"Five months later, there are questions as to, Why Doug Barron? Why was he tested at his only tour appearance of the year?"
Yesterday I noted Doug Barron's media mini-crusade and the ramifications for the PGA Tour in not responding. The talk continued today with a new piece filed by Tim Rosaforte, who addresses the miraculous coincidence that Barron, in a dispute with the tour over his condition, just happened to be tested the one week he got into a PGA Tour event.
Barron admits he did not tell the tour's testers in Memphis that he had taken a shot of testosterone two weeks before the tournament, but he says he did admit to being on Beta Blockers. "When I went in I didn't think it was a witch hunt. I thought I was being proactive," he said.
The St. Jude was his only PGA Tour event of the season, and he missed the cut. Five months later, there are questions as to, Why Doug Barron? Why was he tested at his only tour appearance of the year? But there are no simple answers. Meanwhile, Leslie wonders, "If one of the tour's top players tested positive, would they have zero tolerance for that?"
Rich Young, an attorney for the tour in the Barron case, said the tour wouldn't discriminate. "Once you get a positive test for a Beta Blocker or testosterone, you've got to go forward with it regardless of who it is," Young said. A tour spokesperson added that Barron was randomly selected for testing in Memphis.
This might be more believable if there was a transparent system tied to the drug testing. But as we know, positive tests for illegal stuff like marijuana remain private (you know, because it's not performance enhancing according to the tour).
Steve Elling touched on this earlier in the week:
Plenty of rumors have circulated this year about positive tests -- Barron's attorney offered no names or first-hand knowledge to support his claim -- but if the case continues in court, the tour could be asked to give an account. Earlier this season at the one-year anniversary of testing, tour commissioner Tim Finchem said that while no positive tests for steroids had turned up, he did not deny that players had tested positive for recreational drugs.
The tour has repeatedly declined to name those players and Finchem, in a jarring conflict of interest that has been decried several times, has complete latitude to dispense punishment for recreational-drug use as he sees fit. In other words, he can do next to nothing and nobody but the offending player would know the nature of the sanction. The tour has never announced fines for disciplinary actions, another frequent point of criticism.
Ironically the tour's credibility may be taking a from its own website coverage. They reported Barron's loss in court in a detail-rich 70-word story (that's almost Tweetable!), but the November archive page does not include a news report about his suit or request to play second stage of Q-school, prompting the AP's Doug Ferguson to Tweet:
And as I noted in not neutralizing this with some honest PGATour.com coverage or pushback to Barron's claims, questions like this from Rosaforte are going to keep Barron's story alive and well:
But now with Barron left out on an island, fending for himself, another familiar issue has been raised: Do tour players need a union? Some wonder if, at the end of this battle, the PGA Tour may wish it hadn't suspended Barron. They wonder if the Doug Barron case might not develop into a public relations debacle to rival the Casey Martin case.
And as with Martin, the tour may have underestimated the player in question. This is no John Daly.
Barron is resolute in taking this to the next legal level. Though he was denied the temporary restraining order, he and his legal team have taken enough positive signs from the ruling to believe they have a case. While he says tour commissioner Tim Finchem "couldn't have picked me out of a one-man lineup," he is decidedly more big picture than he is bitter.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 08:44 PM
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Reader Comments (25)
As the doctors on this blog have suggested, there are some fishy things about Barron's case. Low dose testosterone, to raise a low level to physiologic, is not unusual and should be granted a TUE, as the amounts used are highly unlikely to be "anabolic." I guess one can always argue the philosophical point that correcting low testosterone to remedy "low energy" is technicall "performance enhancing," but I think what we want to avoid in sports is blatant doping, not something medical that happens to have some degree of performance benefit. I mean, if you have heart disease and take nitrates to prevent heart attacks and angina, clearly that is "performance enhancing" in that it lessens your risk of keeling over on the backswing.
