All weekend long, as I read the stories about baseball slugger Jose Canseco's new book, 'Juiced,' about his and others use of steroids, I found myself thinking of a song by that great British rock band, The Who.

The Song? "Won't get fooled again"

And I don't mean getting fooled by Canseco. I believe what he has to say about the rampant use of steriods by major league baseball players. The same with Kimberly Bell, the former mistress of San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds, who alleges that Bond told her he started using steroids in 1999.

No, I'm not going to get fooled by that group of players and sportswriters who want to ignore the elephant in the living room. The group that desperately wants us to believe there is no drug problem in baseball. Or sports in general. The group that knows almost every modern record in baseball is a sham, and fears the consequences of admitting that out loud.

The group that wants us to believe that Canseco is just jealous and broke, or that Ms. Bell is out for revenge. All that may be true. But it doesn't change by one iota the fact that this group has its collective heads buried so far in the sand, they may be seeing the earth's core by now.

The other reason I won't get fooled again is Ben Johnson.

It was 1988, and Johnson was Canada's idol. He was the fastest man in the world and we knew he was going to win the 100 meter sprint at the Soeul Olympics and forever silence the "chatter" from American sprinter Carl Lewis, who had all but said that Johnson was cheating.

The race was run early one Saturday September morning, and I can remember being woken up by the sound of people driving around the streets of Halifax, Nova Scotia honking their horns. Although I hadn't stayed up to see the race, I knew exactly what had happened.

Johnson had won.

For two days, we ruled the world. The fact that a Canadian was the fastest human on the planet was astounding to all of us. We revelled in it. If Canada had not won a single other medal during the entire games, it would not have mattered a bit. We had the big one.

The first signs of trouble came on the third day, when journalists began to report on rumors that a major track and field star had failed a drug test. No one said it outloud, but doubt began to creep into our hearts. Then came the press conference that shattered that smug feeling of winning we had all been nursing.

It was Johnson. At first, none of us believed it. We were sure that the drug testing was wrong, that someone had deliberately tainted Johnson's sample, that the samples had gotten mixed up. We were willing to look at any possibility but the truth.

Worst of all, was the realization that Lewis had been right all along. Johnson had cheated, and because we had all believed in him so fervently, it was like we had cheated too.

It's all history now. Johnson had used steroids. He was stripped of his medal. The Canadian government held a sweeping inquiry, where Johnson's coach, Charlies Francis told how he had helped the runner beat for the system for several years, as well as other athletes on other nations' teams, although those names he didn't name. The only reason Johnson had been caught was that he panicked, and gave himself one more injection of steroids before the 100 meters in Soeul than Francis had planned for him.

Since then there have been too many stories and allegations about steriod use to count. Baseball, football, soccer, the Tour de France, almost every Olympic sport you can think of (except for curling, perhaps).

And why should we be surprised? We've made winning the most important thing of all, particularly in this society. Just competing for the love of a sport is for chumps. And chumps don't get Nike contracts, or asked to appear on Letterman, or featured on ESPN Sports Center, or see their faces on Wheaties boxes.

A few years ago, I interviewed Jaci VanHeest, who spent five years as director of exercise physiology for the US swim team, about steroid use.

"American society expects American athletes to always win," VanHeest says. "It's 'Winning is not something we want to do, it's something we must do.' And it's not just in the US that this is happening. Canada is coming around to be more and more like the US."

It's my guess that many sportswriters don't like writing about all this cheating because it's too close to where they live. No one wants to admit that their best work has been little more than chronicling the exploits of a bunch of cheaters.

I wish I could be more optimistic about this latest round of revelations about sterioid use. But athletes, their coaches and their chemists are like those good folks who think up computer viruses - always one step ahead of the people dedicated to stopping them. Anabolic steroids today, human growth hormones, blood doping, THG and who knows what else tomorrow.

Let me finish with what I consider the scariest fact of all. A few years ago top young athletes were asked the following question: If you could become the top athlete in your field using illegal performance enhancing drugs, but it meant that you would die by the time you were 30, would you do it?

A majority of them answered yes.

I have always loved baseball. I have not, however, always loved the Boston Red Sox.

Yet, when I consider the past, I must admit the Red Sox have lingered at the edges of my baseball passion, like a wolf, waiting for a chance to strike. And when I moved to Boston from Nova Scotia in 1994, it was only a matter of time before I surrendered to the Old Towne team.

