Steroids can help golfers. That's why testing's needed

	PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem needs to heed his best player's advice. Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images

For this week's SI, I wrote the opening essay in the Scorecard section, riffing on last week's confluence of the dead-ball tournament thrown by the Ohio Golf Association and Tiger Woods' stumping for testing on performance-enhancing drugs. I want to make a few more points that space didn't allow.

What made Woods' new public stance on steroids so noteworthy -- it was played on the front page of the Los Angeles Times -- is that the second-most powerful man in golf, PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, has very noisily said he sees no reason to test his squeaky-clean players. Finchem has made millionaires out of even the Tour's middling middle-class, and these loyal troops have largely adopted the commish's line of reasoning.

"We're self-policing out here," Fred Funk said at last month's British Open. "You're either good enough or you're not good enough. I don't think drugs will help you get better."

Here Funk manages to neatly tie together two central myths: that golfers never cheat -- never mind Vijay Singh's one-year suspension from the Asian tour in the 1980s for altering his scorecard -- and that the golf swing, built on flexibility and suppleness, won't benefit from 'roids. On the latter point, the example of baseball is illuminative.

It made sense that beefy power hitters were juicing, but more surprising was the evidence that implicated just as many pitchers, who wanted to add a few feet to their fastballs and speed their recovery time between starts. Steroid use in golf is counterintuitive, but so was the idea that a junk-ball middle reliever might be using.