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Imagine {The pairing of steroids and the high profile athlete}

© Roy Pickering

Imagine if you are a fanatic about professional wrestling. You watch with baited breath as your heroes do battle against their arch enemies. The combatants are bigger than life. There is something quite theatrical about their outlandish personalities, costumes, and storylines. The bad guys are so obviously bad, the good guys somehow overcome tremendous adversity and stacked odds to prevail time and time again. Yet nothing about this strikes you as suspicious, much less preposterous. Perhaps you are still too young and naive to be jaded. That will come later. Imagine if you are a true believer in the muscle bound men who defy gravity and logic, only to be told one day that it's staged, a scripted carnival act choreographed for your entertainment. Imagine how you would feel when this deception was brought to light. Imagine the sense of betrayal, the end of your innocence.

If that scenario doesn't disturb you, then try any of the following on for size, because unlike professional wrestling, there has never been any question that these sports are supposed to be for real.

Imagine if you found out that your favorite boxers were on the take, their bouts rigged from the outset by gangsters who control the sport you love. Imagine discovering that your favorite shoeless ballplayer and his teammates were bribed to throw the World Series for fast cash. Imagine if the player you most admired due to his grit and hustle was a gambling addict who bet on his own team's games when he became a manager.

If you can imagine all of that without your heart breaking, then perhaps we should move beyond history and on to current events. Imagine if players in the sport you love are growing bigger, faster, stronger, and better by the day. Imagine if they easily demolish records that had seemed set in stone and capable of withstanding the test of time. Imagine idolizing these men who take to the field of play with their bats and gloves and perform one amazing feat after another. Imagine if you believe you are living in a time when several of the greatest men ever to play the game are simultaneously demonstrating their out of this world abilities, surpassing the milestones of the game's legends. Imagine how exciting this would be. Imagine how riveted and uplifted you would be. Imagine how lucky you would consider yourself to be. Imagine the wonderment that would fill your soul at the crack of the bat and soaring of the ball into the blue yonder. Imagine now if those many blasts over the right, left, and centerfield fences turn out to have been artificially produced.

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