The New York Times reports that the Yankees were so desperate to sign Jason Giambi to a contract that they deleted references to steroids in the guarantee language of the contract at Giambi’s request. The guarantee language in a baseball contract says things such as, “we can terminate you if you are a bad citizen or you jump out of airplanes or try to strangle your coach.” The Colorado Rockies terminated Denny Neagle’s 19 million dollar contract after police arrested him for solicitating a prostitute. Neagles’ grievance against termination will be held in April.

The article shows an image of Giambi wearing a suit designed to make him look as big as possible. Do baseball uniforms come with padded shoulders I wonder?

The Yankees have the same problem as major league baseball, and the players who took steroids. They made a deal with the devil. The players made a deal with the devil because they are likely to suffer long term health problems from taking the steroids. The Yankees made a deal with the devil and now they are now strapped with a 120 million dollar contract for a questionable player. Baseball made a deal with the devil by turning a blind eye to steroid use so they could reap benefits from the season home run record. Now they will likely have a new record for career home runs set by an admitted steroid user: Barry Bonds.

By the way, doesn’t a contract have to be reviewed by the league before it is signed? O.k., so steroids were not illegal in Major League Baseball when Giambi did them. But they were according to the government else there would be no Balco investigation. And clearly steroids were included in the guarantee language otherwise there was no need to delete them.

It’s not just the players who have totally lost face. The teams themselves and the league look just as bad.

An ad for godaddy.com showing a woman in a sexy t-shirt who happens to suffer a slight, and we do mean slight, wardrobe malfunction in front of a government censorship committee was pulled due to objections by the NFL after airing only once during the Super Bowl.

Girls Gone Wild, a highly popular series of videotapes showing college coeds stripping for the camera, aired a pay per view event at halftime of the Super Bowl. The event promised plenty of wardrobe malfunctions. The CEO of Girls Gone Wild and a few of the girls gone wild appeared on The Loose Cannons, a sports radio show, to promote the event. Mychal Thompson, one of the loose cannons, objected to their presence and refused to appear with them.

LA Couples holds weekly swinger parties in a large warehouse in downtown Los Angeles. Men must be accompanied by a woman. Women can turn up alone. I once spent an evening volunteering at the wine bar. More than eighty couples and a handful of single women filled up the nightclub area. People milled around and chatted each other up. There were some shy couples, there were some bold couples. Groups moved to the dance floor and various combinations of couples and singles went off together to the Doctor’s Office Set or the Arabian Set or the Jail Set or any other of over thirty theme rooms set up for creative sexual fantasy.

Tantra and other ancient sexual practices have been around since long before Christianity. Just because conservative Christians tout abstinence doesn’t mean it’s the only alternative. One thing you learn from the study of tantra is that you cannot repress sexual energy. It’s kind of like a Whac-A-Mole arcade game – if you whack one mole, another one just pops up somewhere else. That is probably why Hustler has a huge building on Wilshire Boulevard and Girls Gone Wild has sold 90 million videos. I was riding in an airport shuttle one evening and a fellow traveler told me a story about an older co-worker who was called to the Hustler building to install some computer equipment. The poor man was deeply embarrassed to discover that the equipment in question was a webcam pointing up the skirt of a Hustler secretary during her working hours. Now I ask you, isn’t that pretty desperate?

I contend that the fascination with porn is fed by a lack of alternatives. If people felt comfortable going to swinger parties or other private sex parties or more people knew about yearly pagan ritual orgies held in the woods or more couples watched HBO’s show Real Sex and were willing to rent a theme room and have themselves videotaped playing out a scene, there’d be a wider variety of erotic adventures and products available and porn would no longer out-picture everything else sexual. We have plenty of medical help for our sexual shortcomings but not a lot of instruction. I did a Google search for sexual advisors and it returned a long list of sexual harassment and sexual assault advisors.

Mychal Thompson believes that it’s wrong for college coeds to lift their shirts. He believes that an eight year old shouldn’t have to watch a satirical ad about a wardrobe malfunction. I think women should have the same right to go topless as men do and I hope we’re sophisticated enough that our entertainment can interest an eight year old and amuse an adult at the same time.

