By TERRY NAU

Sports editor

There’s a great lesson to be learned from revelations about steroids abuse among major league baseball players. It’s something young people hear from their parents and teachers and coaches almost every day. Just tell the truth, both to yourself and to your peers. Do the right thing.
That’s easy for someone of my vintage to say because most of my key life decisions are in the past. Hindsight provides a great perspective as the years slip by. None of us go through life making all the right decisions.
The mentors of my youth talked about doing your homework, studying for tests and telling the truth to your parents when something went awry on the home front. And if we laid down a solid foundation for doing the right thing as teenagers, maybe those instincts would take over when life offered more complex choices during our 20s and 30s.
I was thinking about those lessons when New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez went on ESPN yesterday to offer his explanation for why he had used steroids during his three years with the Texas Rangers. Alex called himself “young” and “naïve” and “stupid.” Guilty on all three counts.
But there’s more to A-Rod than just his lack of street smarts and interpersonal skills. This is a man who grew up with an absentee father, something a lot of youngsters in today’s world can appreciate. How many kids at the inner-city schools in Rhode Island fail to benefit today from the two-parent families that used to be so much more common 40 years ago?
Without a father in his life, Alex Rodriguez grew up as this extremely talented young athlete who lacked the kind of familial foundation so evident in his current teammate, Derek Jeter, whose father and mother made him sign a “contract” to do his homework in high school and to fulfill other obligations in his family life.
Whereas Jeter always seems to do the right thing when faced with a tough decision, on or off the playing field, A-Rod usually manages to do the wrong thing. For all his greatness between the white lines of a baseball field, Rodriguez is a needy individual off the field, looking for respect and validation from friend and foe alike.
Jose Canseco plays an interesting role in A-Rod’s life. Canseco is like the “bad” kid we all knew as teenagers, the guy who got us in trouble (or so we told our parents, who were only too willing to blame someone else for getting their precious children in trouble).
Truth is, it takes a little cooperation on both sides to do the wrong thing. We can all walk away from a bad situation. That’s where peer pressure comes into play. It takes a mentally strong and morally grounded person to know his own place in the world, to have enough self-confidence to say “This isn’t for me.”
When A-Rod signed with the Texas Rangers in 2001, he now admits to feeling the pressure to live up to his $252M contract. At one point he approached Canseco – The Godfather of Steroids in Baseball – and asked how he could find a supplier. Canseco wrote in his book “Vindicated” that he introduced A-Rod to a man named Max who could serve as his “trainer.”
A-Rod was already the best young player in the major leagues when left the loving cocoon of Seattle for a lucrative deal that put him in the crosshairs of critics around the country. Soon, his own insecurities led him to try and get bigger and better. In this regard, he differs from Barry Bonds, who allegedly turned to steroids in the late 1990s because inferior players were hitting more home runs and making more money than he – the best player in the game – was getting from his team, the San Francisco Giants.
Granted, the steroids culture in major league baseball had been winked at by owners, managers, coaches and the players themselves. The media just played along, failing to break the story that begged for coverage from the day Mark McGwire’s bottle of Androstenedione (a steroids hormone) was picked off a shelf in his locker by an inquiring reporter. The hormone was legal at the time and quickly passed off as no big deal by McGwire, his manager (Tony LaRussa) and the baseball commissioner, Bud Selig.
Steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs continued to run unchecked until 2003, when the owners finally negotiated a clause in the collective bargaining agreement that allowed for random testing. When 104 players (including A-Rod) tested positive for illegal substances during the 2003 season, a mandatory drug testing clause kicked in for 2004 and beyond. And that’s how we got to where we are today.
A-Rod’s name came up because of some serious reporting done by SI.com’s Selena Roberts, who could be in an uncomfortable situation very shortly if federal investigators ask her to reveal her source for the leak of A-Rod’s name. If Roberts does what most journalists do and refuses to name her source, she could face a short jail term. (Good thing for her that the Bush administration is out of business. President Obama’s legal team may be less harsh on this issue over the next few years.)
The bottom line for A-Rod is he should have done the right thing a long time ago and relied on his own talent and hard work to help him succeed. What made him seek an edge? Who knows? This is a man who openly cheated on his former wife. If he’s capable of doing that, then cheating in his own career is a no-brainer, especially with all the money available on the free agent market.
It’s a great temptation for these athletes, knowing they only have a short window of time to cash in on their athletic skills. But it’s simpler to blame their mistakes on money than on the mental process that gets them to this point. Do the right thing? That’s a cliché as old as Spike Lee’s early 1990s movie on the same subject.