After a bizarre incident during e-ticket check-in that required me to pick up a phone and wait on hold while surrounded by some one hundred United Airlines employees – the final nail in the coffin for the theory that technology saves time, some lost baggage and a wrong turn on a road wiped out by lava, I’m in a rain forest on the Big Island of Hawai’i. Without a raincoat.

And I left my digital camera at a USTA match last weekend so I’m in one of the most beautiful places on earth with an $8.95 throw-away camera.

The Big Island – also called Hawai’i – is a volcanic island currently being chased by two cyclones. The tennis court is submerged and I happen to be staying in a cottage with a tin roof. It’s not only raining cats and dogs but it also sounds like them.

There are actually five volcanoes here but only two of them are active. That’s more than enough. You can drive forever on hardened lava and end up in a parking lot that is within four miles of the volcano called Kilauea. At night you can see the red spots where the lava comes to the surface. If you look up, you see steam where lava is still spewing out of the top of Kilauea. If you look out over the beach, you see steam where lava enters the ocean.

A man recently walked the four miles to get a closer look at the lava. He misjudged the distance on his return walk and ended up lost on the huge expanse of lava for three days.

Not one person has mentioned sports during my stay here. It’s not that there aren’t a lot of athletes in Hawai’i. Dylan Rush, of Konawaena High School on the Big Island, was named the Bigger Faster Stronger 2005 National High School Athlete of the Year. An All-American in football and wrestling, he also competes in powerlifting and Judo and plays on a baseball team. He has accepted a scholarship to UCLA to play football.

Two weeks ago, Brian Viloria from Waipahu, O‘ahu, won the World Boxing Council light flyweight title by beating Eric Ortiz. In his previous fight, Viloria pounded his opponent, Ruben Contreras, so hard that he suffered brain damage. Viloria invited Contreras to the title fight and gave him a check for a few thousand dollars in front of the newspaper cameras at the end of the match. This is similar to Shaquille O’Neal’s offer to pay for George Mikan’s funeral. Mikan, the NBA big-man pioneer, died earlier this year. Offers of financial aid should be made in private and carried out in private. It’s embarrassing to need a handout. Helping someone should be a noble activity, not a photo-op.

Anyway, the point is that there are sports here but when you can hike around lava fields for days at a time and surf in the Wai’pio Valley, a stunning beach with two impossibly high and beautiful waterfalls, you don’t spend a lot of time indoors watching college football. Even if you do, the islands are six hours earlier than the east coast on the mainland so you can watch your game and still have time to spend the afternoon swimming with the dolphins.

My swimming was limited to riding on a blowup dolphin in the pool at the resort where I am staying. Sounds easier than it was, the damn thing kept tipping over and it was very hard to mount because it sat so high in the water. But that was enough for me. I had no urge to sponge off the tennis court and actually exert myself.

Maybe that’s why there aren’t a lot of professional athletes from Hawai’i. Who needs the stress?

The message boards at tennis-warehouse.com are the liveliest place for tennis on the web. During an important match, a thread in the General Pro Player forum spins out an ongoing commentary while the match unravels in real time. The heading will have the word “spoiler” in the thread title so you don’t see the outcome of a match before you get around to watching it on your DVR. The match between Roger Federer and Nicolas Kiefer at the US Open today generated six pages of user posts. A lot of the users were at work when they posted their comments. One of them even complained that his company’s computer system would not allow him access to the live scoreboard popup window.

How were these fans tuning in? They were using the IBM Point Tracker. Go to the US Open website and click on Live Scores. Click on Point Tracker in the lower right hand side of the IBM On Demand Scoreboard window and we’re off. If you’re wearing earphones behind that cubicle you’re hiding in, click on the Radio button to get the complete multimedia experience.

If you click on Automatic in the Point Tracker window, the match will automatically play out in real time using an animation that draws the path of each shot and a list that describes how each point is won or lost. You can choose any one of five points of view of the court, a seat in the middle or one of the four corners. If you want to go back and see a particular point, click on Manual in the Point Tracker window, choose the set, then click on the description of the point. The animation of the point then plays out.

When Andy Roddick hits a 150 mph serve, it’s not traveling at 150 mph by the time it reaches his opponent. Small consolation, no doubt.

For each point, the scoreboard window displays the serve speed and return speed – you can choose mph or km/h. It’s interesting to see that a 95 mph serve might result in a 58 mph return. That tells you how much speed is lost by the time the ball bounces and gets to the other baseline. When Andy Roddick hits a 150 mph serve, it’s not traveling at 150 mph by the time it reaches his opponent. Small consolation, no doubt.

