We keep hearing that it doesn’t matter how many times you fall, as long as you keep getting back up.

But it’s kind of unclear how it applies to apologies from athletes caught using illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

How many mulligans are you allowed?

How sincere must your contrition appear?

What constitutes "getting back up?"

How many bottles of wine, exactly, is Ryan Braun supposed to take to the house of Dino Laurenzi Jr., the sample handler Braun blamed last year for a urine test he failed in 2011, that showed up positive for synthetic testosterone?

That was the suggestion of mea culpa expert Charles Barkley, and it didn’t sound like he was joking, although it was very funny. Yeah, a couple of glasses of cabernet and all’s forgiven.

"Hey, sorry you got fired buddy, how do you like the Duckhorn?"

"It’s great, my best friend forever, sorry you got suspended."

Barkley, who was speaking on national radio, is right in a sense. American sports fans are extremely forgiving, and if you don’t botch your apology and in general you’re not a jerk, you will be OK in the long run. (Then again, a guy you helped get fired might never forgive you.)

A record of affability helps. Look at Andy Pettitte. He admitted a couple of years ago to using human growth hormone to help with an injury in 2002. He apologized, just threw himself at the mercy of the fans. Apparently he’d built up a lot of good-guy equity — with them, the media and everyone else involved with baseball.

He’s still pitching now for the Yankees, at age 41. Funny how you never hear anyone discuss whether Pettitte would’ve survived in the majors into an 18th season if he’d never used PEDs. Every time he takes the mound in the twilight of his career, he moves up near the top of some ranking or other. Assuming there are pitchers who never broke the rules, is that fair?

Of course it isn’t, and we could take it a step further and ask if it’s fair that any of these guys were born with the talent to even have a chance to play professional baseball and the rest of us were not.

That’s beyond the scope of this discussion, as is the whole idea of whether any of the currently banned substances should be allowable.

These are the three things that bother me: 1) Lousy, repeated lying by cheaters. 2) The unfairness of it to guys like Tony Gwynn and Ken Griffey, Jr., who by all appearances were guilty only of ingesting performance enhancing doughnuts. 3) Borderline big leaguers whose cheating kept others from making it to the show.

There are those who want to just blame the powers that control Major League Baseball, including commissioner Bud Selig and the team owners, for looking the other way for so long. OK, I’ll go along a little bit. But let’s say an authority figure in your life tells you it’s OK, either directly or indirectly, to do something that is technically against the rules. But then you are told the party’s over and you have to adapt or suffer consequences.

In the case of MLB players, you like your job and you adapt, right?

You get caught, you man up, tell the truth and say you’re sorry like you mean it.

"Then you move on," said Barkley, whose apologies for everything from DUIs to his terrible golf swing are accepted by most.

Maybe he should start a consulting service.

Reach Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com or 529-4783 or on Twitter as @dave_reardon.