I remember watching Andre Agassi play early in his career. He had a ton of talent but the image outpictured anything else he might have been. I scoffed when Barbra Streisand called him the Zen master. I felt self satisfied in my opinion when he dropped down to 141 in the ATP rankings. He was a very clean hitter but not a very heady player. He could hit you off the court but not out-think you.

Then he was smart enough to start working with Brad Gilbert and learned how to outmaneuver his opponent. Then he improved his conditioning. Then he improved his return of serve, if that was possible. Then I read Gilbert’s book, I’ve Got Your Back, Winning Ugly for coaches I suppose you could call it. Gilbert describes his friend as a gracious, intelligent warrior who remade himself and his game to get to the top and stay at the top well into his thirties.

The final thing that got me was Agassi’s introductory speech for his wife, Steffi Graf, when she was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in 2004. I’m telling you, I cannot read it without tears in my eyes. For instance:

“From the roar of voices inside the lines of center court to the quietness of a child’s bedroom, that generous soul, that unbending strength, that soft spoken integrity has not been shaken. The arena of tennis simply gave you a platform and an opportunity to refine those inner qualities even more.”

My favorite part of sports, besides playing them, is the opportunity to read the ongoing biographies that constitute the sports pages. Each season I get to know an athlete a little better. Did they face their demons down and reach their potential? Did they live up to their huge contract? Did they win the gold medal an entire country expected them to win? Sometimes they fail horribly. Mayhem and murder even. And sometimes they grow into themselves and become deeply caring human beings. Here is someone who suffered from a common but debilitating sports disease: the athlete who plays sports in a futile attempt to win the praise of a critical parent who never praises you and is never satisfied with your accomplishments. Agassi had already won slams when his father said, “Well, he could have been President by now. Why isn’t he President? He could have been.” Andre dealt with it. He got the counseling he needed and learned to compete for his love of tennis, not his father’s.

Which brings us to yesterday’s match against Joachim Johansson. Johansson set a new record by serving 51 aces in the match with Agassi. Richard Kracijek set the record of 49 aces in a five set match. Johansson needed only four. At one point Johansson had 27 winners to Agassi’s 7. But Agassi protected his service game, got to the tiebreaker in the last three sets, and won each one. This was a masterly display of patience and, above all, mental toughness. No throwing fits or turning to your coach and whining, not even a “come on!” Just put your hard hat on and keep working at it until you find the slightest opening or weakness you can exploit. Agassi kept changing his service return position – he was almost in the shade at one point – moved his serve around and did anything he possibly could to give Johansson a different look. It was enough. Just enough. That was a great testament to his transition from a power hitter to a mentally tough master technician.

Practice and Competition Report: played two sets with M., 7-5, 4-6
Solutions Analysis:
1. Trunk twist is everything. If I swing the racket with my arm only, the ball dribbles over the net. If I twist my trunk and step into the ball, I hit it solidly and deep. This is particularly useful if I get pulled out wide because I can still hit a solid shot without a lot of footwork if I make sure to twist and hit.
2. When M. gets behind, she hits the ball short then lobs me when I come in. She also starts to hit more junk: short balls and spin. To counter this I should hit shorts balls to the corners of the service box before she hits them. Also, I need to keep the ball deep to make it harder to hit short balls.
3. I got tired in the middle of the second set, understandable for my first match in two and a half months I suppose.
4. Lost rhythm on my serve. See Sean Brawley about this.
Success Analysis: improved my slice serve. You actually do have to hit the side of the ball, just like they always said.

Say it isn’t so. I’m not ready for this. The December 23rd New York Times reports that a woman paid $50,000 to have her beloved cat cloned by a company called, oh my, Genetic Savings and Clone. I can only hope that The Onion has deviously planted one of its articles in the Times and a statement will appear in the corrections column on December 24th apologizing for the breach of security. Except that it’s now January 5th.

Not that I wouldn’t like clone a few people.

