Imagine a skinny, little 15-year-old boy from a suburb in Japan coming to the United States for the first time in his life. For summer vacation. It was his first time away from his mom and dad, and one of the first times he would even leave his hometown alone for an extended time.

He didn’t speak English, and would be staying with a family in California for a month, and going to a summer camp with American kids.

The boy encountered many culture shocks: what the heck is peanut butter? Why do these people eat that sugared-popcorn-snack-like thing in the morning? And with milk poured on it, no less! But the most jaw-dropping of all was witnessing major league baseball for the first time.

And it came in the form of the almighty 1989 Oakland Athletics.

He wasn't a crazy baseball fan (like he is now), but he liked his Japanese hometown team, the Chunichi Dragons. He had heard of the major league, but really didn't know much about it.

On the team, there was a skinny black man stealing bases like no other (that player’s name, the boy later found out, was Ricky Henderson). There was a scary-looking, un-hittable closer who "shuts the door" on the other team (Dennis Eckersley). There was this manager, people called him a genius, who seemed always seemed to know what would happen next (Tony LaRussa). But the crazed fans were really going nuts for the Bash Brothers, Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco.

McGwire was blond-haired, blue-eyed and broad-shouldered, looking like Superman and hitting the ball out of the park. Ditto for Canseco.

No matter how far behing their team ever was, they could change the game with a swing of their bats. It was exciting to watch them. They put fear in the eyes of opposing pitchers.

It was magic. It was out of this world. It was like a Hollywood movie or a sci-fi, super-hero comic book. The boy said to himself, "Wow, this is AMERICA."

That skinny kid was me, and this was my first encounter with major league baseball. Though I've changed my pledge to a Boston team since then (and I'm not so skinny and I eat that sugared-popcorn-snack-like thing for breakfast), it is not overstating it to say that my love and admiration for the game of major league baseball was formed that summer.

That's part of why it has been so heartbreaking to see now-admitted cheater Canseco ripping into his "brother" McGwire about steroid use in his book,"Juiced". And then to see McGwire, called before the US Congress to testify about steroid use in the major leagues, on advice of his attorney saying little more than: "I am not here to talk about the past.”

I feel cheated.

The little boy in me is saying, "Say it ain't so." The magic is gone. The superheroes were cheating.

They were, after all, not very "super." Between steroid use and the ridiculous money the players are making, though I still love the game and watch many games on the TV and from the bleachers, I do so as a cynical adult. My excitement and joy will never be as great as that pure "wow" I experienced 16 years ago.

One of the congressmen at the hearing said it. "Whether you like it or not, the professional athletes are role models to many children." Major League Baseball and its players owe it to the kids, like that kid from Japan, to clean up its act.

The size of professional football players has begun to raise eyebrows. According to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, more than half of National Football League players are, by federal standards, obese. Whatever the scientific conclusions, it’s become increasingly clear that coaches want linemen who tip the scales at 300 pounds or more.

If carrying so much weight isn’t dangerous to the players themselves, then it might be for those hit by or buried under these mastodons. Something may eventually have to be done to keep a lid on the corpulence, perhaps by creating a weight cap similar to a team’s salary cap.

A maximum roster weight limit would be set that no team could exceed. To keep under this cap, teams might have to juggle their rosters or enroll players in Weight Watchers.

Shortly after the NFL findings were released, the Associated Press said that nearly half the players in the National Basketball Association qualify as overweight. This may be splitting semantic hairs, though, because it’s really hard to be overweight, as most of think of it, and run up and down a basketball court the way NBA players do.

Rotisserie baseball: Does it come with skewers?

Did you know that Rotisserie League Baseball (alias fantasy baseball) is now defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary?

In case you ever wondered about the origin of this peculiar name, it stems from the birth of these stats-based leagues at La Rotisserie, a French restaurant in New York where the founding fathers of the first league launched the craze 25 years ago.

The definition of a Rotisserie league, by the way, is one that "consists of imaginary teams whose performance is based on the statistics of actual players." It’s probably safe to say that millions of valuable working hours have been lost to the US economy as a result of fantasy general managers checking last night’s box scores and making online trades.

The seven statistical categories used by Rotisserians: batting average, home runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, and, for pitchers: wins, saves, earned-run average, and something with the acronym WHIP, for walks plus hits per inning pitched.

Indoor track well off the beaten path

In a rather unlikely development, Boston’s Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center has become one of the chief venues for indoor track in the United States. The national indoor championships were held there last month, and a number of international Olympic athletes have competed there in recent years.

The facility is no Madison Square Garden. It has only 3,500 permanent seats and is situated in an inner-city neighborhood, not downtown. A multipurpose facility 35 years in the making, it is named not for a track star, but for basketball player Reggie Lewis, who played his college ball down the street at Northeastern University before being drafted by the Boston Celtics. Lewis died while captain of the Celtics in 1993.

