Record Citrus Bowl crowd doesn’t care about ‘roids
Mar 31st, 2008 | By admin | Category: Opinion“You’re joking, right?” said Jason Tyler, a 23-year-old fan from Atlanta, wearing wrestling boots, trunks and a fake gold-plated championship belt. “I don’t care what these guys take as long as they put on a good show.” Most of the fans I approached Sunday with questions about steroids looked at me as if I were an alien from another galaxy, Which, in a way, I guess I was. You see, I went to WrestleMania as a sports columnist, and we all know wrestling is not really a sport (Note to readers: Ignore the two-plus pages of coverage in today’s “sports” section.) But you know what? These wrestling fans have a point. Much has been written in recent years trying to relate rampant steroid use in wrestling to rampant steroid use in legitimate sports like baseball. This is ludicrous. This is like trying to compare U2 to Milli Vanilli. One is legitimate; one is a hoax. Wrestling fans know what they’re seeing is an act. And, quite frankly, they don’t care if the actors are juiced up. Nor should they. Here’s all you need to know: The first match of the night Sunday featured Hornswoggle — a little person dressed up like a leprechaun. Do you think wrestling fans are really concerned about the purity of their sport? “We just want to be entertained,” said Troy Laberca, a butcher from Stroudsburg, Pa. And that they were. A Citrus Bowl record crowd of 74,635 fans showed up Sunday night. There’s a reason this was the largest revenue-producing event in the history of this decrepit old stadium. Wrestling fans eat this stuff up — even if it is laced with steroids. Fans just don’t care that the biggest story in the mainstream media is about how an inordinate amount of pro wrestlers die premature deaths. And they certainly didn’t care that there was more testosterone in the ring Sunday night then you’d find in Jose Canseco’s medicine chest. Save the self-righteous indignation about performance-enhancing drugs for legitimate sports. This just in: You can’t enhance a performance where the outcome is predetermined. What wrestlers do is use appearance-enhancing drugs to help them sell their performance. They are no different than Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose entire career was built on the back of performance-enhancing drugs. They are no different than Sylvester Stallone, an admitted user of human growth hormone. Have you ever heard anybody say Congress needs to outlaw steroids among action heroes in Hollywood? Of course not, because movies aren’t real and neither is wrestling. If Stallone’s body wasn’t chemically enhanced, he’d be 5 feet 8 and 145 pounds, and somebody else would have been playing Rambo all these years. And, please, don’t trot out the argument that steroid-inflated wrestlers send a bad message to kids. If your child is looking to pro wrestlers for guidance, this is not a wrestling problem; this is a parenting problem. In fact, if your 12-year-old son comes up to you and says he wants to start sleeping in a casket like the Undertaker or bleaching his hair white and dressing in flowing, sequined robes like Ric Flair, then it might just be time for a child psychologist. When I asked J.T. Bishop of Tampa Sunday if he thought the Undertaker’s 15-0 record coming into WrestleMania might be tainted by steroid use, he literally started laughing. Then he pointed to the words on the front of his T-shirt: “Look into the eyes of the dead man.” When I asked 28-year-old Jacksonville resident Chris Murphy if Ric Flair’s 16 career titles might be tarnished by steroids, the only response I got was Flair’s trademark, “Woooooo!” And that pretty much sums up how these fans feel about steroids. They’re not here for the honor and purity of the sport. They’re here because WrestleMania has an enormous “woooooo” factor. Whether you like it or not, steroids are a huge part of that appeal. Mike Bianchi can be reached at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. RED HUBER/ORLANDO SENTINEL
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