Steroids: the smoke screen for the real drugs

It what is reminiscent of AOL perusing farmland in MA , The R & A will start testing its players for performance-enhancing drugs. This needle-in-a-haystack approach will start with this years world amateur team championship in Cape Town South Africa.

Is this just chest-pounding? Or is it the first volley in what could be an explosion of finger-pointing and second-guessing for the Teflon-proofed golf world.

If you listen to the PGA's Finchem...he believes that "just telling his players what the rules are" is good enough.

Okaaaay.

And if you listen to Tiger Woods "being proactive instead of reactive" is a better way to go.

Thanks Tiger.

Of course, neither is going to give the media a straight answer on what should be done to prevent performance-enhancing drugs in the sport.

But I will.

I bet the first thing you thought of when you read the words performance-enhancing drugs, was steroids. But you'd be wrong. Steroids aren't the real issue.

Thanks to baseball...steroid is the buzz-word of our era. Joe Public knows steroids as making ones muscles and forehead's pop out.....and privates shrink.
So everyone is thinking: that could never be used for golf right? This is all just poppycock....right?

Enter Floyd Landis. The Tour de France whipping boy.

Suddenly, thanks to the media's infatuation of an American cyclists "low testosterone" levels, everyone now knows that you can get "up"(no pun intended) for an event with products other than steroids.

Now, the real issue is drugs: ADHD drugs, Epogen and Testosterone patches. ADHD drugs give you better concentration, Epo gives you more oxygen in your blood, Testosterone aids the body's recovery time. All help you excel in (among other things) sports. All are on the black market (try your local college). All are readily accessible (Floyd can hook you up).

The golf Tours know there are problems. Trust me, someone knows something that could break the camels back. Why else the call for testing this year?

The reason that golf has been under the radar is because of media's (thus Joe Public's) focus on the wrong "performance therapies".

I'm reminded of a prescient quote by Thomas A Edison: "If there's a way to do it better...find it."

Unfortunately for golf, we're about to find it.

Thanks for reading. Keep it in the short-grass,

JFB