I live in Los Angeles. If I want to listen to sports radio in the morning, I listen to James Brown or Jim Rome. James Brown is the nicest guy in the world. He’s humble, he usually limits himself to sports related subjects and looks at them fairly when he does. It would be nice, though, if he was willing to own an inflammatory opinion now and then. Jim Rome has never found a subject he couldn’t rap about endlessly and has never expressed the slightest doubt about any of his opinions. “Don’t tell me…” is one of his favorite phrases. If we could somehow mix their cells together, we would then have a very entertaining sports rapper who is opinionated, spends more time talking about sports than he does Martha Stewart’s stretch in jail and is neither too self effacing nor too full of himself. How cool would that be? You might miss the news items about the woman who shot herself when she forgot that she’d left her gun in the oven or the latest death from belly flopping but you’d adjust and be a better person for it.

However, it’s not that simple.

Let’s say something happened to Pedro Martinez tomorrow. His bereaved mother thinks to herself, “We are devastated by the loss of Pedro. We have plenty of money. Let’s see if we can get him cloned.” If you want to clone someone and you want them to be the same person you knew and loved, in this case a quirky but nonetheless very effective baseball pitcher, you would need to duplicate his environment as closely as possible. Starting with the womb. Our genes don’t determine all our characteristics thank heavens. Many of our characteristics are determined by the womb we hang out in for nine months. Pedro’s mother is probably not a good candidate for pregnancy at this point though I did read another article I hoped wasn’t true. A 67 year old woman is seven months pregnant with twins in Romania. By the time I read this I was totally speechless, not a common occurrence.

What would it be like to give birth to the same child twice? How would inbreeding work I wonder? Usually a child has the DNA of its mother and father. A clone only has the DNA of its mother or father. Inbreeding causes problems because it minimizes the genetic diversity between the mother and father. Offspring of inbreeding are more susceptible to diseases and health problems that run in the family. What if you cloned yourself and carried yourself to term? When I meet someone who has the same annoying habits I have, I can’t stand to be in the same room with them. I would not want to give birth to and raise me.

Back to Pedro. It would be important to be raised in the Dominican Republic because everybody is crazy about baseball. It would help if you were a barefoot boy from a poor family desperate to play baseball and make it to the big leagues so you could buy big houses for your family and friends and bring great pride to your country. Except that Pedro would be the favorite son raised in the lap of luxury this time around. He’d probably sit on the couch all day eating potato chips and watching baseball on satellite television. Who wants to run around barefoot in the hot sun throwing sockballs at a cement wall when you could be playing video games on a huge flat screen TV?

Speaking of twins, identical twins are clones. That means that Jose Canseco and his brother Ozzie are clones. Maybe even more alike than clones because they were raised in the same womb at the same time. So this is what might happen if you clone someone. You might get an o.k. baseball player who barely makes it to the bigs. Or you might get a blustery bruiser who uses steroids to become a home run slugger for the Oakland A’s. Along the way he might get arrested for domestic abuse, convicted of felony aggravated battery and test positive for steroids while on probation.

Isn’t there something unique about each person in the world? Isn’t this what we mean when we talk about spirit? Isn’t that entirely beyond the realm of cloning? Even if I hadn’t spent the past thirty years going to Opening the Heart workshops and Conscious Living/Conscious Dying workshops and every other spiritual workshop every offered, this would still be a subject of deep interest to me. I was raised in an adoptive family. Every adopted person I know is obsessed with identity. We want to know how much we were formed by our adoptive family and how much we share with our birth family. As we get older, though, this becomes less important. We have to make difficult life decisions and find a peaceful way of living with our thoroughly exasperating personalities. We can’t blame our family for everything and even if we had the worst family in the world, there’s nothing we can do about it now.

Another Victor Conte will come along to develop a new steroid that can’t be detected in current drug tests. Athletes will still be under great pressure to use them. Salaries will continue to go up. Kids will leave school earlier and earlier to turn pro. Pissed off fans will still throw cups onto the court because they are tired of paying too much for tickets to see very rich basketball players complain about not being able to feed their family. Science doesn’t contribute much to a solution. Steroids just make things worse and I can’t imagine how cloning could help.