When you click on Radio, up comes the voice of a commentator describing the action on the court. There must be a delay on the radio transmission because you see the animation of the strokes before you hear the description of the point. Are they afraid that an announcer at the US Open is gonna blow up like Howard Stern and say some of those words that can get you a two hundred thousand dollar fine from the FCC? Tennis should be so happy to have that much controversy.

This is what tennis sounds like on the radio:

Petrova at the far baseline, has yet to hold serve
first serve here to Sharapova backhand, 97mph
inside out going to the Petrova forehand
flicked crosscourt by Sharapova
down the line goes Petrova’s forehand
backhand exchange
Petrova tried the deuce court sideline, Sharapova there
Petrova forehand, thought about coming in
answered by Sharapova and that’s well-wide
Petrova was able to stay in that point until Sharapova made a mistake
thirty all

That’s almost as much work as announcing the undercard at Madison Square Garden.

So there you have it, a circus of information, more than you could ever possibly need. You can hear what’s going on at the same time that you can read what’s going on and simultaneously see an animation of the point along with serve and return speed.

You can click on a button for up-to-date match statistics. Click on an individual statistic to get a pie chart for percentages and a bar chart for numbers. Click on an individual player to get a mini-bio and a link to a full bio. There’s even a button for reporting feedback.

What more could an action-craved, information-soaked video game generation ask for? We can hardly stand in line at the grocery story without a video game in our hands or eat at a restaurant without a TV screen to watch.

Pay our bills or write that report our boss asked for while also tracking the Blake-Agassi match at the US Open? No problem.

Lance Armstrong’s seven straight Tour de France victories and Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak sit on top of the pile when it comes to incredible feats in sports.

The year after Babe Ruth was released by the Yankees, Joe DiMaggio arrived in New York and led the Yankees to a championship as a rookie. He served in the army during World War II and later married Marilyn Monroe. More than enough reasons to make him an American hero. Lance Armstrong is a hero because he survived a lethal bout with cancer and recovered well enough to not only ride again and win a Tour de France, but to keep on riding until he’d won more than any other man in history.

The last time a French rider won the Tour de France was 1985. An American rider has now won ten of the last twenty Tours – Greg LeMond won in 1986 and 1989-90. France was already pissed off at the US before their riders started taking over France’s premier sports event so it’s not surprising that the French newspaper L’Equipe reported that a B sample of Armstrong’s blood taken during his first Tour win showed the presence of EPO, a form of blood doping. It helps that French libel laws force the libeled person to prove that the newspaper’s report is false. L’Equipe journalists are well aware that this is a tough standard to satisfy.

When French resident Roman Polanski sued Vanity Fair for reporting a story that he tried to seduce a young actress on the way to the funeral for his slain wife, Sharon Tate, he tried his case in England and not France because England’s libel laws require the publisher to prove that their information is true. Polanski won the case.

It’s more surprising to read the response of Tour de France director, Jean-Marie Leblanc: “… these are no longer rumors or insinuations, these are proven scientific facts.” Without an A sample of Armstrong’s blood and lab verification that the sample belongs to Armstrong ( the French anti-doping lab has refused to do this), the testing standards of the World Anti-Doping Agency have not been upheld and the result is not scientifically proven.

More than surprising, and even shocking, is the comment by Dick Pound, head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (and an American). He’s not sure an A sample is necessary. “You can count on the fingers of one hand the times a B sample has not confirmed the result of the A sample,” Pound said.

He may be expressing the cynicism Americans now feel after ten years of lies about steroid use by professional and amateur athletes. Year after year, baseball players blew up till they looked like the Michelin man and attributed their new body to dietary changes or working out with their wife’s trainer. The Balco scandal opened our eyes but still left questions – who was doing what and when? Jose Canseco’s book, Juiced, answered our questions but how much of it could we believe? Then came Rafael Palmeiro’s positive test for steroids and that was it. We thought baseball players might have been cheatin’ and lyin’ but we weren’t sure and we didn’t want to believe it. Now we had no choice.

Palmeiro’s positive test result was like finding out that your lover is cheating on you. You’re not only deeply wounded but you’re ashamed that you didn’t see it and you don’t believe it when your lover says that it was just a fling.

Palmeiro and his brethren wanted to protect their careers until after the Hall of Fame ballots were cast. Palmeiro is one of only twenty-six players in the history of baseball to hit over five hundred home runs and get three thousand hits. Admitting to steroid use would have been the same as erasing his numbers over night.