I grew up (the horror! the horror!) a Yankees fan. My dad was a Yankees fan. The first movie I ever saw, in the old Paramount Cinema in downtown Truro, Nova Scotia, was 1962's "Safe at Home," a story about a Little Leaguer who runs away to join Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris at spring training. I cried when Yankees' first baseman Joe Pepitone lost the ball in a sea of white shirts during the '63 World Series with the Dodgers. When Yankee Bucky Dent hit that famous (or infamous) home run in the '78 playoff game at Fenway Park, I was estatic. I subjected my best friend, Larry Lee, a diehard Sox fan, to weeks of torment, finding a way to bring Dent's name in to every conversation we had.

I'm not sure if I can pin down the exact moment when the Yankees began to fade from my esteem, but it was the actions of George Steinbrenner that ultimately drove a spike in the heart of my love for the Bronx Bombers. Steinbrenner turned the Yankees into a joke in my eyes. I found that I could not cheer for a team that was under his control. But it wasn't as if I suddenly switched to the Sox. I had been a Yankees fan for years. How could I like the Red Sox?

But then events began to take on a life of their own.

Nova Scotia had always had a large base of Red Sox fans. My best friend Larry, for instance. My Mom. Lots of my friends at work. Red Sox talk was always in the air. Then, in the mid-80s, an event occurred that created my first connection to the team.

For years, ever since the introduction of cable-TV in Nova Scotia in the early '70s, we had received the American channels from Maine. I grew up with the likes of Eddie Driscoll, and Dick Stacey's Country Jamboree (which college students in Nova Scotia considered required viewing, on a par with Saturday Night Live, because it was so bad it was hilarious), and of course, Red Sox baseball.

Then the cable-TV owners in Nova Scotia announced they were dumping the Maine channels for stations from Detroit, in a move to cut costs. (The Detroit channels could be picked up via less expensive satellites instead of the more expensive Maine channels, transmitted via microwave.) And in a way seldom seen before or since, Nova Scotians rose up in anger as one and said, "No way, eh!" Leading the charge were Nova Scotia members of Red Sox nation. Several of them wrote to me (I was a columnist at a paper in Nova Scotia) and asked me to help them. And so I, and a couple of other local columnists, started to write about the Maine connection.

What in heaven's name do we have common with Detroit, I wrote? Nothing. On the other hand, New England is like Nova Scotia South, only with more people, who tend to be ruder than Canadians. Also, nobody wanted to watch the Detroit Tigers. Nova Scotians did, however, want to watch the Red Sox. My fellow columnists and I waged an unrelenting battle against the Detroit channels. Newspapers in Maine wrote about us like we were heroes. In the end, a compromise was reached. Two Detroit channels would replace two Maine channels, but two Maine channels would be kept, including the one that broadcast Red Sox games.

Since I had fought so hard to save the Red Sox channel, I actually started to watch it. Then in 1991, when I came to Boston for a year on a journalism fellowship, I went to my first game at Fenway. I did not have a religious experience. The seats were small, the food expensive, it was April and it was freezing, and the park had an unpleasant odor.

But the fans! I had never seen people so involved in a game. I thought Canadians could get passionate about hockey. But nobody, nobody, can hold a candle to a Red Sox fan in Fenway Park.

When I moved to Boston three years later, the changeover was complete. I had gone from rooting for a team that was a World Series dynasty, to a team that hadn't won a World Series in 76 years (as you know, we've added 10 years to that total since then).

There have been moments when I have wondered about my decision, like last year after the seventh game of the American League finals. I detest the endless misery of the Boston sport media, and their ability to turn any silk purse into a sow's ear. (New manager Terry Francona has managed exactly one game for the Red Sox, and already he has been written off by the "fellowship of the miserable" as they are known.) And I'm tired of hearing about 'The Curse,' because I just don't believe in such foolishness.

But it's too late. I'm hooked. When you live in Red Sox nation, you're either a fan, or you're a foreigner. My children are Red Sox fans. My 6 year-old daughter happily sits in the back of my minivan chanting, "Red Sox rule, Yankees drool" (which, I would like to add, I did not teach her). I stay up late to watch games on the West Coast. I worry about Pedro's velocity, and whether we can sign Nomar, and of course, how we can beat the Yankees.

