. But if you just take a step back, you have this reality to confront: There have been a tremendous number of positive tests and doping suspensions, yet you can count on the fingers of one hand (even if you’re not part of the opposable-thumbs set) the number of admitted dopers.
If you're naive and/or idealistic enough to give everyone the benefit of doubt, and especially if you have an ingrained aversion to authority, the conclusion is unavoidable: The entire anti-doping effort is driven by incompetence and injustice; all it does is ostracize and punish innocent people.
Do you really, truly believe that can be the case? If you do, you're obliged to extend your good faith to anyone in a similar position--Martha Stewart, let's say, or all those guys at, oh, Enron. They too, talked a pretty good game and knew how to obfuscate.