HOLLANDER: Shock value is subject to the law of diminishing utility. After a sustained period, you almost no longer feel it. After that it becomes the norm. You become numb to it. 

Howard Stern can’t say anything shocking that he hasn’t already said and you haven’t already heard, nor can any of his imitators. Since Jerry Springer, what can TV do to weird us out much more than it already has? As a result of Watergate, we stopped trusting government to the point where today we expect government scandals. We’re not surprised when it happens. We just hope it isn’t that bad. We know that’s what politicians do. They cheat, lie, steal and cover-up. Corruption is the norm.

Sports held itself out as a form of sanctuary for some of us. In a world full of deeply flawed public leaders and pandemic cynicism, sports presented a cultural realm where you could see heroism performed right before your eyes, under the lights, captured by unflinching cameras and replayed in slow motion. Yes, we knew that pro sports was a business and that players were meat. North-Dallas Forty and Ball Four broke that ground. And sure, we knew that once in a while you’d have your 1919 Black Sox Scandal or a ’50s Jack Molinas college basketball point shaving scandal. But the athletic ability? That was real. 

You couldn’t fake Reggie Jackson’s three home runs in one World Series game against the Dodgers in 1977. You couldn’t manufacture Tom Seaver’s charismatic control with the ’69 Mets. And nobody could have scripted Joe Namath’s prediction and flawless leadership in Super Bowl VII. That was long ago in place far, far away. 

Today, organized sports have openly joined the ranks of the shameless. You should presume cheating. It’s invisible and commonplace. Disgraced former Tour de France champion Floyd Landis is astonished. He’s looking at us and saying “Hey, what’s all the fuss? We all do it.” He’s unconsciously using that famous but never successful speeding ticket defense: But officer, everyone else was speeding too. 

Landis suffers from classic denial. In the face of overwhelming evidence against him—physical and circumstantial—he insists on fighting the charge of using performance enhancing drugs. He’s even asked to make the hearings public. (I love that.) They say never go to a sausage factory because once you see how they’re made, you’ll never eat sausage again. 

Do we really want to know? Do we care anymore? If sports get stripped of its integrity, what’s left? 

SULLIVAN: You speak of sports integrity and I laugh. Babe Ruth’s hallowed 714 home runs were hit under an apartheid regime—No Colored Allowed. Tour de France bikers routinely pull and push other riders. Baseball pitchers throw spit balls. In 1951 the N.Y. Giants won a pennant by stealing the other teams pitch signs. Football linemen devise ingenious holding techniques. In the NBA they walk on most plays.

And in most sports the athletes take performance enhancing drugs and supplements. And they always did.

Namath could not have played without cortisone, and other less publicized substances. I’ll bet Seaver and Jackson (like Mike Schmidt who admitted it) had a bennie jar with ups in it to get them going. Was that cheating? How about Tommy John’s surgery that was not available a generation ago? Are the pitchers who get that and extend their careers cheating?

I don’t know, and I don’t really care. You look at sports with rose-colored glasses. It was never a sanctuary; it was always a world of denial. It is where you go to get away from the world. I really don’t care who is putting what into his body. That is up to the governing bodies of each sport to determine.

It is like not caring what athletes get paid. A-Rod makes more in one game than 85 percent of the people in America get as a yearly salary. Focus on that and you might go mad, so, instead, I stay with the game and ignore the nonsense afterward.

I really don’t care if athletes use drugs. You think my kids need some fat back knuckle head NBA player to be a role model? Charles Barkley was right—these fools shouldn’t be anyone’s role models.

I watch sports because they are fun and no one knows the outcome until the game/race/match is over. I don’t care or want to know anymore than that.

HOLLANDER: You’re right. We hold very different views of sports. I like sports for the human element. I like watching men and women pushing themselves to their physical, mental and emotional limits against other men and women doing the same thing where, in the final result, only one can emerge victorious. It is from maximizing the limits of ourselves that sports gives us transcendence. Transcendence is the only reason we embrace any art form. In sports, we (the audience and the athlete) transcend nothing with artificial aid. The greatest moments in sports come when an athlete goes beyond his limits on his own—not through synthetic augmentation, but by summoning one’s internal and perhaps heretofore untapped reserve of heroism, courage, heart, character, cool, cunning or guile. Hemingway called it “grace under pressure.” Apparently, these things do not exist in your world of sport.  

To you, sports are some kind of entities apart from us. It’s a result you passively ingest. Not for me. I believe every sport is bigger than any individual who plays it and bigger than any league that organizes it. Basketball does not belong to the NBA just like baseball does not belong to the MLB. If there were no leagues and no television the games would still go on and I’d still like them. I’d still play them, too.   

Call me an idealist. That’s fine with me. People, like you, may say that by seeking to disqualify a cycling Tour Champion for the first time is to unnecessarily show how dirty their sport is. I think they are showing integrity by openly cleaning up their sport, no matter what the cost. They value their sport’s integrity over merchandise sales, sponsorship revenue and television contracts.  

On the eve of the 2005 Tour, nine riders, including three favorites, were disqualified for being implicated in a Spain-based doping ring that has since extended to implicate 60 riders and coaches. Landis submitted to a urine test after his jaw-dropping State 17 solo comeback victory ride through the Alps. Three days after winning the Tour, we were notified that he tested positive for a high 11-1 ratio of testosterone, epistestosterone and synthetic testosterone. The accepted ration limit is 4-1. Most men have either a 1-1 or 2-1 ratio. A week later a back-up test confirmed the initial test.  

The case against Landis is overwhelming. He, like you, thinks he has done nothing wrong. You and Landis can have that world of sports. I will stick with mine.

SULLIVAN: Landis did what he thought he had to do, and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts Lance Armstrong did the same thing. Now he has to abide by whatever decision is made.

In your argument I guess referees are unnecessary. Just you and the hallowed athletes you so cravenly admire. I played every sport there is, and I enjoy watching them. But it ends there.

I never had a love affair with any individual. I like the sports. Humans do what they feel they must. You never answered my questions about cortisone and ups in the ’70s being used as a cheating tool.

You are right. I don’t care. If he is stripped of his title, so be it. They took Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals away because he had once played professional baseball. If you were alive back then you would have cheered that. 

Me, I don’t care. Does Barry Bonds use steroids? Maybe. He is a grown man and has the will to decide what he is going to do. If baseball has a problem let officials deal with it. I have no dog in that fight.