Courts can cure cheating

Trevor Graham goes on trial Monday in San Francisco on perjury charges, specifically that he lied to federal investigators about supplying steroids to the Olympic athletes he trained in Raleigh.

Whether Graham is innocent or guilty -- and the evidence, from Marion Jones' belated confession to the expected testimony of North Carolina assistant track coach Antonio Pettigrew, is likely to stack up against him -- may be less important than what his trial, and the others that have arisen from the BALCO investigation, could do for sports.

It would be fitting if the BALCO trials and those likely to come from the Congressional hearings on the Mitchell Report -- is Roger Clemens next? -- somehow cleansed sports at the beginning of the 21st century just as Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis sanitized baseball at the beginning of the 20th.

In the wake of the Black Sox scandal, Landis purged baseball of the nebulous and increasing influence of gamblers and restored credibility to the sport. The culprits are different now, but the need for a firm hand and a clean sweep remains the same.

Track and field, in theory the purest form of individual competition, has become a punch line. Cycling isn't far behind. In those sports, winners find ways to beat the testing crew with its cup of truth, not the guy in the next lane.

Baseball's post-strike boom years were built on fraud. Players and management alike turned a blind eye to endemic steroid use as the crapulous Bud Selig presided over a Potemkin village of andro-fueled home runs.

The NFL, a league so paranoid about its relationship with the gambling public that it insists on comprehensive injury reports to deter the nefarious, has parried some of the same steroid issues as baseball even as its most successful coach fends off accusations he was as much Roger Ebert as Vince Lombardi.

BALCO and Bill Belichick and everything else that fits under the same umbrella should sound an alarm, that cheating in sports has become not only endemic but deliberate and willful, subverting the very purpose of athletic competition in the first place.

There is, of course, an honored and venerable tradition of cheating in most sports that is often part of what makes them fun: It ain't cheating if you don't get caught.

From stock-car racing to college football recruiting, any advantage you can shoehorn out of -- or through -- the rules is to your benefit. In, say, baseball, that would include stealing signs, sliding 45 degrees off course to break up a double play and the general employment of Gaylord Perry.

(Of course, at the other end of the spectrum, the spectre of Bobby Jones looms over any golfer who dares to not only improve his lie but fails to promptly report even those violations that are both accidental and unseen -- as Colin Montgomerie's sullied reputation can attest.)

But there is something clever, if not innocent, about hiding a little extra gas in the roll bar or smearing Vaseline on a baseball. It is done in a spirit of competition and joie de vivre, to a soundtrack of winks and raised eyebrows.

No more. Cheating has become systematic, deliberate and, in some cases, criminal. It's not done in the spirit of competition, but with the intention of removing all competition -- not tilting the playing field, but creating an entire new field of play, open only to the guilty.

There's nothing clever or innocent about stabbing a needle full of steriods into muscle tissue in search of a faster 40 time or more powerful home-run stroke. Videotaping opposing teams' defensive signals for analysis isn't bending the rules, it's outright breaking them.

Graham goes on trial Monday for breaking the rules of an institution that takes its rules a little more seriously than the governing bodies of track and field.

Perhaps the courts can do what Selig and his equally spineless brethren wouldn't: Inject a little credibility and sanity back into the world of sports.