Flashes of Panic

Last night, in downtown Amherst, I saw a college student of the weightlifter variety (I don’t know if he’s actually a weightlifter, but he was obviously younger than me and obviously had significantly more muscle mass.) The thing that struck me about him was his t-shirt, which was white with that distinctive dairy-board type on the front: “Got BALCO?” I nearly bounced my jaw off the floor.

I wasn’t sure if I was relieved when I spotted the back, which read “Giambi does” with a website address I couldn’t read. Here I’d thought the drug scandal that has been the buzz of the track world for months had finally penetrated the thick skulls of the stereotypical frat-boy-level sports spectator, but it turned out this was just another, slightly more subtle variation on the “Yankees Suck” shirt that gives a classic sports rivalry a bad name.

Track has been trying for years—no, decades—to return to the kind of popular visibility it had in the early Cold War years, when USA vs. USSR track meets would pack the Rose Bowl or the L.A. Coliseum for consecutive days, or even the late ’70s when our marathoners would finish first and fourth, then second and fourth, at consecutive Olympics. Well, it looks like we’ve made it. We’re on a Red Sox fan’s t-shirt. Our biggest stars line up right next to the overpaid big shots of baseball and football.

It’s a grand jury hearing they’re lining up for, of course, but let’s not quibble.