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May 10All right, then.
The usual politician/celebrity/athlete scandal goes something like this:
- Accusation/rumors
- Denial
- Exposure
- Non-apology
- Cool out
Then, after a while, the storm blows over and everything1. It’s a largely foolproof, if terminally boring, strategy.
So when Houston Texans linebacker Brian Cushing was busted for steroids, he had a fairly obvious way out, especially in a league where 265-pound men look like this and no one says boo2. Instead, after receiving a fair amount of flak, he held a press conference where he denied using steroids and implied he had testicular cancer. The offseason is always slow, but at least this idiot circus has kept things mildly interesting.
Really, the most aggravating thing about this whole case was Brian Burke (of Advanced NFL Stats) declaring “Ironic that so many sports writers are cool with steroids in the NFL, but are SO TROUBLED about the concussion issue.” Burke is a generally-acknowledged smart guy, so it’s pretty unfortunate to see him drawing moral equivalence between muscle mass and brain damage.
- Despite this 538 post that claims “in American politics, there are seldom second acts (for some reason we never saw Senator Nixon, Republican of California, nor Secretary of Agriculture Larry Craig of Idaho),” it’s pretty easy to make a comeback, as Bill Clinton, Mark Sanford and Eliot Spitzer demonstrated. The main political determinants seem to be connections and a willingness to get back out in the public eye (and that’s just politicians. For athletes, the bad-behavior list includes Mike Vick, Charles Barkley, Kobe Bryant, Donte Stallworth, Ben Roethlisberger…). ↩
- Shawne Merriman, pictured, was both busted for steroids and involved in a high-profile domestic dispute with Tila Tequila. ↩