Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio?

It's sucks being a sports fanatic these days. When I was growing up, I
only wanted to be a few things for a living, and one of them was
sports reporting in general, but radio talk show host in particular. I
loved listening to those talking heads, pontificate about their chosen
stories of the day. But more importantly, I loved sports for their
purity. I've had this illusion that the battlefield of sports was a
place where warriors, fucking warriors went to battle, using their God
given abilities to win the war. In short, I felt sports was the place
where cheating was frowned upon, and a place where the will and the
heart of a champion could outweigh any physical or skill set
discrepencies...apparently I was wrong, as wrong as I could have
imagined.

But as odd as this sounds, it's not that Man Ram, Barry, A-Rod,
Clemens, Giambi, etc. have all been directly busted, admitted, or has
been essentially blacklisted from baseball that depresses me. It's not
that the Olympics isthe pinnacle of cheating and ofuscation. It's not
even that . It's that the nature of the game, the bullshit they've
been spoonfeeding us, has become so common, so standard operating
procedure, that I have stopped caring. I found myself saying, to
someone talking about A-Rod and his steroid "admissions", I found
myself saying, to a receptive audience, that I don't care, and if he
was honest, nobody else would care. And it's true. It's some absolute
bullshit that it's true, but that doesn't make it any LESS true. The
fact that it has stopped mattering to me kills me inside. I want to
stop watching, stop paying attention to sports, and start thinking
about it like I think of Boxing (which isn't really a sport anymore,
as it's literally just to steal money from bettors in the most rigged
sporting event since the CCNY basketball program in 1950- sorry to
burst your bubble). The fact that I just shrug my shoulders when I
hear about Manny, that I feel nothing when I consider my guy, Kelvin
Sampson, is essentially banned from coaching and I think nothing of
it, even thinking he got done a little dirty (for cheating!!), that
the idea of dishonesty is something I should accept, like that being
pulled over for Driving While Black is acceptable or that I should
stay silent in the face of oppression. With the same vigilance I fight
those things, I need to fight for the purity in the things I love.

I just don't know how...