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Spiral of Denial
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Book Excerpt: 'Limit Player Sizes in Football to Reduce Doping, Improve Health'


Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football
By Matt Chaney
Released in January 2009
Four Walls Publishing

This final excerpt for Spiral of Denial summarizes anti-doping strategies and failures in American football and recommends new action for immediate prevention

Book excerpt posted February 5, 2010

The Courson Plan: Doping Prevention, Injury Reduction for Football
The reality was obvious: American football was beset by muscle doping and related systemic problems at all levels by the 2000s, professional, collegiate, and secondary school. The primary evidence was increasing sizes, the documented history of anabolic drugs in football [steroids from about 1960 followed by human growth hormone, clenbuterol, GHB, IGF-1, and more], and the inability to produce a valid system of testing. Football’s widespread problem of the past was confirmed even by present-day officials, rendering illogical their claim of effective prevention, given the environment’s humongous athletes with various body frames weighing in at 250 pounds and up at all levels of play.


Urinalysis, the standard theoretical option for combating doping in football’s vast domain, was proven a failure for detection and practicality. Steroid testing, either random or scheduled, would flunk as a grade-school chemistry project, with no chance of meeting its objective because of loopholes. The null hypothesis prevailed: Conventional urinalysis could not prevent doping in football, although incessantly promoted by the sport’s athletes, coaches, organizers, doctors, employee scientists, and other associates of the game. The entire player population, preps to pros, could juice with impunity.


In addition, so-called Olympic testing was no answer for American football, despite incessant hype from officials of WADA, USADA, the USOC, and IOC. Blood testing, an elaborate, expensive, intrusive technology and protocol, was out of the question for some 15,000 school districts and about 1,000 colleges that hosted football.  And expert critics lined up globally to attack the conventional testing of Olympic athletes, detailing the insurmountable faults, and a primary engineer of the technology agreed, Dr. Don Catlin. “I don’t think we’ve done anything that really ameliorates the problem; we’ve just pushed it into different areas,” Catlin said, noting that athletes and clandestine chemists always found substances and techniques to defeat screening. Drug expert Dr. Charles E. Yesalis believed designer steroids, invisible to screening, keyed many false-negative results for dopers. “You don’t know the hot drug, nor do I,” Yesalis said in 2006. “When we find out about stuff, they’ve already gone on to the next one. Growth hormone’s use in athletics is as big a surprise as the Army Jeep. … The real secret stuff is new designer drugs.” Designer steroids were associated with notorious gurus and superstar athletes, but the drugs could reach any person through over-the-counter supplements, according to investigative reports by Amy Shipley of The Washington Post.

The NFL and NCAA, conducting a thin ploy amid the hot steroid politics of the mid-2000s, promised to begin rigid testing out of competition, which they originally claimed to do in 1990. “I’m not sure anyone has worked out the logistics yet, but they are supposed to be doing year-round testing,” said trainer Dave Binder, the University of New Mexico, in 2006. “They called it year-round in the past, but this is really it.” Anonymous NCAA football players, however, stated they knew of no testing in their programs during summer break. Regardless, off-season or out-of-competition testing had proved impractical for anti-doping in Olympic sports and cycling, primarily for excessive costs, logistical impossibilities, and privacy issues. “No-notice out-of-competition tests are easily dodged despite the rules,” wrote Robert Weiner, former White House drug policy spokesman, and Cael Pulitzer, sports policy analyst, in their co-commentary for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A greater impracticality for prevention in football was proposed blood testing, including “bio-marking” a body’s physiology for doping signs such as fluxing levels in proteins and testosterone. Among challenges, serum analysis in America would require heavy funding, qualified personnel, and likely litigation. Moreover, experts worldwide ridiculed WADA’s purported HGH blood test, calling it questionable science. Since the 2004 Olympics, thousands of HGH tests had failed to produce one positive result.

Meanwhile, bio-identical substances, stem cell therapy, and gene transfer technology—or “gene doping” in sports parlance—promised a new wave of undetectable doping for athletes. Gene doping might have hit sports as early as 2005, a German court case revealed, when a track coach tried to purchase Repoxygen, the gene-therapy drug for boosting red blood cells in anemic patients by manufacturing extra EPO. Athletes and coaches worldwide contacted Dr. H. Lee Sweeney at Penn University, inquiring about gene transfer he employed to create “super mice” with bulging muscles and incredible performance. Scientists engineered hybrid animals such as cows with disease immunity, salmon with rapid growth, and eco-friendly pigs that produced low-phosphorus manure. “Some athletes will want to use gene doping to create super-strong muscles. Some will want to increase the supply of red blood cells so they have greater stamina,” said bio-ethicist Thomas Murray, president of The Hastings Center.

