Steroid use in baseball has run its course, all that’s left now is to uncover the lies. Jason Giambi has adjusted to life without steroids, Mark McGwire is long retired, Rafael Palmeiro is gone and Sammy Sosa refused a non-guaranteed contract offer from the Washington Nationals this year.

That leaves Barry Bonds. And now its time for him to go too.

Excerpts from the book Game of Shadows, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, show a clear pattern of steroid use by Bonds. Two employees of BALCO, including owner Victor Conte, testified in front of a grand jury that Bonds received steroids from BALCO starting in 2003. Bonds’ girlfriend at the time, Kimberly Bell, testified in front of the grand jury that Bonds told her he started to take steroids after the 1998 season.

Some people think that Bonds should suffer the same purgatory as Pete Rose – banishment from baseball including the Hall of Fame. Others are unhappy because Bonds is getting a lot of hate while Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are fading into the limelight without the bitternes displayed towards Bonds.

McGwire lost a lot of respect with his cowardly response at the congressional hearings into steroid use in baseball – he refused to answer when asked if he used steroids – but the evidence of his use was a bottle of androstenedione, an over-the-counter testosterone supplement, openly displayed in his locker. Rafael Palmeiro gave us the most dramatic denial at the hearings then tested positive for the steroid stanolozol during the following season. Congress looked into perjury charges against Palmeiro but baseball didn’t test for steroids before the hearings so no charges were filed.

You could say that Bonds should be judged by the same standard as McGwire, Bonds has never tested positive for a banned substance after all. Many times, though, it’s not the crime but the coverup that gets you. Life would have been much easier for Bill Clinton if he’d just said, “I did have sexual relations with that woman.” Adultery may not be a crime but lying about it can get you into a lot of trouble. It appears that Bonds lied to the grand jury by denying that he used steroids. Bonds may have been unlucky to get involved in the BALCO scandal but so was Giambi. It’s hard to argue that Bonds is getting unfair treatment when you consider that Giambi admitted using steroids in front of the same grand jury. It pays to tell the truth.

You could also say that it’s not baseball’s job to police its players off the field but that’s like saying that Marion Jones was involved in off the field activity went she went to BALCO. Bonds went to BALCO so that he could break baseball records. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig has made a career out of sticking his head in the sand. He had to be shamed into instigating steroid testing by congress and further pressured by congress to increase the penalties for positive tests. He’s getting the same pressure to penalize Bonds.

The best thing for Selig to do is to give Bonds a suspension that is long enough to effectively end his career. Barry lovers will be unhappy because Bonds will lose the opportunity to break Babe Ruth’s home run record and Barry haters will be unhappy because Bonds will still get his first round ticket into the Baseball Hall of Fame. But it’s a fair compromise and it serves a very important purpose: it brings the steroid era to a close and allows baseball to move forward.

Baseball will not have to pretend to celebrate Bonds breaking Ruth’s record and Barry will be put out of his misery because we won’t have him to kick around any more.

There is a report from the NFL combine that Vince Young, the University of Texas quarterback, scored six out of a possible fifty on the Wonderlic, a test that measures intelligence and speed of thought. The combine officials say that the score is not accurate, the results are supposed to be confidential, but Young’s agent said that Young retook the test and scored a sixteen.

Amid the confusion – who took it upon themselves to release this information to the media and why did Young have to retake the Wonderlic if the reported score was wrong – is the not so subtly racist idea that black quarterbacks are not smart enough to run an NFL team.

There is also a bigger issue being played out. The stages of resistance to change. Stage 1 is stubborn resistance, stage 2 is plain old resistance, and stage 3 is begrudging acceptance. We’re currently in stage 2.

There is a new breed of quarterback coming out of college – the athletic quarterback. He may run an option offense or a pro offense but he’s a good passer who’s been given the green light to run whenever he wants. Fran Tarkenton and Steve Young might take exception to this characterization. What were they if they weren’t athletic? Tarkenton spun out of trouble and darted around lunging linebackers to get into the open field. Young was a bigger, stronger player who ran forward and slid for first downs when his receivers were covered.

They were scramblers. They were pass first and run second quarterbacks. The difference between Tarkenton and Vick is that Vick is likely to take off for open spaces sooner than Tarkenton did. Vick is a legitimate running threat, not your prototypical pocket passer, and gets a lot of grief because of it despite the fact that his winning percentage is fifth among active quarterbacks.

Kordell Stewart was among the first of the black athletic quarterbacks to come to the NFL. He played quarterback, lined up at wide receiver and even punted a few times. He started two NFC championship games and was a pro bowl quarterback but he was benched three times in his eight-year career with the Pittsburgh Steelers and fans always groused because they thought he should have run around less and played quarterback more.