But the question of his beta blocker, and the "switch to Lyrica" is a little more nebulous. From what I gather from comments in other threads, perhaps the best explanation for this would be that he was using the beta blocker to combat tremors, which I think IS an example of a non-anabolic drug that should, in golf anyway, be banned as performance enhancing (treating yips). Whaddya'll think? But I also read that Barron or his lawyers said he used the beta blocker to treat symptoms of mitral valve prolapse (i.e., the tachycardia that can develop in this disease). This would qualify for a TUE, but since Lyrica isn't really therapy for tachycardia, it seems like Barron isn't telling the truth about the reason for using the beta blocker.
Interesting story.
Can somebody who is opposing the Tour in this case, explain in simple terms how it was in the Tour's self-interest to deny Barron his TUE, and to later suspend him when it became clear and irrefutable that he had defied a prior order?
Is it not the clearest and simplest explanation, that the Tour made a hard decision to enforce a principled rule based on a clearly established factual record?
This is like people who tell the cop that there is some drugs in the car. If you tell them, they will let you go, right? Wrong. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
That's one way of looking at it, anyway. To
But at this point to me the real issue is not "is Doug Barron guilty of an infraction"...
...but rather, "is there any integrity whatsoever to the PGA Tour drug testing system"??
I looked at the PGA Tour website to read up on the policy and there is a section called "Testing Protocol".
To me it looked like the key phrases in it were:
1 - the primary objective with its testing protocol is to have a credible process that...will deter the use of any prohibited substance.
2 - the TOUR has the authority to test players at any time or place. All testing will be without prior notice.
3 - There is not a stated minimum or maximum number of times a year that an individual player may be tested.
I didn't see anything in there whatsoever about it being "random" or any other guidelines about how a player is chosen for a test. Matter of fact, to me it sounds like they can test any player, anytime, for any reason...a "rumor" is sufficient..."we don't like you" is too...and no test at the front door of home on a Sunday morning because "oh we know he's snorting a lot of blow during off-weeks but we like him", well that works too.
Looks to me like Barron was fighting them behind the scenes one the TUE and they didn't like it. Tour probably thought "ok, he says he's tapering off that drug so we can't just turn up at his house and test him or we'll look like the KGB but god help that fool if he's dumb enought to show up and play in a regular PGA Tour event".
He does, boom, gotcha.
I'm on Barron's side but unless there's more detail that we are not privy to about how the selection process takes place then I think Barron has a problem. However, I too think the tour has a problem because this open-ended, heavy handed policy that has the potential to be applied EXTREMELY unevenly probably ends up getting changed...doesn't sound like there's a damn thing about it that is random.
On the flipside, I think the LPGA has a totally random policy/procedure that's applied evenly to all. Remember when Annika came off 18 after missing the cut in her last event and they said "excuse me, follow us on over here to the sampling center"... Personally I think she should have told them to pound sand, and a bit of an uproar ensued, but the LPGA's response was "hey, her number came up, and if the system is going to have integrity we had to test her".
Which system makes more sense and is more fair, the LPGA or the PGA Tour?
In addition, given all the money at stake these days, contrasted with some of the crap the tour has pulled over the years, I think they players are crazy to not form some sort of union to represent them.
All the details on the LPGA program here: http://www.lpga.com/content_1.aspx?pid=13555&mid=4
The LPGA has a random program that seems to primarily revolve around ransom testing in competition but there are certainly many many provisions for testing away from competition, or if certain behaviour/information makes them think they need to test an individual. The first link above is for a doc that includes 45-pages of info on the plan...
...the entirety of the PGA Tour plan detail will fit on 1-page, 2-pages tops.
This seems to be the primary LPGA testing selection protocol: "a. The Sample Collection Personnel shall, using the applicable tee time sheet for the Tournament and applying sequential numbers to the Players’ names listed, beginning at the top of the page/list, create a list of the names of Players to be Tested based upon the random selection previously conducted pursuant to Section D-1 above."
"Sorry you have this medical problem. But we have to keep an even playing field. Find another job."
Sure, the vast majority of the players probably think a union would be in their best interests...but would it be in Tiger and Phil's? And if not, what leverage would the union have?
If Tiger and Phil possess/aggregate that much power, and I'm not arguing that they don't, all the more reason for a players union!
I still don't think that it was necessarily a random test. I also don't think - or care - that even if it was not random that it matters at all.