Bechler Put Face on One More Ill

There had been more than 150 deaths.

Steve Bechler had pitched in three Major League games.

There had been more than 16,000 “adverse incident reports.”

Steve Bechler had pitched fewer than five Major League innings.

The sucker punch of ephedra had long since struck doctors and housewives and children, leaving welts on every economic bracket, bruising every ethnic group.

Yet it wasn’t disarmed until it killed a baseball player.

The Bush administration announced Tuesday that it was banning the sale of ephedra, a weight-loss supplement known for its fatal side effects.

It is no coincidence that, 10 months earlier, a member of Washington’s “hometown team” lost his life because of it.

That it took the death of a Baltimore Oriole pitching prospect named Bechler to ban a substance long criticized by leading scientific minds doesn’t say much about our laws but says plenty about our games.

Sports, once again, amounts to more than society’s nimble feet and carefree hands.

It’s our heart. It’s our conscience.

“Sports breaks through in a way that other events don’t,” said Phil Schiliro, chief of staff for Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), one of the leaders of the battle against ephedra. “Sports has this visibility that other things don’t have.”

Sports doesn’t just record achievement on the courts and fields, it creates achievement far beyond them.

It’s Jackie Robinson breaking down barriers for all blacks by sliding hard into second base.

It’s Pee Wee Reese making his country more tolerant by simply putting his arm around Robinson during batting practice.

“Sports opens a window for everyone to look into,” said Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida.

It’s Magic Johnson becoming the face of this country’s fight to cure HIV.

It’s Pete Rose becoming the face of this country’s gambling addiction.

In the 1980s, everyone heard about the growing cocaine crisis. But did anyone really believe it until a child named Len Bias stunningly died of cocaine intoxication just two days after being chosen second overall in the NBA draft?

Bias’ death occurred in June 1986. Three months later, President Ronald Reagan announced a national crusade against drugs.

“Sports has become larger than life,” said Todd Boyd, a USC professor who writes about the cultural implications of sports. “Lots of people had HIV, but Magic made it human. Lots of people gamble, but Pete Rose brought it home.”

Although football players Rashidi Wheeler and Korey Stringer had suffered ephedra-linked deaths in the summer of 2001, it was Bechler’s death in February that finally made Washington move.

It was the first time a baseball player had died of heatstroke. And it was, perhaps, the first time that an athlete in a major sport had died taking a supplement that his sport had refused to outlaw.

Ephedra had been banned in pro football, college sports and minor league baseball. But Commissioner Bud Selig could not persuade the union to agree to keep it from the major leaguers.

Donald Fehr, the union boss who protects his players to the brink of their destruction, said that because Congress had yet to ban the drug, what did his guys have to fear?

“If something is dangerous for a professional athlete, it’s also dangerous for me and you,” Fehr said, not acknowledging that because of their size and physical exertion, athletes are different.

After Bechler collapsed and was taken from the team’s spring training facility to a nearby hospital, a teammate responded by trying to throw away Bechler’s bottle of ephedra-filled Xenadrine.

After Bechler was pronounced dead, other teammates tried to protect the team by implying he’d been overweight and had done it to himself.

It was a heinous case of desperation and denial that caught Washington’s attention in a way that no overdosing housewife could.

“When something like this happens to an athlete who people assume is in good shape, they realize it could happen to them,” Schiliro said. “People internalize that.”

Sports may not be life, but it’s the closest thing we have to a metaphor for it.

The Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox enthralled this country last fall not because of the baseball, but because of the lessons it taught us about failure.

Hootie Johnson’s good ol’ boy remarks about women at last spring’s Masters encouraged a national debate not about golf, but about the Constitution, and when was the last time that happened?

Not even five months after the Sept. 11 tragedy, America recognized the collective strength of its comeback spirit during a safe Super Bowl won by -- who else? -- a team called the Patriots.

“The ephedra case is another in a long list of things where this nation receives a wake-up call because of sports,” Lapchick said. “Lots of times, nothing happens until something horrible happens in sports.”

This is why, for all its silliness, sports matters.

This is why an end zone dance is not just a celebration, it’s a national referendum on grace.

This is why, when an NFL general manager uses homophobic invective against a player on Sunday, he should be fired on Monday.

This is why it’s important not just how they play, but how they talk, and how they act, and if they don’t think its anyone’s business, well, the president just made a deceased pitching prospect our entire country’s business.

This is why Charles Barkley is still wrong, and John Wooden is still right.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.