HANDS OFF GREG ANDERSON!

I admit that I don't know shit about point spreads.  I couldn't give you the odds on the NFL if my life depended on it.  I once had a boss who knew all that stuff.  He knew football, basketball and horseracing.  He knew so much that one time his bookmaker sent a couple of goons up to our company to hang him out the window by his heels until the Big Boss opened the safe and paid them to let him live.  When he retired they gave him his retirement pay in one lump sum, which he had to turn the whole amount over to his bookie.

Another sports expert I knew blows so much money betting football that he can't even keep a telephone in his house.  His wife left him even though she still loved him.

What qualifies me to write about sports is that I work out more in one week than most Americans work out in a year.  I haven't let my gym membership expire in 25 years.  Everybody I know I met in gyms.  I run, lift weights, box, practice Tae Kwon Do and kickboxing, you name it - anything to move and sweat.  Arnold Schwartznegger is my supreme hero and "Muscle And Fitness" is my bible.

Oh, I follow the New York teams, but it's hard for me to sit still and watch unless I'm drinking.  Like a lot of hard-core gym rats, I would rather be working out than watching somebody else play.

Every friend I've got I met in a gym.  If you don't play sports, fuck off.  I don't like fat people and I don't like skinny people.  Athletes have got the best values and they are the only people to have for friends.  Look at Greg Anderson.  He trained Barry Bonds, and Bonds is such a prick that it can't have been that memorable of an experience.  But it was a professional relationship, and when the feds started crawling all over Anderson about what he knew about Bonds, Anderson clammed up.

A personal trainer working in Greg Anderson's capacity for a professional athlete like Barry Bonds doesn't just stand there and count repetitions while Bonds does ab twists with a medicine ball.  He is fully engaged in designing a nutrition and training program for his client to get results.  Anderson intimately understood every muscle group in Bonds' body and how it got that way.  Greg Anderson knew more about Barry Bonds than Bonds' girlfriend or his mother.  But it was a confidential professional relationship that you don't discuss with anybody.  Just because some flatfoot investigator comes into the gym and demands that you spill your guts out or some venal, ambitious assistant U.S. Attorney drags you before a federal grand jury to betray your client's confidence does not mean that it is the right thing to do.

As far as I know, Anderson himself is not accused of doing anything illegal or unethical.  He simply is not willing to say what he knows about Bonds' behavior, which he feels is information imparted to him under terms of confidentiality.

Strictly speaking, under the law Anderson is not protected by the same guarantees of confidentiality that cover licensed attorneys or physicians.  But he is unwilling to betray that confidence and he has suffered immeasurably, spending years in jail for refusing to rat Bonds out.  Susan MacDougall also suffered the same way when the Republican congressional committees trying to dig up dirt on Clinton locked her up for years in solitary confinement, kept her in chains and let her sick husband die in jail, all because she refused to spill her guts to them about what she knew about the Clintons (not that she knew anything, but she refused to tell them anything).  So don't ask me why I hate Republicans, OK?

What do I care about Barry Bonds?  Quite aside from the fact that he stinks as a human being and that he ingested poison to enhance his athletic performance, he cheated other ball players and brought misery onto baseball.  Fuck the asterisk, I'd like to see the stupid ball pulverized by a steamroller.

But the feds don't have the physical evidence that is needed to convict Bonds in a court of law on drugs, only on  supposed perjury. And lacking that they are cheating the same way Bonds cheated, by bringing destruction upon innocent people who are only incidentally involved to try to get them to roll over on him.  If they can wring an admission out of Bonds that he cheated like they did with Marion Jones and strip him of his records so much the better, but not at the expense of honest people who work for a living.

If they can do this to Anderson and Susan Macdougall, they can do anything to anybody.  That's why we have constitutional guarantees in place, to protect us from tyrannical authority.  That's what America is supposed to be all about.

All I know is, if I find myself in a problematic situation, I hope I have a decent guy like Greg Anderson around to watch my back.

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Posted on 11/22/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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