Last week in class, my yoga teacher said that people tend to dream less when their life is less stressful. If you shoot up steroids, worry about your current batting slump and think about that younger player threatening to take away your job, when you go to sleep, if you can sleep, you might dream that the bat disintegrates in your hands as you swing or you might dream that the younger player accidentally disappears into a huge pit and is devoured by hungry lions, anything to help you deal with the stress. If, however, you come to the end of the day and you’ve done your best to address all of the issues in your life and generally feel like you’ve chosen appropriate goals, you’ll go to bed knowing that you’ve done what you can and enjoy a deep satisfying sleep. Isn’t this the idea in life? The goal here is not to bring back your pet cat. The goal is to lead a productive life and learn how to manage stress.

Daily Recap of Today’s Soap Operas

As the Ball Turns: Karl receives shocking news, Kobe receives even more shocking news

Michael and Juanita Jordan are in town for an NBA all-star game. Karl Malone, dressed in cowboy hat and boots, walks up to Michael and Juanita and gives Juanita a hug. Michael is uncomfortable with this and excuses himself.

Juanita asks Karl if his injured knee has healed. He says he feels good; he just needs to decide whether to return to the Lakers or sign with another team. Juanita asks him if he really wants to play with Kobe. “You know how he is. He’s gotta be the the star,” she tells Karl. She suggests that Karl just might want to test his friendship with Kobe if he’s considering spending his last shot at a championship with someone who’s got such a bad track record. “Say one bad thing to Vanessa and see what happens,” she says as she walks away. Karl is left pondering her comment.

Coach Joe Bryant stands on the sideline at his team’s practice. His cellphone rings and he steps off the court into a hallway to take the call after he looks at the caller-ID. “What do you want from me? I told you never to call me again, haven’t you done enough already?”

A woman speaks on her cellphone in a dark corner in a bar. She says that Kobe’s lawyers are lowballing her and if he can’t do anything about it, “I’ll go to Kobe’s house and tell him who paid me off.”

Vanessa Bryant sits by herself at a small table at the All Star event. Karl walks up to the table. She looks at his cowboy outfit with total disbelief and asks him, “Hey Cowboy, what are you hunting?” Karl is offended by her attitude and says, with a sly grin on his face, “I’m hunting for little Mexican girls.” Vanessa had a puzzled look on her face. Karl sits down at the table still grinning and asks, “Do you like me?” Vanessa is now feeling uncomfortable. She answers that she likes him as a friend then quickly gets up and leaves the table.

Joe Bryant is driving in his car and looks at a slip of paper with an address on it. He checks the street addresses and drives up to a local motel. He sees a woman drive out of the motel, recognizes her and drives off after her.

Karl leaves the All Star event and is walking to his car. Kobe, very angry, walks up to him. He accuses Karl of hitting on his wife and using a racial slur. He tells Karl, “I can’t believe you hit on my wife. How could you do that?” Karl protests that he was only kidding around, he didn’t mean anything by it, but Kobe is furious. He puts his finger in Karl’s face and says, “I’m gonna mess you up if you every come anywhere near her again,” then storms off. Just then, Kaye, Karl’s wife, walks up. “What was that all about?” she asks. “It’s no big deal,” Karl says, “Kobe’s mad because I was teasing Vanessa, that’s all.”

Still at the All Star event, Michael walks up to Juanita and tells her that he has an unexpected business meeting. His bodyguard will take her back to the hotel and he will meet her later for dinner. He gives her a kiss on the cheek and leaves. Juanita, angry, picks up her phone and says, “Follow him.”

Kaye is in her kitchen. She dials the phone and asks to speak to Vanessa. Instead, Kobe picks up the phone. He is still furious. He yells into the phone, “What kind of man is he? He hits on his friend’s wife. He hits on women when he’s on the road. How can I be friends with someone like that?! Tell him our friendship is over.”

Kobe gets off the phone and goes into the living room where a local television sportswriter is setting up a live interview with him about his new role as team leader. Kobe tells the reporter that he’s pretty hopeful about this season, things are going well but he thinks it’s not fair to his teammates that Karl hasn’t made his decision to return yet. His teammates are working really hard for him and they’re having to look over their shoulder and wonder if Karl is going to take their place on the team if and when he comes back.