The primary process of genetic manipulation entailed the needle insertion of a plasmid composed of a virus and a gene—such as a gene for fast-twist muscle development—into a host’s particular muscle group. The virus carried the new gene through cellular walls for proper uptake. Sweeney doubted gene transfer could be detected by anti-doping in sports, but WADA claimed its scientists were making progress. A muscle biopsy would probably be the only way of finding the telltale transport virus. Sweeney planned to introduce a commercial product for dogs in 2009, gene therapy to treat muscle wasting or immobility, and he anticipated that calls from the sports world would increase. “I think the real threat is from scientists and clinicians who decide they want to make money off the athletes to make this available,” Sweeney told The London Telegraph.

More experimental substances and techniques enticed athletes and associates. “I think there’s a whole new horizon for anabolic therapies, and the potential for abuse will be exceedingly high,” said Dr. William Evans, the University of Arkansas. SARMS, or selective androgen receptor modulators, locked into steroid receptors of specific muscle groups to foster growth, and myostatin inhibitors blocked the protein that halted expansion of muscle. Prior to the Beijing Olympics, Sciencentral.com reported substances reputed to be myostatin inhibitors were sold in China, Korea, and online. Sweeney found that injecting IGF-1 into target areas stimulated specific muscles, and an injectable “HGH releaser” was on the market, Sermorelin, said to stimulate the pituitary gland for secreting more of the hormone. “MK-677,” a similar substance, stimulated production of HGH and IGF-1 in older adults. Resveratrol was another prospect for performance enhancement in athletes, as a drug said to boost endurance and lifespan in mice and rats.


So, with the undeniable failure of conventional testing, what could be done about muscle doping in American football?

The historic argument of game abolishment lingered in citizens like M.E. Davis in Missouri, angered by NFL lineman Korey Stringer’s unnecessary death of heatstroke in 2001. “It calls attention to the stupidity, callousness, inhumanity and cupidity of the ‘game’ of football and all who promote it,” Davis wrote to The Post-Dispatch. Abolishing football wasn’t widely discussed, but in the wake of BALCO’s exposure many media and policymakers believed Congress should handle the drug problem for sports. However, politicians accomplished nothing in years of wasted time, expense, and misinformation. Public patience had diminished for federal investigations into scattered individuals, even superstar athletes like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.


Law agencies did make progress in combating PEDs during the 2000s, but they were incapable of tackling the problem alone. Many police personnel were juicers themselves, with hundreds exposed for purchasing, distributing, or using anabolic steroids and growth hormone. In addition, the notion of teaming law enforcement with sports organizers to share information and bust athletes was badly misguided in America, given Constitutional rights and the potential for abuse by athletic organizations with historic, ongoing complicity in doping.

The overall hypocrisy and ineptitude of traditional anti-doping policies and programs led to the increasing public call for “legalizing” synthetic performance enhancement in American sports. The argument completely aligned with the culture’s prevalent value for success through virtually any means necessary, or true American ethos, and it certainly merited discussion for leagues comprised strictly of adult athletes. In addition, pro sports like the NFL already allowed anabolic drug use for select athletes, although mostly unknown to the public. The “therapeutic use exemption” in policy sanctioned tissue-building substances for diabetes and other medical conditions, including dubious “hormone deficiency” problems that doctors legally “diagnosed’ in younger men without pituitary or testicular damage. Moreover, the simple brutality of football at the pro and college levels mandated the use of painkillers and anabolic drugs, if not stimulants, yet only athletes remained at a punitive risk for exposure.


Throwing open the barn door to PED use at the prep level was untenable, however.

Weight Restrictions Based on Player Frames, Body Mass Index
The Courson Plan for the immediate prevention and future control of muscle doping in football was rather simple by composition, largely drawn from the elements of the marketplace of ideas.  I was forever fond that the Courson Plan evolved in American fashion. The marketplace of ideas was the great Colonial vision for public debate, including the hearing of falsehoods. With rhetoric in the open, everyone could arrive at sound conclusions. The Courson Plan, as I would name it for the late doping expert Steve Courson, a former juicing NFL lineman, perfectly demonstrated the practice of democracy.

For eight months Steve and I mulled together ideas reported for possible prevention, and we added a few ideas ourselves. We framed a common theory in agreement, although unwritten at the time of his death, basing it on the reduction of player sizes. We capped the weights in a reasonable, equitable manner, especially for the high schools and colleges. Our big disclaimer was the method could never make football safe, much less fully eradicate doping, but it would undoubtedly improve the environment, especially for youth, at least until better ideas came long.