Baseball players may have been reflecting America’s attitude towards winning at all costs or they might have been shaping it when they testified in front of congress that they never used steroids. Either way, Palmeiro’s positive test result was like finding out that your lover is cheating on you. You’re not only deeply wounded but you’re ashamed that you didn’t see it and you don’t believe it when your lover says that it was just a fling. We want to believe in our sports heroes but we’re not sure we can.

We’re not sure it’s possible for a man to recover from an aggressive form of cancer then go out and ride up and down impossibly steep mountains faster than any other cyclist on the planet without using illegal performance enhancing substances. And that’s very sad.

[Correction: Dick Pound is a Canadian, for some reason I was confusing him with Dick Button the former Olympic skater and television analyst. There are a few similarities, they were both Olympic athletes and they both have law degrees, but that’s about it.]

Actually, it’s my Maria Sharapova bobblehead doll that has a broken neck. It doesn’t bobble, it just lists to one side. Sharapova does have an inflamed pectoral muscle, though, and that’s why we’ll see Elena Dementieva play Tatiana Garbin instead of the quarterfinal match between Sharapova and Daniela Hantuchova.

On top of that, Peng Shuai injured herself in practice and has defaulted this evening’s doubles match so will see an exhibition by two players who would have been in the doubles match if there had been one. Welcome to Maria Sharapova bobblehead night at the JP Morgan Chase Open.

The injuries just keep piling up. Mary Pierce, Lindsay Davenport, Serena Williams, Vera Zvonareva, Elena Likhovtseva and Ai Sugiyama dropped out before the tournament started.

The WTA and ATP summer schedule is brutal. Two weeks of long tedious matches on the red clay at Roland Garros followed two weeks later by a fortnight of hard hitting on the quick green grass at Wimbledon. Follwed by ten tournaments in the US Open Series. Followed by the Open itself.

The year end championships are in November with only five weeks off before the Australian Open tuneups usher in a new season.

It’s not like basketball, football and baseball. At least there you have teammates and a four-month off-season. The NBA has 82 regular season games. A top ranked tennis player can play over 80 matches a year on many different continents. And that doesn’t include doubles. Tennis players are now bigger and stronger and they have more powerful rackets. It’s not men in long white pants hitting slices back and forth anymore. It’s a barrage of very hard hit ground strokes coming at you from all parts of the court. The spate of injuries in the men’s and women’s game in the last few weeks is not surprising.

Every single time an interviewer asks a tennis player, “What would you do if you were commissioner for a day?” they respond, “I’d make the season shorter.” You could argue that no one is forcing players to enter all of these tournaments but you could hardly blame Sharapova for playing this week. If she’d actually played in the semifinals, she could have claimed the number one ranking. It turns out that she will still get the number one ranking, the first Russian to do so, but a week later because Davenport is not playing in Toronto.

At the Mercedes Benz Cup tournament a few weeks ago, your parking fee was refunded if you owned a Mercedes Benz. Tonight it’s a Land Rover. Nobody could ever accuse tennis of being a working class spectator sport.

Tonight we are at The Home Depot Center and the field of the adjacent soccer stadium is tricked out like a dirt bike track. Instead of dirt bikes speeding around the track, Land Rovers slowly turn sideways and tip upwards as they crawl over the dirt hills. It looks like an ant farm in slow motion.

Elena Dementieva is playing Tatiana Garbin in this last quarterfinals match. Garbin is a quick and that’s a good thing because Dementieva is one of the hardest hitters on the tour. Garbin manages to hold serve in the first game but she spends a lot of time running down Dementieva’s shots.

Dementieva is overpowering as she breaks Garbin on her next three service games and wins the first set 6-1. You can see Dementieva’s shots get harder and deeper as her confidence grows and Garbin’s returns get shorter as her confidence drains away. One of Dementieva’s shots is so hard and flat it looks like it was shot out of a cannon.

Dementieva has a double fault in each of her first two service games. She has well-documented problems with her serve. In a loss at the finals of the 2004 French Open, she had ten double faults. Her serve is much improved, she’ll only suffer through four double faults this evening, but it’s still an adventure. She’s like a crafty baseball pitcher who tosses pitches at different speeds and different angles, you never quite know what’s coming. Garbin gets four break points in the third game of the second set but she’s unable to convert them and when Dementieva finally gets a game point, she lobs a 68 mph second serve that throws Garbin off – she returns it over the baseline and out.

Dementieva breaks Garbin twice in the second set and wins the match in fifty-five minutes, 6-1, 6-1.

Instead of the quarterfinals doubles match, we see an exhibition set between Bethany Mattek and Angela Haynes, two young Americans who have made it to the doubles semifinals. A courtside announcer reveals the contents of each player’s tennis bag as Mattek and Haynes joke around on the court.