This is how it goes. The first person to break the mold is under immense pressure because there is such resistance to doing something different. Add the fact that only a small percentage of players become stars in the NFL and you have a virtually no-win situation.

You could compare this to a gay man coming out of the closet in a major sport. It will probably start with a high school player who is a star and gets a college scholarship. Homophobia and the odds against making it to the NFL will probably sink him. The second out gay man might make it to the NFL but then make a mistake. Maybe he’ll get embroiled in an affair with a teammate or get caught at a local drag queen show and that will be the end of his career. I’m joking here but the player will be under such a microscope that it would be hard to avoid getting into trouble of some sort.

Eventually the issue of athletic black quarterbacks will be a non-issue, you’re either an effective quarterback or your not, but you can see why no one wants to be among the first few people to do something different. The pressure is immense and, in the case of black quarterbacks, you have to deal with racism

There is hope. Last year we had the reverse situation. A white quarterback, Matt Jones, ran such a fast 40 in the combine that he was drafted as a receiver.

Young might be the player to take us into stage 3, he had an excellent pass completion percentage in college but then so did Vick and you can see the pressure Young is under already and he’s not even in the NFL yet. Hopefully Young can handle the pressure with the same skills he used to pass around and run through all of those blitzes opposing teams threw at him while he was winning the national championship at Texas.

If you’re a top player on the professional tennis tour and there is a real possibility that you will never reach the number one ranking again for the rest of your career, how do you make peace with that?

Andy Roddick is moving sideways. In the past three years he’s gone from being number one to number two and is now in a holding pattern at number three. He changed his game to attack the net more and it hasn’t worked. Ivan Ljubicic beat him last year in the first round of the Davis Cup and Marcos Baghdatis beat him in the fourth round of the Australian Open. Those players are moving up and he’s not.

If you’re Roddick at this point and you look at your situation, you think that you can win a few more slams, Roger Federer isn’t going to win all of them after all, and bring home a bunch of Davis Cup titles. That would stand as a good career.

Roddick doesn’t need to come to the net, he just needs to get to the baseline.

So this week’s Davis Cup tie with Romania becomes a huge event. You certainly don’t want to flame out in the first round like you did against Croatia last year. You’d much rather use this event to get yourself back on the right track. The pressure might make you nervous and nerves could result in an upset stomach or even abdominal cramps. In an interview with Bud Collins after the match, Roddick both admitted that Davis Cup can give you a case of nerves and insisted that the bout of vomiting during his loss on Friday was completely physical. That about covers it all.

I was one of the people who called on Roddick to attack the net more. I wanted him to be challenger instead of a perennial lose to Federer and coming forward seemed like the best strategy to complement the fastest recorded serve in ATP history. But I was wrong. That’s not his game and now his confidence is suffering. Roddick doesn’t need to come to the net, he just needs to get to the baseline.

In today’s Davis Cup reverse singles match, Roddick played Razvan Sabau, a substitute for Victor Hanescu who had to retire with an injury in the doubles match yesterday against the Bryan brothers. Sabau is a journeyman who’s been on the tour for fifteen years and is currently ranked number 110. In the first game of the match, Roddick hit nine slice backhands in one rally. What was the point of that? If Sabau was a power hitter, you might want to feed him junk to avoid giving him pace, but Sabau is a lightweight. It not only didn’t make sense but it allowed Sabau, a baseliner, to develop a rhythm on his ground-strokes and gave him hope because he knew he could stay in a rally with Roddick. With Sabau down 0-40 and an opportunity to go up 5-3 in the second set, Roddick got a second serve to hit. What did he do? He stood a few feet behind the baseline and hit a return smack dab in the middle of the court. If you won’t attack with three break points, when will you attack?

You might as well roll over on your back and offer up your tummy.

When Roddick lost to Joachim Johannson two years ago and Gilles Muller last year in the US Open, you could say that he just happened to run into players who were having a career day. Johansson and Muller played the match of their lives. It’s more likely that, instead of taking the game to them, Roddick gave them hope by playing behind the baseline. If you’re a power player and you set up behind the baseline, even on second serves, that tells your opponent that you are on the defensive. You might as well roll over on your back and offer up your tummy.

Sabau, by the way, did stay on the baseline and took more than a few trips forward. He was smart, he only came forward when he knew he could put the approach away. He was too inconsistent to be effective and he self-destructed towards the end of the match to lose, 3-6, 3-6, 2-6, (the US won the tie 4-1) but it’s a strategy Roddick should adopt.

