As everyone knows, home runs hitters represent an inordinate number of Major League Baseball players suspended for using performance-enhancing drugs. That was why Melky Cabrera‘s 50-game suspension for testing positive for testosterone resurrected images of Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and the other “dirty” sluggers of the steroid era.
It is also common knowledge that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team and that until LeBron James came along, there was parity throughout the NBA and a few stars did not all congregate on the same team.
Everyone knows these things, and yet none of these things are true.
What sports fans think they know and what really happened do not always jibe. That is why fans focus on homers when they discuss steroids, guzzle Gatorade on a hot day and scream at their televisions whenever their team’s football coach goes for it on fourth down. By now these truths have become self-evident, even if they are not exactly truths.
