Evidence of a Mitchell Report Cover-Up

This post actually has very little to do with the Mitchell Report itself, but (a) it was an astounding coincidence that the event discussed herein happened the very week that the Report was released, and (b) I figure that I can increase readership if I pretend to be talking about hot-button sports yak topics.

A yearly pre-Decemberween class activity that I’ve developed is an investigation of pseudoscience and urban legends. I present the students with a twenty statement true-false “quiz,” including things like “A duck’s quack can not echo” and “When a city’s professional football team plays a home game, wife beating incidences in that city rise dramatically.”[1] Rather than grade the quiz, I ask the students to choose a statement they think is true, and to check it out. Some of the statements are shown to be false with a quick link to snopes.com or straightdope.com; others require more detailed research, or are in fact true. The whole point is that after this exercise, my students are (hopefully) less inclined to believe everything that some guy in the pub tells them.

For years I included on the quiz the myth that Mountain Dew will shrink your[2] testicles. It was amazing how many of my students believed this one, and only because a friend had told them so.[3] But as steroids and baseball became increasingly linked, and especially once the famous commercial came out, I changed this entry on the quiz to “Taking steroids will shrink your testicles.” This claim draws strong interest from my class, probably since my students are all boys and mostly athletes.

This year Dennis, a particularly strong student, investigated this claim. He quickly found evidence from reliable sources, but he wanted to go further. Sure, he had quotations from prominent doctors and medical researchers that steroids can in fact shrink testicles; but he knew that a thorough investigation would include the biological evidence behind the researchers’ statements. He went looking for the physical or chemical mechanism behind testicle shrinkage. But here’s where the vast Mitchell Report Cover-Up kicked in.

Every site Dennis tried to use was blocked by a pornography filter.

[1] This latter statement is a classic example of a media frenzy based on pseudoscientific “research.” Back in the early 1990s, an idiot crunched the numbers of referrals to a D.C.-area battered women’s shelter. The shelter saw an average of about two women per day over one entire month; but on the one day that month that the Redskins played, the shelter admitted three women. Therefore, the idiot concluded (and major media outlets repeated), professional football causes a 50% increase in wife-beating. The Nachoman is not kidding – check it out.

[2] Sorry, not your personal testicles, especially if you don’t have any. I guess I should rephrase.

[3] This myth was so widespread that for a while a number of teenagers claimed to be using Mountain Dew as a contraceptive, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and addressed by Pepsico public relations officials. Really… google “Mountain Dew Contraceptive” to find a few gems on this topic, such as the Orange County, Florida Health Department responding to the frequently(!) asked question “If you drink Mountain Dew after sex, can you still get pregnant?”