Given the quantifiable data of football sizes in 2008, The Courson Plan would turn back body weights while very likely reducing risks of drug use, obesity, and physical danger in competition. At least one writer was thinking in the same general approach, although separate from us: Sam Donnellon of The Philadelphia Daily News, who specifically noted the Body Mass Index for possible use. Several writers of the decade, including Dan O’Neill of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, called for size limits in general.

Steve and I also agreed on certain components of traditional anti-doping that were compatible in their proper forms. We advocated that police should enforce the law where applicable and that anti-doping education continue based on earnest, straight talk—absent of scare tactics about known health risks and without presenting juicer suspects as so-called role models for abstinence, specifically NFL players and otherwise abnormally large athletes. We endorsed public and private funding for research and development of effective anti-doping strategies, from new testing to educational upgrades. We endorsed sound, vigilant medical precautions and care around football participation, including heart screening for every player as part of a thorough and regular checkup. Without these precautionary policies, a school, college, or pro franchise should not host the dangerous sport.

Based on our personal experiences and through decades of study, Steve and I believed anabolic substances contributed to health problems that struck each of us in the near and long term.  He was almost certain that the incredible size and exertion he maintained for football contributed to his heart condition, and I believed potent injections of testosterone contributed to the hyper-extending and shredding of my right knee.  Like our friend and expert collaborator Chuck Yesalis, we were convinced performance-enhancing substances were the foremost reason for the ridiculous sizes of football players beginning in the 1960s. In turn, founded on what we experienced and acquired, we believed that football sizes posed a national health menace for young males. After Steve’s death, for example, an Iowa State study determined 9 percent of Iowa prep linemen were obese by BMI standards. Such dangerous health conditions of adolescents could not be tolerated by a civil society for its institutionalized, nationalistic sport.

Therefore, The Courson Plan proposed football participation based on a BMI application. It would begin with establishing a baseline weight for every individual frame by height. Independent experts could debate limitations for the BMI regarding muscular or low-fat physiques, but allowable percentages of weight above one’s baseline—such as 189 pounds on a 6-1 frame for maximum normal—could account for discrepancies. For example, Steve was about 6-2, 230 entering college as a true genetic wonder or ultra-elite specimen fully strength-trained and athletic. He would have to employ chemicals to grow good mass from 230, where he possessed abdominal muscles and probably less than 10 percent body fat—yet he qualified as overweight on the BMI with a high risk for complications. The maximum normal or baseline weight at 6-2 was 194 pounds, with 243 the marker for entering the qualified obesity level on the scale.

That marker weight for entering obesity in Steve’s case—or a half pound from exactly 25 percent above his normal maximum under BMI—represented a sound cutoff for the weight of any 6-2 specimen in high-school football. Colleges might set a 30 percent maximum above a body frame’s baseline, and the NFL could adopt a maximum of 35 to 40 percent above baseline, or no more than about 272 pounds on a 6-2 frame. A player could not compete weighing above these standards at any level, and close monitoring of one’s weight loss for meeting eligibility would be imperative. Obviously, a player could still juice under these guidelines, but another player could compete without drugs. In addition, a triple-pronged reduction could be realized in lowering rates of drug use, obesity, and field casualties.  

“People wonder why athletes take the risk [of doping], but the risk is going out on the football field in the first place,” Steve said about a month before his death, during an interview with Robert Dvorchak, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Even if you’re not taking them, steroids have had a profound impact on sports. Some juiced-up beast is trying to blast you out of the stadium. Athletes didn’t invent this stuff. We opened Pandora’s box. We’re still trying to figure out how to close it. It’s bottomless. It’s impossible to eliminate them. Let’s accept it’s inevitable. But don’t put athletes on a moral pedestal when it’s an absolute joke. Don’t speak of purity and ideals. There’s too much money invested in performance."

References

Note: The author files many items beyond works cited for this conclusion book excerpt
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Matt Chaney is a journalist, editor, teacher and publisher in Missouri. E-mail him at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information about his 2009 book Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the home page at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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Book Excerpt: 'Health Liability Will Remake or Break Football'

Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football
By Matt Chaney
Four Walls Publishing 2009

The excerpt series for Spiral of Denial culminates during holy Super Bowl week with summaries and conclusions of the book released one year ago

Book excerpt posted February 2, 2010

Safety Issues and Real-World Threats
By 2008, I was impressed American football continued to get away with butchery, even killing. Like me, many former players saw through the football mythology, understood The Spectacle, the power of denial for issues that impacted the health of athletes. Popular sentiment held football as essential for American life, right?  Yeah, we older guys heard that. What amazed us in the Post-9/11 world was how America continued to pick up the medical expense for football, to pay for the harm done young players and former athletes in their retirement. There were millions of us. Didn’t America understand mere football profiteers—including the “nonprofit” NCAA and flush athletic departments—continued to pass enormous health-care costs to the public?

