Lowell Cohn: Add ‘cheater’ to list of words that applies to Maria Sharapova

It's easy to like Maria Sharapova. It was easy to like her.

Until Monday, when she held a news conference and admitted taking a substance banned in tennis, meldonium, which sounds like some crazy made-up compound you'd read about in Superman comics. But it's real and it got banned this year because, in mega-doses, it's a performance-enhancer. It's so unique - or strange - it's not approved in the United States.

Before her revelations - call them shocking revelations - Sharapova was high on the terrific-person list. She is a good sport. She's elegant, has that certain something. She's also the highest-paid woman athlete in the world. Which means she had a lot at stake.

So, she held a heartfelt news conference and admitted what she did. And if you watched her and heard her and thought about her coming clean, you might have told yourself, “That's Sharapova for you. She even shows class when she admits doing something bad.”

That certainly is one conclusion you could draw from her mea culpa moment. You could draw other conclusions.

For starters, she got the memo about meldonium being banned. That she admitted. It's just that she forgot to read it. Maybe she was overloaded with reading material at the time, was wading through Dickens and got stuck on “Bleak House,” and after that, she had assigned herself Joyce's “Finnegans Wake” and it might take the next decade to wrestle with that confounding text. And somehow she overlooked the memo.

I mean, really, do you believe that?

This is her career, a glorious career. She is a professional athlete who needs to guard her reputation, and if she's overwhelmed with reading material - she might be reading the complete Shakespeare including the sonnets - she has a team to watch her back. She probably has more advisers and agents and managers and gofers than you can comprehend. Certainly, one of them was in charge of drug awareness, of keeping up with the rules.

It sure seems like she was lying.

Bad look. Especially when someone pretends to come clean, to take the moral high road. Certain words apply to people like that. One of the nice ones is “phony.”

She said, “I take full responsibility.” They all say that. I am so sick of athletes saying I take full responsibility. As if that absolves them. And what are they taking responsibility for? If Sharapova lied about forgetting to read the memo, she's taking full responsibility for zilch.

And there's the matter of the news conference itself. She preempted the authorities by ratting out herself. Gutsy. Heroic.

Maybe.

You could look at it another way. She could get suspended up to four years for breaking the rules. She's 28. Four years is lots of years in what remains of her career. She's trying to get a lighter sentence. If she's smart - she is - she'll admit her wrongdoing, show she's courageous and honest (maybe), and appeal to people's pity to avoid a really long suspension. Get just a slap on the wrist of, say, a few months.

You could interpret her news conference as highly premeditated and strategic, Sharapova a real operator trying to leverage her situation the best way possible.

Let's be blunt. When Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire and Alex Rodriguez got caught red-handed taking performance enhancing drugs, the sports world treated them brutally. Well, most people did - some deluded fans think it's OK to take PEDs. Those baseball players have bad reputations and almost certainly never will get into the Hall of Fame. A brutal business losing your good name.

Why should tennis treat Sharapova any differently? Give her a light sentence because she's nice and held an emotional news conference? Mark McGwire is a nice man and no one - including me - gave him a break in the reputation or Hall of Fame Department.

Jennifer Capriati, who won the French and Australian Open titles, went on Twitter and eviscerated Sharapova. Capriati retired early from tennis because of injury. “I didn't have the high-priced team of (doctors) that found a way for me to cheat and get around the system and wait for science to catch up,” she tweeted.

She also pointed out on Twitter that meldonium is a drug for people with severe heart conditions, but Sharapova doesn't have a severe heart problem. She's a young, world-class athlete. Fishy to the max.

One ugly word applies to Sharapova. Cheater. No sugarcoating on this one. Cheater.

And I'll tell you something else. Never get emotionally attached to the athletes you follow. It's a loser's game. You identity with them. You relate to them. You admire them. You think you know them. Wrong.

You know what they do on the court or on the field and, often, what they do is admirable. But you don't know what they're taking in the locker room and you don't know how they act at home. You don't know the first thing about them.

Sharapova was a world-class good person until she revealed herself as just another garden-variety cheater.

For more on the world of sports in general and the Bay Area in particular, go to the Cohn Zohn at cohn.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Columnist Lowell Cohn at lowell.cohn@pressdemocrat.com.