Pitarresi: A-Rod sins hardly surprising

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it was very common for baseball, football, hockey and basketball players tospend their off-seasons on the speaker circuit.

 

So, one time or another, before I was in high school, I got to meet and/or hear Jim Brown, Lou Groza, Phil Rizzuto, Cookie Gilchrist, Rocket Richard and many others in person. When I was about 10 or 11 years old, Alex Webster, then the star running back of the New York Giants, came to Niagara Falls to speak at a dinner. Afterward, as we were leaving, my father spotted “Big Red” in the bar of the restaurant and told me to go get his autograph. I went in with my pen and a piece of paper, and there was Alex sitting with a couple of friends and what seemed like a forest of empty Black Label bottles spread out on the table.

 

I was a little dubious, but I politely asked Alex for an autograph, he graciously signed, and I returned to my father.

 

“Dad!” I said in amazement. “He was drinking beer!”

 

“Well, that’s okay,” my father said, or something like that.

 

I was to learn somewhere down the line that drinking beer isn’t necessarily bad, but back then? Whoa! I thought athletes and especially football players were somewhere on a level with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and John Wayne, all of them virtuous and all them, in my mind, unlikely to drink beer.

 

Well, watching Alex Webster suck down a couple of brews was the beginning of the end of that idea. So …. the far, far greater transgressions of Alex Rodriguez hardly surprise me. The last 15 years has been a tragic era in sports. Chemically-assisted performance has junked record books, skewed the estimation of players’ abilities and muddied the waters of sports history.  

 

We’ve come to expect it. What I’m worried about is that such things will turn all of our legitimate sports into professional wrestling. That’s a depressing thought.