Clearly this country didn’t mind footing the bill for stadiums, arenas, and practice facilities, paying billions in construction and renovation along with ongoing maintenance and security. Over the 21st century, the sport-entertainment domain would cost Americans billions just in loan interest and debt service—for capital borrowed and spent within the first decade. What the public didn’t realize, apparently, was the fact we all paid for football’s ravenous consumption of the vital talent commodity, the bodies of players—and for as long as they lived.

 

Society paid the lion’s share for football casualties, short-term and long-term, in health-care costs and insurance premiums. Costs compounded annually with hundreds of thousands of fresh injuries, leaving many young people with qualified disablements. Medical insurance for colleges and high schools paid some immediate coverage, but school and athletic officials often shifted costs to the injured individuals and their families. Barring death or catastrophic injury, a player assumed full health-care costs once no longer listed on a school’s game roster, whether by choice, graduation, or other medical condition. Future medical coverage and payments related to football were the individual’s burden.

Every year, the nation’s school districts collectively racked up a fortune in injury costs, and college football churned out its enormous medical expenses, incurred at the thousand or so institutions hosting their blood sport. Even major colleges liked to dodge medical expenses. “In fact, the NCAA, which reaps billions from the efforts of ‘student-athletes,’ somehow maintains its status as a nonprofit organization (with all the accompanying tax loopholes),” Wayne M. Barrett wrote for USA Today Magazine. “Yet, the NCAA doesn’t adequately insure its athletes…"

The NFL was hardly better. Barring catastrophic maiming, retirees were responsible for their medical care until death, and many couldn’t afford adequate coverage, especially among generations predating 1977 in the league. The atrocious physical condition of NFL retirees was thoroughly documented, mass orthopedic injuries, and accumulating research focused on concerns such as concussions. The disability and pension issue of NFL retirees blew up in 2006 and would continue for years, apparently, with public sentiment growing against management and the union.

“The richest sports league in America can’t take care of its own,” observed Gwen Knapp, San Francisco Chronicle, citing the case of 1970s lineman Conrad Dobler, in his 50s and facing a myriad of challenges in health and finances along with his wife, a paralysis victim. The league wasn’t any help. “The way Dobler sees it, the NFL often dumps its medical problems on an unsuspecting public, either through social services or higher insurance costs for a player’s future employer,” Knapp wrote. Dobler said, “You see how they get the money for their stadiums. … They’re always saying, ‘Hey, let’s get the public for some more.’ ” Charlie Krueger, former 49ers lineman, said, “Part of the cost of playing football is physical damage. The NFL has been able to get away with monumental monetary advantages without paying for it.”

Surely the general public understood modern football was dangerous as ever. Every American saw vicious collisions of pro and college up close and repeatedly on video, supported by hard data of sizes, speeds, and casualties. Contact death had not occurred for decades in mass-marketed, entertainment football, the 32 NFL franchises and 70 or so big-name schools—each a valued brand name of American football—but disabling injury was common in the variety of shattered bones and ripped knees, tendons, and shoulders. The tragic cases included brain traumas and crippling paralysis, with the latter much less frequent but more publicized. “The health consequences of high-impact sports is not just an issue for old timers. Increasing numbers of present-day players are reckoning with the short- and long-term consequences of concussions and cranial trauma,” wrote Dave Zirin, cultural critic on sport, for The Nation. “This is partly because there is far more research and awareness about concussive injury. But the game is changing: Players today are bigger, stronger and faster then even ten years ago.”

The reality of football destruction and death had been quashed, minimized, disinfected to the extent it rolled by out of sight save for the relative few witnesses to genuine horror. Victims of serious injury and their families endured terrible tragedy of American football. If the game indeed taught positive values to untold young athletes, it should have, because the other side was much darker than commonly portrayed.

The game outright killed 1,006 players during the 77 years through 2007, for example, including at least one girl, and led to deaths of 683 more players, including of heatstroke and cardiac arrest, according to statistics of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In addition, the center reported 278 catastrophic incidents classified as cervical-cord injuries, affecting the region of spinal column to brain. Many victims did not recover fully from damages in motor and neural function, and I could vouch for other types of paralysis the center didn't track. In middle age my right foot remained 90 percent “dropped” with paralysis of a nerve shredded at the knee in 1982, sustained playing college football. In the same season, the Catastrophic Injury Center logged 11 cases of cervical-cord injury.

Raw data, stark as it may be, was not the full story, though. To paraphrase the butcher Joseph Stalin, from his staff briefing on fine propaganda, the public viewed 5,000 deaths as a statistic but one victim’s personal story as tragic. Maybe that was why the media routinely reduced football deaths to the few lines of a brief report, and the game and fans demanded it that way.

