Ron Borges

We know Jim Thorpe was clean. We're sure Jesse Owens was, too.

Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb? If you exclude alcohol poisoning it seems safe to conclude they were clean as well. You can bet great sprinter Wilma Rudolph was clean as a hounds tooth. So were Gale Sayers and Satchel Paige.

But who, we wonder, was the last clean professional athlete? Not morally clean as in Mother Teresa, either. Who was the last guy running on regular instead of flying along on high-test?

By clean, of course, we mean performance-enhancing drugs.

When did it start, this slip into the abyss of chemical set as athletic star? Why did it become so important, these games they play for money? More importantly, when will it end? More and more, that answer seems to be never.

Jason Giambi. Barry Bonds. Floyd Landis. Marion Jones. Justin Gatlin.

Who’s next?

Androsteindione. Steroids. Human growth hormones. Inhumane growth hormones really. What’s next? What’s the next drug du jour?

Athletic achievement has become so obsessive that young men and women seem willing to put anything inside their bodies, at whatever the future risk, to put themselves into the record books and into the public eye.

So who were the last clean performers? How do we go about defining what that means in today’s sports world where everyone claims to be innocent regardless of what the urine or blood sample says. Even a guy who takes an eight-year suspension, which for the 24-year-old Gatlin effectively means an exile from the track world, continues to express bafflement at how he could have tested positive. Sports fans can’t believe anyone today.

One thinks of the great athletes of the 1970s and 1980s. What about the great Pittsburgh Steelers, Oakland Raiders or San Francisco 49ers? What of the Yankee teams known as the Bronx Zoo? Those were the days of uppers and painkillers, according to the biographies and autobiographies from that era’s players. Remember, speed may not be a drug that sculpts and athlete’s body into a work of art, but using amphetamines clearly started the decline.

Forget about the Olympic movement. By the 70s, East Germany was dominant thanks to its superior chemistry through athletes. East German athletes’ drug use has been well documented, leaving bitterness behind for people like Frank Shorter, the great U.S. marathoner who won one Olympic gold.

So there’s a guy. Frank Shorter. Maybe he was the last clean athlete.

Certainly Sandy Koufax, the great Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher of the 1960s was clean. If he wasn’t, he would have a way to the arthritis from ruining his left arm and could’ve prolonged his Hall of Fame career instead of retiring at age 30.

Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were certainly clean. One arguably the greatest all-around player and the other baseball’s home run king. We’ll leave Mays’ godson, Barry Bonds, to be judged in the courts of public opinion and legalities. Still, it’s doubtful many people really believe that Bonds set all those record-setting home runs without a little help from his druggist.

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We’d like to believe Bo Jackson, two-sport athlete  and Heisman Trophy winner, was clean, but who can say?

Jack Nicklaus is surely clean. That body wasn’t the result of performance-enhancing anything; his body of work was merely impressive.

NBA legends Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain were clean. Chamberlain was a seven-footer who was overpowering and incredibly strong — he once threw the shot put 53 feet — but never abnormal in size. Russell, the Celtics’ greatest winner, was never mistaken for a bodybuilder.

We will never know who the last great athlete clean was. Everyone is suspect. Just when you start to believe someone has performed an athletic feat, you read about their failed drug test days or weeks or months later. When you see so many mountainous men walking around in athletic uniforms but seldom find anything similar at the mall you wonder if it all can just be attributed to improved weight rooms and Met-Rx protein shakes. We think not. And so we grow ever more nostalgic.

And so, more and more, we look backward and wonder. Were Willie, Mickey and the Duke clean? Were Koufax and Drysdale?

Was Jim Brown? He was merely the greatest all-around athlete to ever live. And he did it all with his God-given talent plus his own work ethic.

Didn't he?

It’s depressing to think that the only athletes one can be certain of are Thorpe and Owens. They didn't have the stuff that men and women cheat with today. Beyond that, who knows what would have happened then or what's happening today?

Nobody knows, and maybe that’s the saddest part of all.