World Anti-Doping Agency head Dick Pound got his hooks into the PGA today. Our source is the UK's Times Online. Pound clubbed pro golf last year for lack of doping controls. He was sure to club the PGA when Gary Player chipped out the 'steroids in golf' story last week.
The PGA has resisted any acknowledgement that there may be a problem,” Pound said. “We would be happy to sit down and help golf come together with a significant and robust programme. I have said [to the PGA], ‘Look, this is your opportunity to lead, not to be forced to follow, so get on with it. The time is now. “ ‘You should do this while you still have the initiative, rather than being forced into it as the result of a scandal. Then you are going to have the whole of golf regarded with suspicion. Do it now before there’s a big public problem.’ ” The tardiness of the PGA to respond to drugs-testing is in contrast to the European Tour, which is to start testing in the new year.
Last Pound drove into the PGA without a particular source. Now he can point to an ally with stature in Player:
Pound said that his “suspicion” was that there are professional golfers who are using drugs. “Gary Player says he knows, so that’s fairly powerful medicine from somebody who has only the integrity of the game at heart,” he said.
“It comes from one of the icons of golf who has no particular axe to grind other than to try to maintain the integrity of the sport. It’s a wake-up call that has not come in such stark terms to date from the golf community.”
Professional athletes in the USA appear to be loathe to let Dick Pound and WADA lay a glove on them. Perhaps Pound sees this as a way to penetrate the American pro scene.
Asked what he had been told to arouse his suspicions, Pound said: “Some say they know, others say they strongly suspect, but it’s really not the point.”
I know Dick Pound is or has stepped down from WADA, but let me tell a brief story about the hypocrit and power broker. In 1996, during the Olympics in Atlanta, Dick was the VP of the IOC, under the biggest IOC crook ever, Juan Antonio Samaranch. One evening in Buckhead during the Centennial games, Dick's wife was belligerent and drunk and jaywalking across Peachtree St, when she got detained by the police. She subsequently got arrested for a couple charges, public Intox, resisting arrest, and there was a third, related charge. This case never came to adjudication. In fact, it has been somehow wiped off of Atlanta Police records. Completely. I know this goes back several years now, and we're not talking any serious crimes here, but this is one more example of the influence peddler that is Dick Pound. From my memories of the bribes the IOC took when he was the VP, and why he DID NOT get voted to the President of the IOC, it is easy to see that he was as crooked as anybody in the Olympic movement has ever been.
Posted by: Scott | 11/24/2007 at 07:06