Touching other bases, quickly

- Is there a more appealing, picturesque-sounding name for a college conference than the Big Sky Conference? As for the best-named sports event anywhere I'm partial to the Frozen Four, college hockey’s version of basketball’s Final Four.

* Alabama is my pick to surprise people in the men’s NCAA basketball tournament and possibly make it to the Final Four. Bama's got the balance and the athleticism that you need to make a run in the postseason.

* HP Hood, the Boston-based dairy that makes the official ice cream of the Boston Red Sox, has unveiled four new flavors: Fenway Fudge, Green Monster Mint, Comeback Caramel, and Peanut Butter Nation.

* Three cheers for the Ivy League. It’s the only conference left that still uses the regular season to determine which team gets an automatic berth in the NCAA basketball tournament.

* Boston College, a charter member of the Big East Conference, is moving on to the Atlantic Coast Conference next season. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to BC being in the ACC . To me, the ACC is all about Tobacco Road, the mid-Atlantic, and the Carolinas. By the same token, I’ve never felt comfortable about Penn State being in the Big Ten Conference. In my mind, Penn State will forever be an Eastern school. Check the map. University Park, Pa., is east of Buffalo.

* The basketball pennants are drooping these days in the state of Indiana, which was totally shut out of the men’s NCAA tournament, the first time that’s happened since 1972. There’s no IU, Purdue, Notre Dame, Ball State, Valparaiso, Indiana State, or Evansville. Ouch. Oh well, at least the women upheld their end of the bargain, by placing Notre Dame and Purdue in the NCAA draw, which, which ends with the Final Four in Indianapolis.

* Red Sox outfielder Johnny Damon hasn’t exactly popularized shoulder-length hair in baseball, but he sure has established a pop-culture identity with it. So much so, that the publisher of his new biography required that he remain unshorn for a book tour.

* The current world figure skating championships are finally back in Russia – after a 102-year absence. That’s right, the country that is a veritable superpower in the sport hasn’t hosted the world championships since 1903, when they were held in St. Petersburg, as they were in 1896.

* The NCAA hoop tournaments always test one’s grasp of the American collegiate landscape. If you know the locations of these schools, all in the men’s field, go to the top of the class: Pacific, Bucknell, Gonzaga, Winthrop, Creighton, and St. Mary’s. Give yourself one point each for naming the right state, and a bonus point for knowing the city. If you score 10 or higher, go to the head of geography class.

* Looking for an athlete of impeccable honesty and integrity? German long jumper Bianca Kappler may be just the role model for you. After winning the European Indoor Championship, she asked to exchange her gold for a silver medal. The reason? She was convinced the judges mismeasured her winning jump of 22 feet, 10 inches, which was about a foot better than her previous best.

* I did a double-take the other day when I saw a list of women’s college softball scores in the sports section agate. Softball in New England, with snow on the ground? No, an online check revealed that these were early-season games between northern teams played in Florida and other warmer climes.

Steroids: I'm totally opposed to them. And my personal belief is that there is not a single high-performance athlete left in the world who isn't either doing steroids, or who hasn't done them in the past.

That's the reason a few years ago I advocated that we just dump the Olympics altogether, since we can no longer be sure that the games aren't the biggest doped-up gathering since Woodstock.

Now baseball finds itself unable to shake the steroid boogeyman, and we all know that home-run hitters such as Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds will never be truly acknowledged as the greatest hitters who have ever lived. They may own the records, but those records will have a huge asterisk beside them, even if only in the minds of baseball fans (because baseball commisioner Bud Selig will never admit all those home run records are tainted.)

I find Barry Bonds' talk about the 'race card' whenever he is confronted with his performance-enhancing drug use truly offensive, especially when you consider the real racism great players like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron had to endure during their great, steroid-free careers. Bonds just sounds guiltier and guiltier day by day and I doubt that there is a single baseball fan in America (even if they like Bonds) who doesn't believe that Barry is a regular user.

But here's the problem. How do you convince kids not to do this?

Sure, baseball has initiated a steroids testing program, but the first offense is only a brief 10-game suspension. After the first couple of players are caught doing steriods, this punishment will become meaningless. At least if you get caught cheating by Olympic officials, you are suspended for two years.

And then there is the biggest advertisement of them all for steriod use - the governor of California.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, after all, has long admitted his steriod use, but has never really said it was wrong. He's rationalized it ("We were all doing it' or "It wasn't illegal then") and joked about it, but never said he is truly sorry for having done it and that it was basically cheating.

While the governor has called on bodybuilding officials to crack down on steroid use (now that he's not competing, of course), critics point to the fact that he refused to sign a bill last year that "would have created a list of banned substances for interscholastic sports and required coaches to take a course on performance-enhancing supplements." Schwarenegger said it was too "vague" about supplements.

The truth of it is that if Schwarzenegger hadn't done steroids, he would not be governor of California today. Steriods helped him win those seven Mr. Universe competitions, which led directly to his movie career, which led to his political career.