When Brad Gilbert took over as Roddick’s coach, the first thing he did was move Roddick behind the baseline on service returns. Gilbert correctly identified Roddick’s return as the weakest part of his game. After Gilbert was fired, the new coach, Dean Goldfine, didn’t correct Roddick’s court position on second serves and seems to have condoned Roddick’s deep positioning during rallies. Now Goldfine is gone too. Roddick just hired his brother John to coach him.

Roddick realizes that he’s at a crossroads in his career and getting back to his game, which his brother is most familiar with, would be a good move. Hopefully Roddick can find a way to attack within his comfort zone. Finding a comfort zone on the court might also help him deal with the huge expectations put upon him by the media and fans. If Bud Collins is questioning your ability to deal with pressure in a big match, then you know it’s coming from all sides.

On Wednesday, Sheryl Swoopes, the three-time MVP of the WNBA Houston Comets, came out as a gay woman. She used the occasion to announce a one-year endorsement deal with Olivia Cruises and Resorts, a company that runs ocean cruises for lesbians.

Gay athletes are afraid that they will lose endorsements if they come out of the closet. Olivia is doing good work by providing financial support to gay athletes who want to come out. LPGA golfer Rosie Jones previously came out by announcing an Olivia endorsement deal.

Martina Navratilova also has a contract with Olivia. This should surprise no one; she has been out of the closet since 1981. Anyone who comes out today rides on her shoulders. Pioneers in any movement become the public focus of intolerance. Reprisals and lack of endorsements were only part of the punishment Navratilova received. When Chris Evert retired after a long rivalry with Navratilova that was arguably the best rivalry in modern sports history, a journalist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press praised Evert’s “demure” ground strokes and criticized “European women with a lot of facial hair” who come to the net like “some disgusting Buffalo.” The journalist was clearly referring to Navratilova. You can read about this article and the rivalry between Evert and Navratilova in the excellent book by Johnette Howard, The Rivals.

Swoopes is the first African-American athlete to come out but she may suffer more for behavior having nothing to do with sexual preference. Swoopes declared bankruptcy because she mishandled her money and took off on an Olivia cruise in the middle of the season while playing for a European team she plays with in the WNBA off-season. O.k., no big deal. Many people are filing for bankruptcy now because new laws will soon make filing for bankruptcy harder. And her European team knew before the season started that she would be leaving to take the cruise.

When Magic Johnson assured us that he got the AIDS virus from a woman, no on questioned it despite the fact that it is statistically much harder to contract AIDS from a woman than a man in this country.

Swoopes and her partner of seven years, Alisa Scott, started dating while Swoopes was still married to her husband. Dating someone while you’re still married and have a child? Not fair to your spouse but, then, we don’t know anything about Swoopes’s relationships with her husband.

However, Scott was an assistant coach with Swoopes’s Houston Comets team until 2004. That is most definitely not o.k. It is taboo in team sports with good reason. Imagine being a professional athlete and worrying that your teammate will get more playing time than you because she’s sleeping with a coach. Swoopes had access to her coach when other players didn’t. She would have been privy to information about other players that should have remained within the coaching staff.

If she didn’t want to come out when she started to date Scott, she should have asked for a trade or Scott should have left the team. This has nothing to do with being straight or gay. By keeping her relationship with Scott secret, Swoopes was being dishonest with her teammates and unfair to the coaching staff.

There is some consolation that being gay is less of a problem for Swoopes than other behavior in her life. It means that being gay is not such a big deal anymore. Unfortunately, that is not true for male athletes. An active male athlete in a major sport has never come out as a gay man. When Magic Johnson assured us that he got the AIDS virus from a woman, no one questioned it despite the fact that it is statistically much harder to contract AIDS from a woman than a man in this country. I’m not suggesting that Johnson did not get AIDS from a woman, I’m saying that the subject of homosexuality is so buried in the professional male athletic culture that we accepted his version of the story with little resistance.

In many places in the world, being gay will get you killed. The NBA markets itself in China, the NFL and MLB played a preseason game in Tokyo, and the NFL played a regular season game in Mexico. As American sports spread around the globe, it’s important that American athletes stand up and come out. I adore Martina and I applaud Swoopes, but I hope that male athletes will soon be brave enough to join the party.

Here at the newly renovated Rocódromo Arena, the ball-kids for the Masters Series Madrid tournament are wearing black pirate pants – capris – but Rafael Nadal is not. He is playing in white shorts and has a strap under each knee. Football players have straps above their elbows, tennis players have straps under their elbows, and baseball players have straps on their elbows – with padding in case they are hit by a pitch. The strapping represents sports medicine’s attempt to deal with the heavy toll exacted on a professional athlete’s body. Nadal has won ten titles this year; you have to play a lot of tennis to do that. His knees have been complaining lately, he didn’t play last week so he could rest them. Not a good sign for a nineteen-year-old.

