STEROID NATION:
TRACKING THE REVIVAL OF REPUTATIONS

One professor has examined tactics of busted users. What works?

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Was Giambi's tactic the best way to restoring a good name?

We don't really need a college professor to explain this fact: the reputations of the major league players linked to the BALCO scandals have suffered in the last few years. But as the fallout from baseball's steroids era settles, one of them has quantified how well those big leaguers are doing at restoring their reps.

Michel Haigh, an assistant professor at Penn State's College of Communications, looked through three years worth of press clips to determine whether the crisis response strategies that were used by big name players worked.

Here's what she found:

Denial was the most common and least effective tactic. Of 300 newspaper stories that Haigh reviewed on the man, Barry Bonds' denials were mentioned in 90 of them. "Yet all the stories had a negative tone," she says.

Evading responsibility is a favorite strategy for big business. (Try finding a Wall Street banker willing to take credit for the current economic mess.) But it backfired on the BALCO bunch. Rafael Palmiero blamed an Orioles teammate for causing him to fail a steroid test by giving him a contaminated B-12 shot. As a result, he got investigated by Congress for perjury (though never charged) and crept from the game unwanted.

Another tactic that bombed in MLB: Reducing Offensiveness. "When you reduce the degree of negative feelings toward the act," Haigh notes, "you reduce the negative feeling toward the actor." But as Congress pushed MLB officials, demanding a tougher drug testing policy and comparing steroids to crack, nobody tried to laugh steroids off as harmless.

Haigh concludes that the best strategies are the ones used by Jason Giambi: Mortification and Corrective Action. Says Haigh, "Giambi accepted responsibility for what he did and said he wouldn't do it again."

The only problem? "He never actually said what he did. And his apology might have been better received had it come before his grand jury testimony leaked out."

Overall, Haigh says that the big name players linked to BALCO are a textbook study in how not to handle a crisis. "I don't ever think they'll ever be able to repair their reputations," she said.

Then again, considering the lows some others have sunk to recently, maybe the professor is speaking too soon. Let's look at what happened in the Steroid Nation this week alone:

* Tim Montgomery, who fathered a son with Marion Jones and was once the fastest man in the world, admitted to a judge on Monday that he helped others get high by peddling heroin around his home in Newport Beach, Virginia. Montgomery was sentenced to five years in jail after he was busted selling 100 grams to an undercover DEA agent. But Montgomery won't be serving that time for a while. He's already doing four years for his role in the same check-kiting scheme that led Jones to jail.

* Jose Canseco also found himself standing before a judge this week. On Tuesday, the Juiced author was arraigned in San Diego, having been busted crossing the Mexican border with a drug used by hard-core steroid users to increase the size of their shrunken testicles. HCG, a controlled substance, is banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Canseco, meanwhile, has become such a toxic substance that one can only wonder whether the feds will still have the, uh, balls to use him in their perjury investigation of his former teammate, Roger Clemens.

* In Vienna, Bernhard Kohl, the best climber at this year's Tour de France and third overall, held a teary press conference in which he admitted to using Cera, a new version of the banned blood oxygen EPO. "I want to come clean," the tearful cyclist told a group reporters. Using a version of Haigh's mortification strategy, he added, "I fell to temptation. The pressure was incredibly strong. I'm only human and in this exceptional situation I showed weakness."

* An honorable mention goes to Lance Armstrong. While he's sucking all the air out of cycling with his return from three years of retirement, he's also kicking the Tour while it's down, suggesting he "may not" compete in it next year because it's not as pristine as he is. "Everybody knows its importance but the problems I have with the organizers, journalists and fans could be distracting for my mission‐to focus world attention on the battle against cancer."

You can say a lot about Barry Bonds. But given all that's gone on this week, I'm already thinking twice about him. So maybe Haigh's strategy of reducing offensiveness will wind up working after all. With the bar getting lower and lower, his chances of restoring his reputation look better and better.

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Shaun Assael is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. His book, Steroid Nation, is available here.

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