Lance Armstrong has taken all the fun out of cheating.
Cheating, like flirting, can be a source of harmless fun in the right circumstances.
Who among us hasn’t pegged an extra point to avoid the skunk in cribbage or short-changed the bank in a friendly game of Monopoly?
There are even card games where the object is to cheat as much as possible without getting caught. Win or lose, everybody has a good laugh.
Nobody’s laughing now. When Mr. Armstrong spilled the beans to Oprah about his lying, bullying, cheating ways there was a feeling of shock and betrayal but nobody was really surprised.
I first became suspicious of organized sports as early as the first grade. It happened one summer when I was at the Moose Lodge family picnic at Chippewa Park.
In spite of all my protests I was entered in one of the kid’s races, a grueling course of about 50 feet or so over freshly mowed lawn. I was mortified to be there.
When I looked around at the other contestants something seemed fishy. The five and six-year-olds I faced looked all pumped-up and enthusiastic. I just assumed they were on the juice.
When the gun went off I refused to run and instead I slowly sauntered to the finish line in protest.
I was right. I found out later that my running mates were all sugaring.
They were hopped up on pop, candy bars and fudgesicles. I never had a chance.
There was no inquiry and my allegations were never proven but I discovered that most of those kids were also getting extra juice (apple, orange and grape) from their Nona, their Baba or their Grandma.
And so, it was no surprise to me, or anybody else when Mr. Armstrong confessed to being a liar, a cheater and a bully. He has probably been behaving this way since he got his first tricycle.
We have witnessed many such confessions lately, some voluntary and some forced under subpoena and under oath. Each revelation implicates hundreds more.
It seems like there have always been cheaters in professional sport but there was a time when good-natured cheating was more practical, even playful at times.
For example, infielder John McGraw (1891-1906) used to hold on to the belt loops of base runners at third or trip them up as they rounded second.
The umpires rarely caught him in those days before instant replay. No real harm done.
More recently, in 1980, Rosie Ruiz was the first woman to finish the Boston Marathon but it was later discovered that she had hopped out of the crowd only a few hundred yards from the finish.
But these pranks are easily forgivable when compared to the conspiracy and deceit used by Armstrong.
He has already destroyed lives and careers in his wake and there is much yet to be revealed.
Long after my boyhood sprinting disaster, I got a chance to redeem myself at the Great Lakes Father’s Day Picnic.
It was again at Chippewa Park but this time I had a six-year-old of my own.
She and a friend, fueled by cotton candy and the competitive spirit, flew to a first-place finish in the three-legged race. The win was uncontested.
Not so for Mr. Armstrong. His appeal for forgiveness has been branded as insincere.
There is widespread suspicion that he is up to something. Some say he lied to Oprah.
One analyst stated that he still looked cold-blooded, cutthroat and ruthless.
He wore the cold, calculated expressions of a bald-faced liar. Let that be his legacy.
Cheaters never prosper.
