Some Free Advice to a Future Sports Hero

So you’re good enough to play sports…maybe professionally…maybe in college, but you think you can be more. And you’re looking at the current landscape of professional sports and you’re sick of all the steroid talk. You’ve worked hard all your life and it gets under your skin that a number of very high profile cheaters are changing the landscape for everyone.

Here’s a little PR plan that I’m giving away for free. Follow it and you’ll become the hero of the working man (and woman…this is man in the mankind sense), the family man, and amateur coaches everywhere.

Dale C. Roe’s Certified Sports Hero Program

1. Be clean. No recreational drugs, no steroids. Let me repeat, no steroids. If you can’t do this one, just skip the whole thing.
2. Go find a testing lab and work out some sort of program with them—a program of scheduled and random tests that will allow them to certify that you are steroid free.
3. Call a press conference. Stand up on a podium, with doctors from the testing lab, your parents and kids, your coach, the owner of your team, and anyone else you can think of who should be in on this kind of thing, and announce to the press and to the world that you have taken it upon yourself to prove you are clean and that you play fair. And that you will continue to have that lab certify you, both on- and off-season.
4. Let the testing lab answer the technical questions. Heck, offer the reporters a tour of the operation.
5. Now, here’s the critical part. At some point the reporters will look at you and ask “Why?” Your answer is critical, and you must believe this deep in your heart:
   

   Because when I was a kid, and I got a solid hit and ran the bases pretending I’d just won the World Series I had fireworks in my head and stars in my eyes. Never once did that dream include needles and pills, and shady doctors.

   Because my dad told me that hard work pays off, and that if you work hard enough you will get your reward.

   Because my coach taught me batting practice and fielding drills, not how to hide needle marks and ruin my body to beat guys who worked harder than me.

   Because I’m tired of press conferences where cheaters insist they just made a mistake.

   Because I don’t want a kid to put down his baseball bat, because he thinks he’ll have to do drugs to make it big. And even more, I don’t want that kid to think he has to pick up the needle to keep playing.

   Because I want all the kids to know that you don’t need the needles to make it to the top.

   Because I want parents to have someone to point to, and say to their kids ‘he didn’t cheat’. And because someday when my kids ask me if I ever cheated, I want to be able to look them in the eye when I say “No”.

6. Now challenge your teammates to do the same.

I guarantee you’ll have at least one new fan for life.

Who’s with me?