The mugbook is running out of pages for athletes who are less than they seemed, when great physical achievements are diminished by human weakness. The fault is theirs, of course, but ours, too, and maybe the cereal maker who puts them on the side of the box.

We perpetually wish that the breakfast of champions is not what it often turns out to be.

Those eight gold medals were carefully arranged for the photo of Michael Phelps. Nice picture. As we were reminded by Donald Rumsfeld, it is not the action but the pictures that matter.

And now the other one, the one where it looks like Phelps is swallowing a telescope, rather a device for inhaling marijuana, will not last as long, but it is more recent.

Barry Bonds faces trial soon and Michael Vick is about to be sprung, proving only that the door swings both ways. The brother, yes, the younger brother of Mark McGwire shops the story that McGwire himself won’t tell, about all of it. Roger Clemens? The muck hardens.
So why do we keep this up, those of us who still have the means to do it, glorifying strength and speed and hand-eye coordination? Caution always come later, and as in the case of the Steroid Decade in baseball, without enthusiasm.

We have let Kobe Bryant back in from his brief exile, a prize for being the best player in basketball, just as Michael Jordan was passed without real scrutiny into his gambling associations.
So, too, will this pass with Phelps, a young hero much over-prized and guilty of little more than having similar appetites of the young. There is no designated punishment for being a disappointment.
The list of Olympic champions is rife with vacated victories, some still fresh from Beijing, those who tested positive for performance enhancers, which, by the way, Phelps has not. There must be examples of swimming after pot but more likely nachos after pot.
It is not that Phelps’ indiscretion is a small corner of the very big picture, it is simply that he is not as represented, and that will be something his marketing folks will have to sort out.

As for Bonds, what has seemed endless almost to the point of piling on is about to reach a resolution. Bonds will be officially condemned or officially forgiven, though in the minds of the world there will always remain only the first one.

Bonds cannot get off any more than Tiger Woods can make us forget how brave and foolish competition can make a man. If Woods never plays golf again or can’t play it as Woods again, there will always be that Sunday in San Diego.
The moments that last, that seem pure and clean, are too few to lose, and so we guard them and scrapbook them and are all the more disappointed when they are soiled. We just never seem to learn to separate the feat from the character, or lack of it.

Bonds must now face an accounting, evidence being notes and recordings and whatever was gleaned from the raid of Bonds’ mother-in-law’s house, all to prove that Bonds lied, not exactly the central concern of the sport that passively allowed him to become the greatest home run hitter of all time.
What baseball wants, and what we want, too, what all sports want, is the promise of innocence, never more represented than in the sleek, shaved body of Phelps, in a sport that washes its heroes as it glorifies them, a sport watched once every four years, and only when a Phelps or a Mark Spitz is doing it.

I have passed through the home town of Super Bowl MVP Santonio Holmes, not the hell hole he described, Belle Glade, Florida. Just another collection of souls and strip malls, supporting agriculture, but no Walmart as he said.

I did not see a single dope seller on any corner, though I may not have passed the right corners, including the one on which Holmes himself confessed to selling drugs. Had it been the reverse, MVP first, drug dealing second, we would be as unforgiving as we are with Phelps.
Timing does matter, then, and the fall is always down, never up.
When Red Smith, then in his 70’s, was asked why he kept writing sports, he answered, “In case I meet another Joe DiMaggio.”

We must keep looking.