How refreshing was it to finally hear someone take a rap and apologise instead of getting their publicist/agent/mother to issue a standard vanilla denial.
Step up Shawne Merriman. Take a caning for having relied upon steroids to boost your God-given talents. Then take a bow for having had the courage to admit a mistake.
Woah. Woah, there boy. Woah. We got to back this baby up.
For a minute there I thought we’d hit character paydirt … Seems not.
After the Chargers’ second-year pro bowl linebacker, Merriman, was hit with a four game suspension ruling him out of a quarter of San Diego’s season he said he wanted to take responsibility for what happened, and then did the exact opposite.
So, Merriman joins the long line of cheats who didn’t do it. Are they all guilty? Probably not all. But equally they ain’t all innocent either.
For just a moment I thought Merriman was at least different; seems he’s not.
He resolved to appeal any suspension telling ESPN: “Hopefully nobody makes any kind of judgement or anything that basically makes me guilty for anything because nothing has been done wrong on my part.”
Then he had his lawyer trot out the obligatory plausible excuse, having David Cornwell blame the detection of nandrolone on its presence as an unnamed ingredient in one of Merriman’s supplements.
Then Cornwell adopted tactic number #2 (seek to deflect and defuse) by stating this was a wider issue of ‘tainted supplements’.
Cornwell said nandrolone “is the primary culprit in tainted supplements. I know that people get tired of hearing it, but it is a fact and it is not going to go away until the Congress of the United States deals with it.”
Unregulated supplements may well be an issue for Congress, but until they get a lot higher up the US Government’s To Do list perhaps millionaire sports stars had best avoid them.
That way people like Merriman will not – as his lawyer put it – “unwittingly (play) Russian roulette with his career”.
That way the sports fans will see true talents knocking seven bells out of each other in a fair contest to excel.
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