Touchdown Jesus: Sports Fans’ Part in the PED Problem

Every Tuesday in Touchdown Jesus, staff writers Cray Allred and Valerie Dunham engage with the popular and polarizing world of sports from a Christian perspective.

On December 26, 2016, Peyton Manning was one of several athletes implicated by Al Jazeera’s documentary The Dark Side, which focused on the use of human growth hormone in professional sports. On one hand, I was surprised—Peyton Manning is just so annoyingly likable—but on the other, I was not. Peyton Manning underwent four neck surgeries in one year and returned to eventually lead his team to a Super Bowl.  The fact that he recovered his career—a career that, to be frank, brutalizes the human body—is astonishing in and of itself. It’s not hard to believe that human growth hormone played a role in that miraculous recovery.

Sports fans are not simply spectators—we are consumers, enabling the systems that silently encourage athletes to abuse their minds and bodies for the sake of our entertainment

However, following the documentary’s debut, I’ve become increasingly skeptical. It’s not that I don’t believe Peyton Manning used HGH; it’s just that the evidence offered up in The Dark Side is flimsy at best. Al Jazeera does little to establish any corroborating evidence, and Dr. Charlie Sly, the only source to implicate Manning, withdrew his support the day after the documentary debuted: “Any recordings of me were made without my knowledge or consent,” he said. “I am recanting any such statements.” Many speculate that Dr. Sly may have fabricated his story about Manning in order to boost his sales; others speculate that he was telling the truth, but Al Jazeera has no way to prove it.

For a time, however, the nation believed one of its most likable athletes may have been guilty of utilizing performance-enhancing drugs. It was a strange precipice to stand on.  Manning is a media darling, having  perfected the “aw-sucks” sort of character that makes you wants to buy a Papa John’s pie or sing to your chicken parm. But most sports fans see PEDs as a downfall in which only a crooked few partake.

If indisputable evidence surfaces tomorrow connecting Peyton Manning to HGH abuse, the nation will be forced to reconcile two often juxtaposed but ultimately unrealistic beliefs: (a) athletes are either good or bad; and (b) the systems that utilize athletes are mostly fair and are primarily interested in sportsmanship, not profit. The first belief strips the human beings who compete in professional sports of the sort of humanity that permits the coexistence of good and evil in one person; the second neglects the fact that systems like the NFL and the MLB are first and foremost entertainment industries and are primarily concerned with their bottom lines. Ultimately, athletes who are willing to abuse their bodies in the name of the sport—well, they’re good for business.

That is what we should be outraged about. That is the picture our headlines should paint when professional athletes are found guilty of PED use. Instead of publicly dissecting the character of men and women willing to do anything to compete longer or better, we should continually gauge the usefulness of systems that permit the sort of self-abuse that frequently takes place behind closed doors—the self-abuse that frequently remains unchecked in the name of good business.

Sports fans are not simply spectators—we are consumers, enabling the systems that silently encourage athletes to abuse their minds and bodies for the sake of our entertainment. We enable, for instance, the systems that take advantage of the free labor of college athletes; and we are part of the systems that routinely take men and fashion them into gods, devils or pawns. When documentaries like The Dark Side surface, our question should not be “Is this athlete good?” We know that he is not—not in the infallible way we expect he should be. Rather, we should ask, “How can we hold the system accountable?” and “Is my part in this system still righteous?”

For me, for now, the answer is a thoughtful yes. As self-interested and inconsistent as organizations like the NFL can be—and as shallow as their facades frequently are—there is still something hopeful, redemptive, and worthwhile in professional athletics. Beneath the network of greedy systems is still a soulful experience that invites in even the weary and the poor—an experience that points to redemption, hope, personal merit and failures. Undergirding all of the mess, there is still a sense of communal belonging.

But my “yes” to sports is a yes that leaves room for a day when it may not be so—when the redemptive qualities of professional athletics do not justify my participation in a system that turns a profit on the dehumanization and abuse of people made in the image of God. It’s hard for me to imagine that day; so many of my formative experiences were built on the back of professional sports, and I’ve long held the belief that systemic injustice cannot be remedied without the persistent presence of people who demand accountability, healing, and change. But I also know that ceasing to consume the product of a flawed system must always be an option; otherwise, there can be no real accountability for industries like the NFL. Otherwise, I am forgetting that good stewardship is a vast and varied command.