Karl arrives home after his workout and Kaye is waiting for him. She yells at him, “You are still seeing other women despite everything you told me. I cannot believe you lied to me again.” Karl is dumbfounded. Kaye continues, “Kobe says you play around when you’re on the road and you hit on Vanessa.” Kaye is upset and angry at the same time, she is almost in tears. Karl comforts her and reminds her that it’s not the first time Kobe has tried to take someone down with him. “Who are you going to believe, him or me,” Karl says. Kaye tells Karl, “I don’t know but Vanessa is my friend and you’d better go over there and fix this up else you are in a whole lot of trouble.”

Michael Jordan drives up to the same motel and walks up to the clerk. He asks if Miss Jones is still registered. The clerk says she just checked out. He says he was in a real hurry and seemed pretty mad. She muttered something about “going where the rich people live.” As Michael Jordan pulls out of the motel, another car drives up and follows after him

Karl Malone’s agent Dwight walks into the gym where Karl is finishing his workout. He tells Karl that Kobe has called him out in a television interview. He tells Karl that this is his opportunity to sign with San Antonio. No one will accuse him of chasing a ring now, even if it is the best team in the league. He can’t possibly return to the Lakers after what Kobe said about him.

A woman drives into the circular driveway of a huge beautiful house. Joe Bryant drives up after her. Joe gets out of the car and runs up to her pleading, “You can’t do this to me. You can’t do this to my son. Haven’t you already ruined his life?”

The cameraman starts shooting. Just as Kobe is yelling at him to turn his camera off, Michael Jordan turns into the driveway and gets out of his car. The reporter’s jaw drops to the ground. Michael runs up to Joe Bryant and the woman at yells at Joe, “I told you I’d take care of this! What are you doing?”

Vanessa runs up to the door, sees Joe and Michael and then sees the woman and is in a total state of shock. She runs down the stairs and starts attacking the woman. The cameraman gets closer and the reporter starts reporting the three ring circus in front of him. “And now Michael Jordan has joined the fight! Joe Bryant and Michael Jordan are trying to pull Vanessa and the alleged rape victim apart. Vanessa is pulling her hair, the woman is kicking…..”

Two security guards run out of the house and join Joe Bryant and Michael in trying to separate the two women.

Juanita drives into the driveway, gets out of her car and runs up to Michael. She starts to yell at him about seeing another woman then sees Vanessa and freezes.

Having heard all the yelling, Karl runs into the driveway and looks at the scene.

Michael yells at Juanita, “What are you doing here?” Vanessa, still held by the bodyguards, yells at Kobe, “What is that woman doing here?” Juanita looks at Karl and says, “What are you doing here?” Kobe, in complete disgust, now sitting on the steps with his face in his hands, looks at the crowd and says, “Even my own father hates me. Everybody hates me. What did I do that was so wrong?” The camera is in his face.

Joe walks up to Kobe. “Kobe, I love you. You are my son. I was trying to protect you. I knew you married too young but you wouldn’t listen to me. I thought if I paid her off to drop the rape charges, you’d be able to go on with your life and rebuild your reputation.”

Kobe looks back at his father and say, “I don’t need any help. Why does everyone think I need help and what is he doing here?” Kobe points at Michael Jordan. “Kobe, Michael is your father. He had an affair with your mother and I decided to adopt you and raise you as my own. He gave me the money to pay off the woman. We were just trying to help you.”

Juanita looks at Michael with horror then breaks into tears. Michael turns to her and says, “Honey, it was before we were married. I didn’t want you to know. I was embarrassed and you’ve been through so much already.” Juanita wipes her tears away and says, “I’m embarrassed too. You know that Karl and I had an affair but what you didn’t know is that we had a child.” Karl’s jaw drops to the ground. Juanita looks at Vanessa, “I never told Karl and I thought it was better if you didn’t know so you would think you were being raised by your real mother.” She looked at Karl, “I’m sorry I tried to come between you and Kobe, I thought Vanessa might somehow find out if the two of you were close friends.”

Vanessa walks up to Juanita and hugs her, Karl joins them. Michael walks up to Kobe and hugs him, Joe Bryant joins them. The woman, now with tears in her eyes, the cameraman and the reporter are left standing to the side. The reporter signs off, “That’s it Ladies and Gentleman, signing off live from the Kobe Bryant mansion. This truly is the soap opera to end all soap operas.”