by Tom Pantera
Columnist

“There are shadows on our land, shadows of hate and war and poverty and despair. So we get caught up in games. There must be better ways to spend our time. For when we spend it, we are returned falsity. We cannot even be sure our games are honest. The quick buck, the carpetbagging, cheating owner, the bet, the fix and the dump are always there, lurking just beneath the surface and at the edges of our minds. And I tell you, you have not heard the last of them.”

That is the concluding paragraph of “The Jocks,” a book by former sportswriter Leonard Schecter about the seamier aspects of college and professional sports.

It could’ve been written today. It wasn’t. Schecter’s book was published in 1970. Funny how little some things change.

This has not been a good summer for sports heroes. There was, of course, the whole Jerry Sandusky thing, which not only revealed Sandusky himself as a monster of epic proportions, but also revealed the sainted Joe Paterno as being just another big shot more concerned with his public image and his job than with preventing the horrible victimization of children.

And now we have Lance Armstrong, whose status as the best athlete ever in his sport will forever carry an asterisk.

I don’t mean to compare the two stories. Sandusky and those who enabled him are the worst kind of people; they threw children under the bus for their own personal gain. What Armstrong did may have been wrong or even dumb, but it really materially affects only him and his personal legacy. He didn’t ruin any other lives but his own, and large parts of his life have been devoted to doing some real good for other people.

Of course, we’ll probably never know the extent of Armstrong’s wrongdoing. His decision not to fight doping allegations raises a lot of questions, but few of those questions will ever be answered now. It’s tempting to think that he’s rolling over because the doping police really have solid evidence on him, but now that they won’t have to make it public that evidence will be known to only a select few.

But at the risk of sounding naïve, there is another possible explanation for what Armstrong has done. It could be that whatever the outcome – even if he’s totally innocent – it could so damage his charitable work and his foundation that he just didn’t want to take any chances. If that’s the case, I say, good for him. He actually may have sacrificed himself for the greater good. But again, we’ll never really know.

What’s interesting, and even a little funny in a grim sort of way, is what Armstrong’s troubles have revealed about his sport. Apparently, professional cycling has an unbelievably rotten core. It’s rather revealing that even once Armstrong’s titles are stripped from him, with one exception every guy who finished second to him in those races also has gotten in trouble for doping. It almost makes it seem like whatever group runs pro bicycling should just throw up its hands, throw in the towel and allow every team to include a pharmacologist. It certainly would reduce the group’s workload.

But that news isn’t exactly new. For years, we’ve seen articles about how doping is epidemic in bicycle racing, so tremendous a problem that whatever steps have been taken have not been able to fix it. It has become the very nature of the beast.

And it isn’t just the popular, big-money, worldwide sports either. Japanese sumo wrestling has endured bouts of scandal. Where there’s money and prestige at stake, there has been cheating. Hell, Schecter notes in his book that cheating was a big problem even among athletes in ancient Greece. It has been ever thus.

I keep watching these news stories and asking why. The simple answer is that sports is big money. Sharks show up when there’s chum in the water. Nothing generates more such chum than big-time sports.

And maybe sports is of a piece with other big industries in the world, like finance and entertainment. There are a lot of bankers out there who have hurt many more people than Lance Armstrong. But the difference is that we don’t make heroes of bankers. When they fall, we shrug our shoulders and let our cynic flag fly; we ruefully remember that they live in a different, mysterious world. Even many of the bankers who brought on the Great Recession can’t quite explain how they did it, at least not in terms most of us would understand.

And you can’t buy bubble gum that includes cards picturing the people who run stock brokerages and banks.

Perhaps the problem is the way we choose our heroes. We choose them for the ability to throw a ball a long way, to run fast, to balance on a thin wooden plank. These are all things that are laudable enough, but none of them really add to the sum total of humanity.

That’s why it’s so hard for me to watch the Olympics. I did, but it’s always difficult to sit through the scores of “humanizing” feature stories that talk about how a certain athlete overcame long odds to get to this spot on the world stage. It’s all very lovely, but it never addresses a fundamental question: Why do we care?

I mean, I know it sounds grumpy, but I could not have cared less that Diana Nyad wasn’t able to complete her latest attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. It just seemed sort of pointless. It wouldn’t have made life better for anybody, not that everything has to. But I just couldn’t see what possible good it would do for anybody, other than Nyad. If you think it’s a demonstration of courage, there are people for whom getting out of bed every morning shows more courage that Nyad’s swim could ever hope to. They just don’t have a press agent.

Still, I suppose some will consider her a hero, for whatever reason. There are worse things than pointless “heroism.”

The problem is this: We had better make sure that those we lionize deserve it. Maybe it’s time to think about whether the ability to ride a bicycle over a long, hilly course, or to throw a ball or hit one, is really all that heroic. And maybe if we give that some thought, the people who do those things may be less encouraged to cultivate our adulation by ignoring the rules.