Jim Souhan: Cheaters, above all, defined 2007

The Sports Stories of the Year in 2007 included O.J. continuing to act insane, Pacman making it rain, Michael Vick inflicting pain, Bill Belichick's Big Brain, baseball's drug-testing credibility going down the drain, and the Red Sox's reign.

We can view 2007 as the year Adrian Peterson arrived, or Torii Hunter left. The year Belichick tried to win 'em all, or Tony Dungy won the big one. Or the year Minnesota's lax immigration policies allowed their best athletes to cross the border to Boston.

Really, though, wasn't it The Year of the Cheater?

The Patriots might be the story of 2007, and their primary motivation for not just winning but obliterating their opponents has been proving that Belichick's spying tactics were not the reason behind their three Super Bowl victories.

If the story of the year isn't the Patriots, then it's baseball's release of the Mitchell Report, which made Roger Clemens a bookend to Barry Bonds among legendary ballplayers thought to have used performance-enhancing drugs.

Cyclist Floyd Landis lost his appeal after being stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title for blood doping, and track star Marion Jones, after years of passionate denials, finally came clean and admitted her usage of steroids. Legendary golfer Gary Player said he suspected current golfers of using performance-enhancing drugs. Even tennis faced a match-fixing scandal.

Because baseball fans care more about history and statistics than fans of any other sport, the Mitchell Report created the largest ripples. Baseball fans, more than any others, want to believe their Boys of Summer are clean-living historians who will defend to the death the sanctity of their record book, the Baseball Encyclopedia and the Hall of Fame.

Baseball players are professional athletes. This means they are prone to cheating, like all other professional athletes.

We hold baseball players to a higher standard because we care more about baseball's records, and because baseball has featured the most easily identifiable cheaters.

As we watched Mark McGwire's biceps and Barry Bonds' head grow, we compared them not just to each other but against Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Roger Maris.

If you can put your naïveté aside, though, you have to realize that the modern-day ballplayer had every incentive to cheat. We are a carrot-and-stick society. We reward the best athletes with millions of dollars and adoration. We jeer failed athletes as if they were criminals.

McGwire was a productive slugger who became a record-breaker and an icon, a transition suspected to have been propelled by steroid use. Before he lost face with his performance in front of Congress, he gained fame and riches.

We all know that peer pressure is more powerful than the letter of the law. We all know that without the threat of tickets, the average speed on the highway would be 85. We all know that without the threat of the IRS, few people would pay their full share of taxes.

Deterrence is the key, not the assumption of ethical behavior. All of the major sports that want to be taken seriously should spend a grotesque amount of money to enlist a powerful and independent testing agency and begin rigorous, unscheduled testing tied to career-damaging penalties.

Making the process independent and unscheduled will let us know that it has a chance to be effective. Making it grotesquely expensive will let us know that the sports are serious.

No testing process will catch all of the cheaters, but independent testing tied to draconian penalties can provide the meaningful deterrence that has been missing in our most popular sports.