When I was a newspaper sportswriter, I penned a column titled “A Player Dies Quietly in Football America,” recounting a college player’s collapse in Georgia. The local prep coach complained to my editor. He said I made it difficult to recruit kids to play, and he was correct. I liked the coach, even understood him to a point. He certainly took as much precaution for the heat as possible with his team, while also properly conditioning players for the trying task of competing. My point was the game could never be safe enough, regardless of anyone’s good intent, and I was a messenger, not a recruiter. Elsewhere, I was agape in seeing researchers, doctors, claim the game could be made “safe” through rules enforcement or technology. Impossible!

Regarding football horror stories, the Stalin rule applied: More detail on victims altered the response. Even the cold, calculated annual report of the Catastrophic Injury Center could chill the blood with its additional notes on cases nationwide. The research encompassed all types of football, pro, college, prep, sandlot, and youth leagues, with financial grants and statistics contributed by the NCAA, the National Federation of State High School Associations, and the American Football Coaches Association. The 2007 report covered football involving about 1.8 million participants, including 1.5 million at junior and senior highs and 75,000 in college football.

In 2007 there were four direct deaths in football, nine indirect deaths, and eight injuries of the cervical cord. Less impersonal details were found in the report’s case descriptions, including the following on non-fatal injuries:

"
A 17-year-old high school football player was injured… while being tackled in a game. The helmet of the tackler hit the ball carrier under the facemask and drove his head back. He had a fracture of CV-5 and had surgery… At the present time recovery is incomplete. A 16-year-old… had a collision with a teammate while rushing the passer. He is quadriplegic. A 17-year-old… was hit in the head by the knee of the ball carrier. He was [5-6] and weighed 140 lbs. Recovery is incomplete. A 16-year-old… was a ball carrier fighting for extra yards when he was hit by another tackler from the front. He had surgery and recovery is incomplete. He is presently in a rehabilitation center. … A 16-year-old high school football player was injured… Contact was head-to-head with the tackler. He collapsed after the game… The injury was subdural hematoma with surgery and incomplete recovery. A 17-year-old… was involved in a number of hits during the game and it was not possible to say which hit caused the injury… diagnosed as a bleed in the brain. The player had surgery and was in rehabilitation."

The football year’s four direct fatalities involved collisions, per the definition, and death was not immediate in three cases. Indirect deaths involved various circumstances attributed to football. Case reports by the Catastrophic Injury Center included the following:

"
A 14-year-old middle school football player was injured while tackling… was diagnosed with a brain injury. After two weeks in a medically induced coma he died… An 18-year-old high school senior [6-5, 275]… was being tackled at the time of the injury. Contact was made by the helmet of the tackler. Injury was diagnosed as internal, with damage to the spleen and small intestine. The athlete died [a month after injury]. A 13-year-old… was injured while being tackled from behind with a blow to the head. The injury was diagnosed as an acute subdural hematoma. … The athlete died [a day later]. A 25-year-old World Indoor Football League football player was injured… a helmet-to-helmet tackle. He was [6-1] and weighed 180 lbs. … Injury was diagnosed as a brain injury and he was dead on arrival at the hospital. … A 17-year-old collapsed at practice… and died [a week later]. He was running laps at the time and cause of death was heart related. He did not have a physical exam before the season. A 16-year-old… received blunt trauma to the knee during practice… He died of a blood clot that broke loose to the lungs, [a] “pulmonary thrombi emboli.” A 17-year-old… collapsed at practice… and died at the hospital the same day. Cause of death was diagnosed as heatstroke. The player was [6-4] and 290 lbs., and the temperature was 100 degrees. … A 19-year-old college freshman football player collapsed and died during a team workout… He was [5-11] and weighed 210 lbs. He was working with weights at the time, and cause of death was heart related."

Beyond cases of direct and indirect fatalities, at least three more deaths were reported around football in 2007: a 14-year-old with a torn aorta; a 17-year-old who died in his sleep; and a teen player who died playing touch football following a team lifting session, caused by an aortic aneurysm, according to the Catastrophic Injury Center.

I saw several problems affecting the future business of football, including for the vaunted NFL, whose fans consumed anything, and I wasn’t alone. “The fact that the public may not care isn’t the issue and doesn’t change the facts and indications that the NFL is sitting on a powder keg,” observed Sal Marinello, BlogCritics.org columnist and former college football player.
 