What a long strange trip it's been. And this will be the year, just you wait and see ... .

It was a cool September night that I remember well. The 1988 Seoul Olympics had been building to a grand finale - the 100 meters showdown between Canada's Ben Johnson and US legend Carl Lewis. The actual race was held around 2 or 3 in the morning my time, so I didn't see it. But a few minutes after Johnson beat Lewis, I was awoken by the sounds of people driving around downtown Halifax honking their horns in celebration, a very unCanadian thing to do.

So you can only imagine the overwhelming shock a few days later when we discovered that Ben Johnson had cheated. His urine sample showed signs of an anabolic steroid. For days we didn't want to believe it. Someone had switched the urine samples in order to rob Johnson and Canada (Those nasty Americans, we all thought.) But slowly it dawned on us that our hero was a fraud.

Years later, a British sprinter who also ran in that race, Linford Christie, was nabbed for steroid use. When Christie won the '92 gold medal in the 100 meters, he was the oldest runner ever to do so. In 1999 he was suspended from track and field after testing positive for the steroid nandroline, but was later cleared in a decision many saw as controversial.

Over the years, most sports have turned a blind eye to the obvious illegal use of steriods and other such substances. Questions and accusations dogged the late woman sprinter Florence Joyner (FloJo), who went from being the 4th fastest women on the American team to the fastest woman in the world in a very short period of time. She won three gold medals, and set numerous world records, in Seoul. Accusations have circled around cyclist Lance Armstrong, although he adamantly denies using any performance-enhancing drugs. Swimmers also have been suspected for years of cheating this way - we know athletes from Soviet bloc countries of the 70s and 80s used them with regularity.

But nowhere have they been so obviously used, and the use so tolerated, than in baseball in the United States.

In the past decade, players who hit maybe 10 home runs a year and maintained a .250 batting average were suddenly hitting 30, 40 and 50 homers in a season, and battling .325. In the space of a few months men with average builds suddenly looked like Hercules.

Home run records fell like leaves in the autumn. But the sport of baseball didn't want to acknowledge the fact that most of these home runs were being hit with a little "help," even when (as in the case of St. Louis slugger Mark MacGwire) players admitted to using substances like androstenedione, which was banned at the time by the NFL, the NCAA, and the IOC. But not by Major League Baseball.

In a sense, what was happening in baseball, the sport I love the most, reflected the dark side of capitalism, particularly the variety practiced in the US – money and winning matter above everything else, including your body, your family, your sport, your fans, your community, and most importantly, your integrity.

These days, fueled by celebrity and commercial endorsements, many baseball players lie and cheat like con men running a scam. Now the San Francisco Chronicle has run a story that we all knew was coming after the government charged several people with supplying illegal steroids to "unnamed" athletes, including several baseball stars. According to a piece in Monday's Chronicle, federal investigators have been told that San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds, New York Yankees stars Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield, and three other major-league baseball players, received steroids from a nutritional supplement lab known as BALCO.

All of those ballplayers named have denied they used steroids. Strangely enough, some people even defend using steroids. Montreal Expos manager Frank Robinson, one of baseball's greatest players, says "what you're doing is taking advantage, not cheating." (I'm sure the people who ran Enron and Global Crossing at first gave exactly the same rationalizations about their actions.)

With all due respect to Mr. Robinson, cheating is cheating. And using steroids is cheating. When I talk to my children about why its wrong to cheat, I don't tell them "But here are a few ways you can shave the odds in your favor." Or, "Let's talk about how you can get an 'advantage' by sneaking that calculator into your math test." I tell them it's wrong to cheat, period. End of discussion. And that if you do cheat, you will almost always get caught in the end.

So what do we do as fans of the game? Well, if baseball executives and the baseball union refuse to address the problem in a serious manner (their current positions), then maybe we fans can. I like the suggestion of my friend and fellow Monitor blogger Jim Bencivenga. Everytime one of these players come to the plate, fans should stand and turn their backs to the field. Such a public display of disgust at their actions might finally force owners and players to take much more concrete steps to deal with this issue.

Otherwise, baseball will become like cycling, or track and field, or swimming, or the entire Olympics games - sporting venues where we believe more than a few athletes are cheating, even if we can't prove it.