All in all it’s pretty disappointing except for a fascinating conversation with the woman sitting next to me. Her name is Terri Ford and she is the Director of Advocacy for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF). She is off to South Africa for the tenth time to visit AHF’s hospital. They treat AIDS patients with antiretrovirals. She shows me images that will soon be in a gallery show. They are portraits of patients in South Africa and Uganda – where AHF has another hospital – who are surviving with the Foundation’s help. One portrait shows a mother who has lost six children to AIDS. Another shows a mother with one surviving child who hopes to live long enough to raise him. There is a happy, smiling family of two parents and a child. The entire family is being treated for AIDS.

It’s a sad but hopeful intrusion into the world of make believe at a tennis tournament where Land Rovers play at climbing over rough terrain. In Africa it’s the real thing.

First Ben Johnson tested positive for stanolozol. Then a bottle of androstenedione turned up in Mark McGwire’s locker the year he broke Roger Maris’ home run record. A few years later the Balco scandal blew up followed closely by Jose Canseco’s book, Juiced. That got the politicians all upset and led to congressional hearings on steroid use in baseball. Now we’ve come full circle. Rafael Palmeiro, who categorically denied any drug use at those congressional hearings, has tested positive for stanolozol.

Steroid hysteria is in full bloom. Palmeiro is getting brutal treatment from the press. Sports radio hosts are so sick of talking about him that a radio host cut off a first time caller this evening because the caller abruptly changed the subject to Palmeiro. I understand why fans are so outraged. Years of lies, and bad ones at that, will piss anyone off. But does that mean that steroids are necessarily bad for you?

Steven Kotler has written an excellent article about the history of steroids, Sympathy For The Devil, What If Everything You Think You Know About Steroids Is Wrong?. He traces the development of steroid research from the 1700’s to the present and looks at the effect of drug laws on current research.

As far back as the 1940’s, experiments showed that steroids could alter moods for the better and increase sex drive. There was also evidence that it could extend our lifespan. But the bias against steroids was so great that they were outlawed in the 1990 Steroid Control Act. The 2004 Steroid Control Act added twenty-six new substances to the banned list. The problem is that these laws discourage scientific research. Research that could show the benefits and correctly assess the dangers of these substances.

Current studies of large populations of adult steroid users show that there do not appear to be adverse effects with steroid use.

Kotler points out a parallel between the treatment of hallucinogens and steroids. After initial promising experimental results, hallucinogens such as psilocybin and LSD were outlawed in the U.S. in 1967. Experimentation didn’t start again until 1990. In Timothy Leary’s appropriately titled autobiography, Flashbacks, he describes an experiment called the Concord Prison Experiment. In the 1960’s, Leary and his fellow professor at Harvard, Richard Alpert, better know as Ram Dass, gave psilocybin to prisoners in a clinical setting and found that the prisoners had a reduced rate of recidivism.

Current studies of large populations of adult steroid users show that there do not appear to be adverse effects with steroid use. Kotler quotes Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale, champion power lifter and noted authority on performance enhancing drugs, “As used by most people, including athletes, the adverse effects of anabolic steroids appear to be minimal.” The news is not all positive. Teenagers should not take steroids. If you take excessive amounts over a long period of time, you will have problems. There is also no way to know what goes into substances cooked up in the homegrown designer drug labs which provide the steroids used in gyms around the country.

This brings up another parallel with hallucinogens. Back in the sixties when I took my fair share of acid trips, it was rare to get an acid tab that wasn’t cut with speed. I was as jumpy as a firewalker. Sometimes I could hear the plumbing in the walls clang so loudly that I had to go outside to calm myself down. The one time I did get pure LSD, I had one of the most profound experiences of my life. Though I could hardly call my experimentation scientific, it does demonstrate that some of the side effects that steroids users have can be be traced to non steroid substances found in black market supplies of the drug.

Two areas where steroids are beneficial are AIDS treatment and anti-aging medicine. A regimen of nutrition, exercise and steroids can increase T-cell counts significantly and prevent death from AIDS wasting syndrome. As you age, your hormone levels drop. If this loss can be reversed, the aging process can be slowed. Current anti-aging regimens use DHEA, a steroid hormone, to increase energy levels and restore sex drive.

If you still want to rant and rave at the long line of indignant liars with bad excuses who have tested positive for steroids, go ahead. But don’t let the anti-drug hysteria blind you to scientific research. Read Mr. Kotler’s article and get an accurate picture of the current state of steroid knowledge. Anything we can do to prevent future ill-advised drug laws could help us live longer and reduce the prison population, in more ways than one.