Franchises and doctors had already been sued for abuse of pain-killing pills and shots, a well-publicized discussion for 40 years. In 2008, Patriots offensive tackle Nicholas Kaczur was charged with misdemeanor possession of oxycodone pills, part of a larger investigation, and Giants tackle Shane Olivea said he kicked a painkiller habit after intervention by loved ones. “Seeing my family [gathered] in my living room… seeing how hurt they were and the pain I had caused them was pretty humbling and gut wrenching,” Olivea told reporters. Hero quarterback Brett Favre was documented with a painkiller addiction back in the 1990s, and I thought it impossible for him to continue through the next decade without the stuff. “I don’t think anyone comes with ‘no baggage,’ ” Favre said in 2006. “And I’d be the first to say that I had my share of troubles and addictions…” The next season, Favre endured shoulder and elbow injuries in his throwing arm, saying he could “shoot up and still play.”


The plague of brain concussions was a certifiable legal nightmare for the NFL, given the union’s court defeat by the family of the late Mike Webster. The estate finally prevailed at the U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit, a 3-0 decision in December 2006, and collected about $2 million in retroactive disability benefits, interest, and costs. There were more Mike Websters out there. Battered bodies were evident among retirees, garishly displayed at team reunions and other public gatherings, when young and middle-aged men hobbled and jerked about on replacement parts. A few guys motored by wheelchair. “It’s an orthopedic surgeon’s dream,” union official Miki Yaras-Davis said of such a sight in 1995. “[Retirees] all have the crab-like walk, and it’s hard to believe they were once these feared gladiators. Forty-year-old players are having the same problems as 80-year-old men.” In 2002, veteran Raiders lineman Trace Armstrong met many retirees as president of the players association, “and some of these guys don’t look so good,” he said. “Young men, onetime great athletes, but they don’t move around so well.” Armstrong, himself facing retirement, had 16 surgeries by his latter 30s.

The obesity issue of players loomed for the game as a whole. There were already lawsuits, notably for NFL heatstroke fatality Korey Stringer, the enormous Vikings tackle who succumbed in training camp. Research doctors and other medical experts collectively reviewed thousands of football specimens, teens to middle-aged men, and generally concluded risks were apparent, including for cardiac disease leading to complications like enlarged heart syndrome.

Heatstroke continued to kill in football, mainly kids, tragedy unabated despite the game’s horrific record of four deaths in a week during August 2001, including Stringer. Everyone then in football vowed to forever avoid this completely preventable condition, but the promise fell broken. In 2006 five players died of heatstroke, for example, ages 11-17. For cardiac death, meanwhile, researchers corroborated alarming rates of fatalities among athletes, all ages and types.

Grotesquely large physiques of modern football were widely associated with anabolic substances and danger, not surprisingly. Eyesight and common sense constituted enough consideration for the assumption. “Evolved Reality is this: It’s starting to feel like a significant segment of the NFL is on drugs,” observed Chuck Klosterman for ESPN The Magazine.  A Chicago physician, Dr. Terry Simpson, saw evidence of malpractice in examining and treating former players of the NFL, damage left by cortisone and xylocaine injections of the past, and he expected disablement rates to increase because of muscle doping and sizes. “Steroids contribute to the overall injury patterns,” Simpson told The New York Daily News.

Active players acted oblivious to muscle drugs, befuddling outsiders as intended. Despite the evidence of a doping epidemic, players would outright deny it, and in turn the public wondered why so many would unite in a flimsy lie. Many retirees were prone to acknowledging a problem, but they didn’t say much. “The guys that we knew… were doing it, we would never say anything about them,” said Bruce Laird, former safety. “It’s just locker room stuff.” Self-acknowledged steroid user Bill Curry, who juiced decades ago as an NFL lineman, believed players and coaches were ashamed of drug abuse. “It’s hard to come clean on it if you did if for a long time. It’s easy to come clean in my little story [of brief use]. That’s like a Sunday School story,” Curry said, adding “no coach can look me in the eye and say, ‘Well, gee, I didn’t know [a player] was doing it.’ ” Curry noted monetary concerns hindered open talk. “Sadly, as in the case of most human experience, it’s going to take maybe a series of disasters that are obvious. … We don’t do anything until there’s a disaster, until everybody feels it. And when everybody feels it, then we’ll do something that’s very, very serious, but not until.”

Money was definitely the impetus for denial by many juicers past and present, along with the league and union administration, according to numerous insiders. Silence or denial was “a self-interest thing,” said former NFL linebacker David Meggyesy, who didn’t use steroids as a player but knew juicers as a union official. “Look, you go to apply for a medical claim or disability, and you can be denied this claim because you used steroids. You know how insurance companies are. For Christ’s sake, any reason you can provide them to not cover you…” In 2004, Giants center Shaun O’Hara echoed Meggyesy as he denied steroid use to inquiring media. “How can we ask someone to insure us if we’re doing something harmful to ourselves? The insurance companies would never do that,” O’Hara said.