Something not really worth watching. And for fans, that's the real consequence of cheating.

It seems that Rush Limbaugh has decided to throw in the towel, and is leaving ESPN. Phil Sheridan of the Philly Inquirer makes an interesting point about Limbaugh's "comfort zone."

Here's your mistake, Rush. You stepped out of your radio comfort zone, where "Dittoheads" either echo your twisted view of America or you can cut them off. You stepped into a place where your bluff - and that's all it ever has been - is easily called.

It is amusing to consider that once out in the open, where he didn't have his hand on the button to cut people off, Limbaugh couldn't take the heat. I'm pretty surprised, to tell you the truth. I really thought he was made of tougher stuff.

It's unusual to have two postings in a row about sports, but I felt compelled to comment after Rush Limbaugh's, well, stupid remarks about Philadelphia Eagle's quaterback Donovan McNabb. In his new role as analyst on ESPN Sunday NFL Countdown, he pulled out that old canard, the "liberal media" argument, to explain why McNabb was overrated, in his view.

"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well, black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."

Say what? Look, I've been a Limbaugh fan for a few years. I may not agree with much he says, but I respect his wit, his energy and the way he does his show. But what bothers me a great deal about the McNabb remark, is that it shows me just how narrow his view of the world has become. It's obvious to me now that he is unable to remove himself from this weltanschuuang that sees EVERYTHING in terms of right versus left. (Thank goodness Limbaugh wasn't around when Jackie Robinson was breaking into baseball, or Jesse Owens was running in the Olympics.) If Limbaugh really and truly believes that "liberal media" are pampering black quarterbacks, then I don't know what sports section he has been reading, but it can't be an American one.

It also gives you the impression that he knows very little about the history of black quarterbacks in the NFL. Once it was true that black quarterbacks had a very difficult time because of the color of their skin. But that was 15-20 years ago. These days, the NFL is overwhelmingly manned by African-Americans, and there are many, very good black quarterbacks. And some bad ones as well. (Now if you want to get into racial issues, let's talk about the lack of black coaches in the NFL when so many good ones are available.)

What also bothers me about this incident is the way ESPN basically refused to deal with it. As USAToday TV sport writer Rudy Martze noted, you have to wonder just how out-of-touch the network is.

I read a report last week that said Americans prefer baseball over football by a 2-1 margin. And while I was writing Daily Update Tuesday, I found a Reuters story that described US soldiers trying to teach football to Iraqi children.

Football ... just not my cup of tea. Football is too, well, thick. Too cludgy, muscle bound and dense. And although I was brought up in Canada, my passion for hockey has passed away. (I even lived in Windsor, Nova Scotia, where hockey was "invented," but it just seems boring to me now.) I am, however, a huge baseball fan. I love the sport.

Baseball is THE American sport to me. Always will be. As the James Earl Jones speech in "Field of Dreams" suggests, baseball and America are joined at the hip. I've played sports my entire life, even won a few trophies in my younger days. But when I think of the memories that mean the most to me, the moments that just fill me with happiness, all of them come from when I played baseball. And there is no finer feeling in the world than playing baseball on a sunny, summer afternoon, even if it's just a pick up game with a few friends.

The 20th century is filled with baseball names, some of whom not only changed baseball, but society itself. Baseball was for a time when we seemed more contemplative, when life moved at a slower pace, when we were more open to possibilities. When memories were more solid. I can still recall "Mudcat" Grant (what a great name) pitching in the '65 World Series; watching Bob Gibson, one of the greatest pitchers to play the game, hit a home run in game 7 of the '67 series in Boston; smuggling a radio into school to listen to the Tigers-Cardinals '68 series; marvelling at the Miracle Mets of '69.

Over the years, baseball seemed to change as we did, sometimes not always for the best. Maybe that's why we like football now. Football is so finite, so ephermeral, so forgotten in the next moment. (Can you remember who won the last five Super Bowls - a misnamed event if one ever existed?) Perfect for the early 21 century when we sometimes don't want to remember what happened the day before.

The one advantage that football has over baseball is that the folks who run football seem to know what they are doing. Meanwhile, the folks who run baseball don't seem to have two clues to rub together. Wouldn't be the first time bad management so damaged a sport that it didn't recover. I just hope baseball isn't the next victim of this situation.