Taking the road less traveled is easier in theory than practice.
Baseball is considering its biggest mass punishment in 93 years after a Miami area entrepreneur agreed to share his knowledge about providing performance-enhancing drugs to a litany of players. Whether the players will be suspended, and for how long, remains to be seen.
The story is another case of a professional trying to seek an edge by any means necessary.
A Sports Illustrated columnist argued Wednesday that he wouldn’t take performance enhancing drugs if he were an athlete. The column was in response to outfielder Ryan Braun being caught in the crosshairs of another investigation that he used performance-enhancing drugs. There are more than a dozen other players linked to the Miami-area clinic, but Braun’s backstory may be the most intriguing.
In truth, most of us would have to look long and hard at the person in the mirror if a shortcut to professional success and financial security was thrown in front of us like a thong in front of a throng at a bachelor party.
In some ways, one can empathize with Braun. Baseball is a sport where the difference between very good and elite can be as much as $50 million.
Then again, Braun’s road to riches was much shorter than many of his baseball brethren. He was a first round draft pick in 2005, breezed through minor league baseball and reached Major League Baseball before his 24th birthday.
He, allegedly, chose to take performance-enhancing drugs in search of additional success.
After driving in his rookie season, Braun signed a $45 million dollar contract with the Brewers. Four years later, the player and the team were once again at the bargaining table. In April 2011 Braun signed a $105 million extension.
Few complained when Braun went out and won the NL MVP award in 2011 and helped the Brewers win a division title for the first time in 29 years.
The bottom fell out that winter when a doping test revealed Braun had elevated levels of testosterone. In his case, the house of cards was too fragile to conceal the deceit in perpetuity.
Those who are seduced by the shortcut to success may not have such a public shaming.
What Braun is accused of doing, taking a banned substance to get ahead of his peers, is no different than offering a young judge a seat at the federal level if they ensure a certain verdict. Perhaps it’s the aide to a politician who is promised support for a future run for office if they help the politician deceive the people they serve. Maybe, it’s the journalist who works in Middle-of-Nowhere, America who is tempted with a cushy position in New York City and a six-figure salary, but only if they report a story from a specific angle.
An athlete who chooses to take performance-enhancing drugs has a choice, just as those other professionals. Athletes are just in the limelight more than your wayward judge, politician or journalist.
Of course it’s the latter whose misfeasance has the broader impact on society — albeit with fewer press clippings.
Braun made $4.27 million in his MVP season. He’s scheduled to make $8.5 million this season. And who can forget the $113 million in guaranteed money the Milwaukee Brewers owe him through the end of the 2020 season.
Many of us joke our principles have a price. It’s likely that price falls below the nearly $130 million in compensation Braun will earn by combining his talent with temptation.
Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be on traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as far that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken
