Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

"I don't want my name to appear in the same sentence as Jose Canseco's," ex-pitcher Jim Bouton finger-waggled to the Chicago Sun-Times' Ron Rapaport.

Sorry, Jim. Can't help it. Before the Feb. 14 release of the former slugging outfielder's "Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big," the last inside-baseball book to create such a large media and fan uproar was Bouton's "Ball Four" in 1970.

Bouton, and most of the rest of the reading public, would consider "Ball Four" a far more accomplished literary work than "Juiced." But the two books will be linked, no matter the old Yankee right-hander's protestations. That's because "Juiced" and "Ball Four" are seminal works in violating what's known as the sanctity of the locker room.

That's the word: "sanctity." Every profession has its secrets. We're taught from an early age that no one likes a tattletale. But somewhere along the way the locker room reached a higher, biblical level of hushitude, up there with attorney-client discussions, confessionals and Las Vegas. Maybe it's the whole being-naked-together thing; a silence was enforced, lest anyone spread rumors of a fellow athlete having a small peener.

The sanctity of the locker room extends beyond the actual confines of the locker room itself. The locker room is considered to be anywhere an athlete is when not at the field, court, pitch, track or fronton.

What made Bouton's book, and now Canseco's, different from other athletes' alleged tell-alls is that they, indeed, told all. Bouton's copious tales of his fellow players' off-field carousing made it so Mickey Mantle fans could never again imagine their all-American hero without a drink in his hand. Canseco's copious tales of steroid injecting made it so Mark McGwire fans could never again imagine their all-American hero without his former BashBrother sticking a needle in his tuchis.

Had Canseco merely written about how he and McGwire would go out drinking together, his book would have raised barely a peep. Heck, if Canseco merely wrote about how he and McGwire would go out sniffing coke off the bottoms of $10 street whores, his book would have raised barely a peep. True, Canseco would have still violated the sanctity of the locker room, but these sorts of activities have already been chronicled, either by Bouton and his successors, or by your local police department.

What Canseco did was expose a dirty secret. While fans a long time ago accepted that athletes were selfish hedonists off the field, court, pitch, track or fronton, there's still an ill feeling toward athletes who are succeeding because of something out of a bottle, tube or syringe.

Plus, Canseco's timing couldn't have been better. Just as it appeared Major League Baseball and its players were putting a lid on steroids by instituting a punitive testing plan, Canseco came in to announce by name who used, and to announce that steroids are great, kids! (Steroids would certainly explain that 11-word subtitle for "Juiced," or why a book that could have been 215 pages blew up to 304.) At least when Bouton wrote about off-field shenanigans in "Ball Four," he didn't include a chapter on why they were such a great idea.

However, acknowledgement of steroid use by himself and others isn't the only reason Canseco's book is causing such a stir. Let's go to his story about McGwire. Canseco says that he and McGwire went into a bathroom stall together to shoot steroids into each other's derrieres. Here we have two approximately six-and-a-half feet tall, 250-pound men — who see each other naked on a regular basis — sneaking into a toilet to take a long, supple needle and plunge it into each other's backside. They didn't even drill a syringe-sized glory hole so they could rest comfortably in their own stalls. To hear Canseco tell it, they pushed their large, sweaty, pulsating, muscular bodies into one narrow roomlet and stuck each other.

Yes, there it is, Canseco's biggest violation of the sanctity of the locker room. He makes it sound so damn gay.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.