For evening matches, fashion models posing as ball-girls march onto the court in unison with their hands behind them. They are wearing lime green Boss tops and gray short skirts. If there was any doubt that sports is all about entertainment and sex, it’s long gone. The marching models and the flashing ads lining the court make the scene look like an electronic version of Vogue magazine. Before you complain about sexism, you should know that the WTA will use male models as ball-boys when the women come to Madrid next year. That should make you feel a lot better.

Most of the top players are here except Roger Federer. Last year a hip injury kept him out of the tournaments preceding the year-end championship. This year it’s a strained ligament in his ankle. The layoff didn’t hurt him last year, he won the year-end championship, and it’s unlikely to keep him from repeating as winner.

We are going to watch Robbie Ginepri play David Ferrer for a spot in the semifinals. Ginepri is having a breakout year. After reaching a ranking of 35, he sank down to number 58 then climbed back to number 20 after improving his conditioning and, as told to me by a local tennis instructor who is familiar with the situation, returning to work with his longtime coach Jerry Baskin. Francisco Montana is Ginepri’s official coach but Baskin is listed as his “local” coach.

Ferrer had trouble with nerves on important points in matches early in his career. Today, though, he’s showing nerves early on. In his first service game he makes two big errors, each one giving Ginepri a break point, and starts the match down 0-2.

Even though Ferrer is in his home country, the chair umpire gives Ginepri the benefit of the doubt. After overruling an out call that Ginepri probably could not have returned, the umpire ruled that the point was to be replayed. On the other hand, maybe that’s because the replay shows that the ball was out.

For such a big guy with long, strong limbs, Ginepri has short-range strokes. He’s got a window-washer two-handed backhand – he just lays the racket back and swipes at it – and a forehand with a relatively short, sharp follow through. Not that the short follow through is a problem. He hits a number of winners by ratcheting up the speed on his forehand, his best shot.

Ferrer is a counter puncher. He’s most comfortable reacting to an aggressive opponent not being the aggressor. Ginepri’s strategy is to keep the ball in play and force Ferrer to go for winners. This is not what Ferrer wants to do and he makes a lot of errors.

Ginepri has a good slice backhand, it acts like a screwball in baseball – it spins away from right-handers. After going up 3-0, he starts using the slice to bring Ferrer to the net, another source of discomfort for him, and produces even more errors. Add in Ginepri’s serve wide to the deuce court followed by hitting behind Ferrer as he scrambles to get back into the court, and you can understand why Ginepri is up 5-0 after only nineteen minutes.

Ginepri has a reputation as a “grip it and rip it” kind of player but he’s more than that. He’s a smart player who can carry out an effective strategy. He can be a backboard and keep the ball in play or he can be the aggressor. Late in the first set he’s up two breaks so he starts attacking by moving Ferrer around and coming into the net.

Ginepri has a reputation as a “grip it and rip it” kind of player but you can see here that he’s more than that.

So far Ginepri is doing everything right. He wins the first set 6-1 and has only four unforced errors. But he’s not perfect.

Ferrer looks better in the second set. He comes up with a fabulous play on a deep Ginepri lob. He turns and runs toward the baseline and, with his back to the net, swings his racket down the right side of his body and towards the net to put up a lob just as deep as Ginepri’s. Ginepri doesn’t expect it and hits the ball into the net.

But Ginepri is not an excitable guy, each time Ferrer comes up with a good shot, Ginepri comes up with one of his own. Serving at 2-2, Ferrer hits a drop shot and Ginepri gets to it and puts up a lob. After running halfway up the barrier at the end of the court in a failed attempt to track down the lob, Ferrer throws his arms up in frustration. Later in the game, after missing a first serve he yells something that sounds like “Ayudo!” – “Help!” That’s probably not what he said but it might as well have been. Frustration has set in and Ginepri breaks him to go up 3-2.

Here is where Ginepri is a little less than perfect. He sees Ferrer’s frustration and starts to force his game so he can end the match quickly. He goes for forehand winners too early in the point and over-hits approach shots. With Ferrer serving at 3-5, they hit twelve ground strokes back and forth then Ferrer dumps a ball into the net. When Ginepri is patient, he’s successful.

Ginepri survives another bad call on match point and fourteen unforced errors in the second set to win, 6-1, 6-4.

Ferrer could have been tired, it took him three sets to beat his previous opponent, Mariano Puerta, and he might have been feeling the effects of a sore achilles tendon. But Ginepri carried out an excellent strategy perfectly, for the most part, and that is the reason for this lopsided match. Ginepri started out well and made adjustments as he increased his lead. If he can do this and remember to be patient at the end of matches, he’ll keep climbing up the rankings.