Hey, I just heard that my old buddy Jose Canseco is going back in the slam down in south Florida. Seems Jose developed such an appetite for steroids during his playing days that he kept them on as part of his daily diet in retirement. Some people take calcium tablets. Jose eats anabolics. The only problem with that is that Jose has a rap sheet longer than one of Master P's limos, and when he came up dirty on one of his mandatory drug tests, the folks in the Dade County Corrections Department were not amused. They immediately outfitted him in one of those snappy orange jump suits, which he will continue to wear while living, as they say, at taxpayer expense.

Ok, so who cares? Who really gives a damn about another washed up jock junky? Well, I'm not going to tell you that 'I care', because somebody might get the wrong impression. But the fact is there's a point to be made, and by golly I'm going to make it.

A decade ago, Jose Canseco was one of the brightest stars in baseball. In south Florida, he was bigger than Julio Iglesias, and that, my friend, is muy grande. Sure, he smacked his wife around a little, and got pulled for driving his Jag 112 miles an hour; got in bar fights, and generally acted like the low-life scum that he was and is. But as long as his steroid-inflated arms kept pumping out home runs, he was 'da man'.

Of course, when it comes to being 'da man', nobody's ever been 'da man' like Michael Jordan. Didn't matter that he had a gambling habit that made Dick Bennett look like a nickle-dimer, the man could play some "mad rock", and so we turned him into Elvis in shorts.

Sammy Sosa gets caught with a corked bat, lies through his teeth and gets a standing "O" his next time at the plate. Sammy's contention that he didn't know the bat was corked would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic. From experience I can tell you that baseball players know their equiptment better than they know their children (which, come to think of it, may not be saying much). They can feel the weight and balance of a bat down to a fraction of an ounce. Sosa knew. He lied, and he's still 'da man'.

And so, here's the message to all you highly gifted but deeply flawed athletes who have the misfortune of being exposed for the dishonest, disingenuous or downright disgusting people you are: don't worry, baby, as long as you can still play, you still 'da man'.

That's the message that we as consumers send, and we should all be ashamed of ourselves.

John Buren