It Seems There Are 50 Ways to Cheat Your Competitors

Remember when you couldn’t tell the players without a program? Now you can tell the players, because they’ve all been on the cover of People magazine and have starred in deodorant commercials.

However, we have entered an era in which you can’t tell the winner without a urine test, a polygraph printout and an appellate court ruling.

The 1980s, friends, are the Golden Age of Cheating.

Pick a sport. Yachting?

Ah, the America’s Cup. Honorable competition on the high seas. A more manly and honest sport you could not find, unless money and power and ego happen to become involved.

A judge has stripped America of the America’s Cup because Dennis (Captain Chapstick) Conner and his corporate boardroom sailors elected to defend the Cup with a double-hulled boat, producing a pathetic and unsportsmanlike mismatch.

If you’re not familiar with yachting, it might help to think of Conner’s boat in that race as a sailboat on steroids.

Even a home-court (read American) judge couldn’t rule in America’s favor on this one, and New Zealand was awarded the Cup, which by now has all the intrinsic value of a Big Gulp mug down at the 7-Eleven.

But the Americans are confident they can reclaim the Cup. Because we have better sailors? No, because we have Courts of Appeal.

Speaking of steroids, has there been a race this decade, human or equine, that we can believe in? Remember Ben Johnson, world’s fastest hormone? And he’s only the tip of the hypodermic needle.

Bulgaria comes to the Olympics with the world’s greatest-ever weightlifting team, but without steroids those guys couldn’t pull up their socks.

Halfway through the Olympics the Bulgarians abruptly leave Seoul, called home to an emergency meeting of Anabolics Unanimous.

Bodybuilding, a sport where you win with mirrors, is known to harbor a steroid abuser or two. A recent international bodybuilding champion posed for ads in a muscle magazine, boasting of how he trained drug-free.

Unfortunately that was a typo. He trained with free drugs.

Football players and other athletes seem to be popping steroids like they are breath mints and some might be dying from the side effects. They look damn good in the coffins, though, possibly because some embalmers are spiking the formaldehyde with Dianabol.

Unfair advantage is the ultimate goal, and nobody achieves it better than the great American hunter, backed by the National Rifle Assn.

The NRA is fighting for the right of sportsmen-hunters to pack submachine guns. This is a survival necessity you can’t fully appreciate unless you’ve seen a hunter who has been mauled by a rogue mallard.

Personally, I’m not in favor of drive-by hunting, but it’s a boon for the taxidermists. When you hunt with a submachine gun, before you get your trophy kill stuffed and mounted, you have to get it reassembled.

To me, hunting deer with an assault rifle is a bit of an overkill, like trimming your mustache with a guillotine. But then I’m no hunter. I get squeamish stepping on a cockroach.

Baseball has been a haven for cheaters for a century, but mostly it has been the fair kind of cheating, like the phantom double play and the outfielder proudly waving the ball he just trapped. Now the national pastime is moving into new arenas of cheating.

Pete Rose hasn’t been fingered for betting on baseball games, but he may have spread himself thin in a different area. It appears Pete may have sold to souvenir dealers the 4,192 bats he used, the 4,192 balls he hit and the 4,192 uniforms he wore the night he got his 4,192nd hit.

What’s real in baseball? Bats are corked, balls are scuffed, gloves are tarred and columns are ghosted.

Met pitcher David Cone ripped the Dodgers in his newspaper column during last year’s National League playoff series. In his next column, Cone explained that a sportswriter, not David, had written the hatchet column. The next day Cone wrote that he hadn’t written the column apologizing for the first column. This was a working definition of infinity.

But that’s minor league stuff. Moving up to the big leagues of dishonesty: Wade Boggs allegedly cheated on his wife for four years before getting caught, one of those baseball records that, like the streaks of DiMaggio and Gehrig--may never be broken.

The most disillusioning revelation to come out of the Wade-Margo affair was Margo’s expose on autographs. In a magazine article, she claims that most players don’t actually sign those souvenir photos and baseballs that are mailed out or sold with their precious signatures.

Often the autographs are forged by a flunky. Ziggy the ballboy, maybe. Pretty soon, at those celebrity card shows, Ziggy the ballboy will have his own autograph booth.

Step right up, folks. For five dollars, you can have the autograph of the kid who signs Wade Boggs’ autographs. No counterfeit bills, please.

Just make sure it’s Ziggy signing your autograph book, fans, and not some kid impersonating Ziggy.

By the way, Margo: Are you sure that was really Wade?

The 1980s aren’t over. When they are, we’ll vote for the decade’s top cheaters. They’ll be sent on an around-the-world cruise aboard a twin-hull yacht, certified seaworthy by Pete Rose and piloted by the former skipper of the Exxon Valdez.

Bon voyage.