Now, if you're a kid in America, and you're looking at all the money made by people like Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds, or the political career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as opposed to those who say its 'bad' for you to take steriods, who might you be inclined to emulate?

That's why I'm worried that, as bad as the steriod problem seems today, we may only be looking at the tip of the iceberg.

The old black-and-white photos that recently accompanied obituaries for Army football great Glenn Davis were classic reminders of a much different time in college football. One shows a helmetless Davis, shod in black hightops, galloping along in an empty stadium (a photo op, no doubt) with an irrepressible smile on his face. Behind him, at the base of the upper deck are the words, “Buy US War Bonds.”

The picture juxtaposes athletic exuberance against wartime reality. It also harks back to the day when Army was unbeatable. The speedy Davis, “Mr. Outside,” teamed with fullback Doc Blanchard, “Mr. Inside,” as the Cadets went undefeated in 1944, ’45, and ’46.

If not for a scoreless tie against Notre Dame, which finished the season ranked No. 1, Army would have completed a three-year reign as national champions, topping the Associated Press poll, something no team has ever done.

Although perhaps only a small consolation to Davis, he did win the Heisman Trophy his senior season, this after having been the runner-up the two previous years.

As the obits have brought out, Davis was an amazing two-way player during an era of limited player substituion. As a halfback, he averaged 8.26 yards a carry, an NCAA mark never surpassed. He also passed, caught passes, returned kicks, and played safety on defense, where his 14 career interceptions are still a West Point record.

Davis served three years in the Army and petitioned to get out sooner so he could accept an offer from the San Francisco 49ers, but the brass turned him down. When he finally did enter the NFL, with the Los Angeles Rams, an injury ensured a short-lived career.

After dating Elizabeth Taylor, he married actress Terry Moore. His third wife, who survives him, is Yvonne Ameche Davis, who previously was married to another Heisman Trophy winner, the late Alan Ameche, who starred at the University of Wisconsin before playing for the Baltimore Colts.

Another skating star turn in Turin?

Something tells me that Sarah Hughes, the figure skating gold medalist at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, won’t defend her title next winter in Turin, Italy. She enrolled at Yale after her surprise Olympic triumph and now is taking an extended study break to perform on the 60-city Smucker’s Stars on Ice tour. She’s as graceful as ever, but her jumps look rusty and low-to-the-ice, maybe partly because she’s grown.

With a new scoring emphasis on sheer athleticism, it may be extremely difficult for Hughes to mount a successful title defense. Then, again, she’s still a teenager with a lot of spunk who just might be intrigued by the challenge of becoming the first American woman to win back-to-back Olympic crowns, and only the third woman of any nationality to repeat.

Norway’s Sonja Henie, who eventually moved to the US and became a Hollywood starlet , won Olympic titles in 1928, 1932, and 1936. East Germany’s Katrina Witt captured the gold in 1984 and 1988.

Bonds swings, but misses with steroid comments

Barry Bonds acts as if the media is on some sort of witch hunt when it comes to steroids. “All this stuff about supplements, protein shakes, whatever. Man, it’s not like this is the Olympics … we’re entertainers,” he’s been quoted as saying.

The issue, in his view, is that this is a big overreaction and that there are things a lot more serious demanding public attention. The point he seems to be missing is that sports, and professional sports in particular, are appealing only as long as the integrity of individual effort is maintained.

To borrow the old US Army recruiting slogan, “Be all that you can be,” only don’t look to unnatural means in pursuing your athletic potential.

Tennis where no players have gone before

Give Roger Federer and Andre Agassi credit for taking part in a gutsy tennis promotion that produced some of the most spectacular photographs of this or any other tennis season. The two traded shots on a court 700 feet above the ground. The court was set up a helipad, which juts out from the luxurious Burj Al Arab hotel in the United Arab Emirates.

The idea was to bring attention to the Dubai Duty Free Men’s Open. There was barely enough room for the court on the circular surface, and hardly anything in the way of restraints around the edge. “When you first get over how high you are and start playing, it’s an absolute joy,” Agassi said. “I had no issues with the height as long as I didn’t have to bungee jump off the side.”

Anniversary calls up Lake Placid memories

I really was at the “miracle on ice” hockey game at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. To be honest. though, I don’t remember that much about it, other than that it was intensely exciting and that there was plenty of cheering in the press box by American scribes after Mike Eruzione scored the goal heard ‘round the world – the one that gave the US its incredible upset of the Soviets.

A lot has been written about the drama of this game on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. Yes, it was special, but, believe it or not, several other things are just as memorable for me about those Olympics, the first I ever attended. Among them: finding a large fly buzzing around in my room upon checking into a modest lodge outside Lake Placid; the transportation crisis that made getting into town on a bus almost impossible at times; and watching Eric Heiden win the fifth of his speedskating gold medals from an open restroom window in Lake Placid High School. It was the only place left with a view of the track.