There are lessons we learn as we get older. Some lessons teach us about respect and responsibility, while others teach us about morals and the differences between right and wrong.
    Then there are harder lessons.
    One lesson I personally have wrestled with, especially     within recent weeks, is the realization that as I get older, so do my idols.
    One of the greatest things about being young is the ability to see a person as a immortal figure, forever sketched in our memories and forever locked in our history books.
For me, those immortal figures came in the shape of basketball and baseball players. My first idol, Larry Bird who I mentioned in a previous column, was a man of towering strength, agility and a powerful hook shot underneath. Bird was the man who had it all. He had the height of Shaquille O’Neill, while perfecting his position in the center lane. Bird’s center position was topped off only by his ability to run circles around his opponents. Bird was an honest, hardworking athlete who never let his abilities get the best of him, or go to his head.
    I watched Bird, dressed in green and white, representing the Boston Celtics. During half time, I practiced my “pretend” interview with Bird, using my hairbrush as a microphone with a larger-than-life smile caked on my face. After the game I practiced my own jump and hook shots, imagining the roar of the Celtics crowd supporting my incredible talent. I achieved super-star status in the comfort of my own front yard, taking only snap shots of Bird’s life and reenacting my own basketball dreams.
    But in reality, that’s all I knew. Snap shots of the lives of others. Although I liked to pretend, I hardly knew a thing about my idols.
    Like most athletic fans my age, I grew up watching and cheering for baseball stars like Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa. My everyday existence depended on watching my baseball idols battle it out on the field for positions in the post season.
    At the time, although I didn’t know it then, I wasn’t a fan because of the sport I was a fan because of the players. I found different reasons to support each and every one of my idols. For Sosa, it was about his small size and big swing. And for Clemens, it was his unbelievable ability to control the baseball with every pitch, but in the end that ability really was unbelievable.
    Frankly, I have waited to voice my opinion of the Mitchell report, mostly because I didn’t want to think about it. For those of you who have yet to hear about it, the Mitchell report was spearheaded by George Mitchell, a former senator and federal prosecutor, who relied on two sources to document steroid use among professional athletes, Kirk Radomski, a former New York Mets attendee and Brian McNamee who worked as a New York Yankees strength coach and personal trainer for Clemens. The report hit the stands mid-December and listed names of some of the Major League Baseball’s most prominent stars, including Clemens, citing them for steroid and other enhancement drugs.
    Someday I will have children, who will also look up to and idolize professional athletes, and the absolute last thing I want my children to learn from their childhood icons is that they used steroids and other performance enhancing drugs in an effort give them a competitive edge.
    This isn’t middle school anymore. You don’t throw rocks or trip someone in a race so you can win. Similarly, you don’t take drugs to become a hall of fame pitcher for the New York Yankees, and if you did or do, your hall of fame title should be yanked.
    Maybe I’m drastic and calling for action well beyond what the consequences should be. But as you look at other sports, in particular Marion Jones, former Olympic gold medalist who admitted in December she had also taken performance enhancing drugs to help achieve more than three gold medals on the U.S. Track and Field Olympic team. I watched a press conference as a teary-eyed Jones addressed the crowd.
    “I didn’t know at the time,” Jones said.
    But I don’t believe it. How many professional athletes wouldn’t realize when someone was injecting them with something illegal? And why did it take an investigative report to come out before Jones thought those many injections she received might be questionable? If a high school student was taking steroids, what would happen to them? I hardly doubt a high school student would even be allowed to participate in sports again if they were caught cheating. In my high school, students who did any kind of drugs were benched on a first offence and suspended indefinitely from the team, and from all sports.
  An iconic figure should be prosecuted to the same degree. After all, these are the people your children are looking up to and the people your children might dream about being someday.
How would you want them to achieve athletic stardom?  
– Ashley St. Michel