Breaking news? Lets Keep It To The Important Stuff
May 20, 2010 · Eric Balkman · Jump to comments
Article Source: Bleacher Report - New York Yankees
You have to love that scroll at the bottom of the screen.
ESPN’s Bottom Line is one of my favorite things about the network. It gives me everything I need to know in bite-sized pieces, including breaking news.
Boy, am I am captivated by that breaking news red glow at the bottom. It gets my heart thumping and mind racing.
“Did LeBron just buy a house in Chicago?”
“Did the Raiders sign T.O.?”
“Did the Yankees just send a few prospects to Florida for the Marlins’ starting lineup?”
“Did LeBron just buy a house in New York?”
You can imagine my disappointment when I discovered what news the Bottom Line was breaking today:
In an interview with ESPN’s Bonnie Ford Wednesday, former Tour de France champion Floyd Landis said that he used performance-enhancing drugs for most of his career.
Thanks, ESPN. Is water still wet, too?
In a sport that has been riddled with dopers, this doesn’t come as a surprise to me. Even when Landis had his Tour de France title stripped because of positive drug tests, he was so adamant that he was clean, he got me to think that he was actually lying.
And to make himself look like less of a bad guy, he decided to throw national hero Lance Armstrong under the bus as well.
I’m not going to write about all the other stuff you’re going to see on other websites, like how could Landis have the audacity to lie, and that yet another athlete has fallen short of our expectations. I’m here to gripe about the breaking news.
Athletes in all sports use drugs. Illegal drugs. And most of those athletes are a dime a dozen. However, some of them achieve success and break records, and those few have us all up in arms.
So when a lab develops a test that can prove whether an athlete ever took PEDs, and guys like Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa pass that test, let me know ASAP. That’s breaking news.
Obviously a guy like Landis got caught up in his passion for success. It sounds like he thought that because so many other competitors were doping, he felt he had to do it to win. And he also said he doesn’t feel guilty about it.
That last paragraph could be said about hundreds–and probably thousands–of athletes in dozens of sports ever since amphetamines were the drug du jour in the 1950s.
Breaking news is when these guys are proven to be clean. Don’t waste that beautiful glowing crimson color on a story like this one, which barely qualifies as news.
Gotta go. I think I just saw LeBron James with my apartment manager.
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