Insurance carriers in the U.S. market struggled mightily in the 2000s, with liquid capital always subject to wipeout by global events such as terrorism, war, natural disaster, and collapsing economy. American football felt the heat too, long overdue, despite the nationalistic sport’s appeal to the insurance industry as sort of a loss leader. Football could still acquire coverage for medical and liability, but premium and deductible rates skyrocketed for sports overall during the decade of disaster, as they should have. American football was increasingly exposed and defeated in civil suits—or predisposed to settle—for its inherent hazards and casualties.

Coaches, trainers, and other personnel gambled on, despite knowing they stood legally vulnerable in potential injury situations involving athletes and even fans—especially at the prep and college levels. On the matter of concussions, for example, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell suggested football’s lower levels had more to worry about, and he was correct. For sheer numbers of football participants and lack of resources, fertile litigious conditions existed over unavoidable shortcomings at school districts and colleges, such as inadequate health screening and medical support, and insiders knew it. Kids understood it. Injury “waivers” for football, signed by parents and athletes, were mostly legal ploy anywhere in America. What taxpayers didn’t get, they paid too, especially in the event of an athlete’s death or catastrophic injury, which meant a huge deductible, as high as six figures, and more costs not covered by insurance.

The insurance industry closely monitored the issue of PEDs in American football and had since the 1980s, when carriers began dropping the sport for steroid abuse and injuries reported by media. In 2007, as Texas mandated worthless $6 million random testing for prep sports, one high school required parents of football players to sign a “Steroid Dangers Acknowledgment form.”

Moving forward in the young century, the institutions of insurance, health care, and education were all cash-strapped while the legal peril grew in litigious America. Already, insurers had dropped coverage on numerous hazardous activities at schools and colleges, from rope climbing in PE class to pyramid building by cheerleaders. Football had slid by thus far, likely since it was institutionalized in schools and culture, but this was a money issue, after all. Forces were converging beyond the game’s control, even the all-powerful NFL’s, and it was anyone’s mistake to presume football could roll forward in its present form.

Football reform lay dead ahead for absurd injury and illness—and financial costs—requiring the reversing of drug use and player sizes, particularly for colleges and high schools. The monetary costs alone would mandate change, if not real concern for young people, and the courts, insurance, and health care would carry it out, if football wouldn’t of its own volition. Approaching 2010 in America, with a scary, tough world coming down to roost atop our heads, deflating our formerly insulated cocoon of consumerism and pleasure, the sane choices to make about football began with the athletes, coaches, and officials.

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Note: The author files many items beyond works cited for this conclusion passage of book
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Matt Chaney is a journalist, editor, teacher and publisher in Missouri. E-mail him at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information about his 2009 book Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the home page at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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Book Excerpt: 'Steroid Use is Unpreventable in High-School Football'


Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football
By Matt Chaney
Four Walls Publishing 2009

Book excerpt posted January 30, 2010

The excerpt series for Spiral of Denial culminates during holy Super Bowl week with summaries and conclusions of the book released one year ago

Teens Using Steroids? 'Not at our school,' Officials Claim
As the high schools of America were drawn into national debate on anabolic steroids, prep coaches and officials maintained that use was minimal. Politicians and media expressed outrage, proclaiming that kids mattered while denouncing pro athletes as poor role models.  Studies concluded teens used steroids, and kids said the drugs were accessible and becoming more popular, for enhancing looks as well as athletic performance. Critics called for tighter laws, steroid testing in schools, and funding for anti-steroid education. “The thing that is most scary…,” said a government health official, “is the kids do it for what society would view as very positive values, winning and success.”


That was the 1980s. Decades later, Dr. Charles E. Yesalis was amused with American acting as if the scourge were new, teen use of muscle hormones in pursuit of athletic stardom, ego fulfillment, and sex. Indeed, Yesalis helped pioneer studies on teens and steroids back in the ’80s, when he heard the same denial he was hearing in the new millennium, from schools across the country: There may be a problem elsewhere, but not here. “It’s always somebody else’s kid. It’s always somebody else’s school,” Yesalis said in 2005. For Yesalis, high-school representatives hardly differed from college and pro officials in their shirking of responsibility. “If I had $100 for every time a high school principal or coach said to me during the past 27 years, ‘Doc, it’s a problem, but not in our school,’ I’d have a Ferrari sitting in my driveway,” Yesalis told The Houston Chronicle.

Among thousands of football programs nationwide, perhaps there existed an American high school with never a juicing football player—improbable concept, said one expert—but apparently a significant portion had users. Nurturing circumstances for a national problem in prep football included a parental mindset for winning and performance enhancement, coaches who looked the other way, the lack of any impact prevention, and the accessibility of anabolic substances from steroids to human growth hormone and supplements. Moreover, the football ideology of “bigger, stronger” ruled in continuum, predating steroids, the dangerous size obsession implanted for players at the prep level.


At least one prep coach considered gene doping by 2008. Media stories were fanning interest for genetic therapy’s possible applications in athletics, and a prominent researcher, Dr. H. Lee Sweeney, the University of Pennsylvania, reported contact from a football coach at a high school. The coach wanted his players to try gene doping, the reputed cutting edge for muscle building, even if some experiments killed humans and lab animals. The coach “wanted to know if we could make enough serum to inject his whole football team,” Sweeney told Discover Magazine. “He wanted them to be bigger and stronger and come back from injuries faster, and he thought those were good things.” Sweeney declined, informing the coach his proposition was illegal and potentially dangerous.

Teens were familiar with anabolic steroids and more performance-enhancing drugs. Studies had long found steroid use at high schools, and news media disseminated reports of police busts and other information. After the BALCO story broke in 2003, authorities, media, and common citizens were increasingly vigilant about steroids.  High schoolers were using for football, wrestling, baseball, and track and field. Some football programs hosted multiple teen juicers down to junior varsity, according to school confirmations and witness allegations. A former cheerleader recounted purchasing steroids from football players at her high school, telling media she sought toned abdominal muscles at 17.

News of juicing preps generated from Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, Utah, California, and more states. The teen athletes mostly used steroids, but also growth hormone, experts said. In some instances football coaches and parents were identified as illicit sources of the drugs. In other cases, no reported links to teens, criminal charges for steroids and HGH were filed against coaches, teachers, and a district board president.

Parents regularly pestered pediatrician Dr. Bernie Griesemer in Missouri, seeking HGH prescriptions for their athletic offspring, and he was publicized as a critic of such doping. “Everybody thinks they are going to retire on their children’s sports incomes,” Griesemer told The New York Daily News. In Dallas, athletic trainer Ken Locker knew of an 18-year-old football player who tested positive for steroids as a college freshman. “The parents admitted giving it to him,” Locker told The Morning News. “They wanted him to get a scholarship.” Only one prep football player in 17 would play in the NCAA, but many parents sought scholarships for their sons. One study found about 10 percent of parents polled knew of PED use by a prep athlete.

Often the pushy parents knew little about anabolic substances, never understanding they might channel children to drug use, said psychologist Dr. Robin Kowalski, Clemson University. “I’m not sure how many parents really sit down and think. Parents know there are some kids that use [steroids], but it’s certainly not their kids.” Football coach George Gatto, Bristol, Pennsylvania, said, “The expectations of parents are sometimes false. We would all like to think that our kids are going to play for Penn State or Michigan, but the reality is that it’s only a small of amount of kids who can play at that level.”

Prep players grasped their limits for advancing in football, measuring themselves against predator physiques they observed roaming college fields. “When colleges are coming around, everyone just wants to get bigger and better, especially now,” said Lucas Cox, senior running back at Red Land High in Pennsylvania, who continued, “You see linemen in college that are over 300 pounds and you see linebackers that are 280 pounds. So everyone tries to get as jacked as they can.” Kevin Perez, 275-pound lineman, was a blue-chip recruit at Miami Killian in Florida. “Looking at the college rosters forces you to gain weight,” Perez said. “You go to the camps and see how big everybody is. I realized a 250-pounder wouldn’t get recruited by a top Division I school.” A coach acknowledged football’s unreal standards, higher up the ladder. “Colleges like linemen that are 6-6, 300 pounds,” said Derek Long, Westlake High in Texas. “They like running backs that run a 4.4 or 4.3 [40]. Not all of us have those physical attributes.

Some prep players attempted to eat their way into college football, but the necessary body package combined size, strength, and athleticism. Drugs offered little help for poor natural specimens, but good athletes could capitalize. “If a coach or someone offers them to you, there’s a real temptation to do it to take yourself to the next level,” Brad Artis, Canal Winchester running back, told The Eagle-Gazette in Lancaster, Ohio. “You see how fast and strong people get by doing it.” Don Matheney, defensive lineman, said he did not use steroids but understood the forces at work, and the physiques of high school were intimidating enough. “I don’t know if it’s as much the guys on TV as it is seeing the guys you’re competing against,” he said. “You feel a little threatened, so some players take things to get an edge.

Prep players with insight about PEDs understood that testing was no protection, just a false hope for prevention in the vast population of school athletes. Urinalysis could not prevent doping anywhere in football, although incessantly promoted by the sport’s doctors, employee scientists, and other associates of the game. All players, preps to pros, could juice with impunity through undetectable steroids, HGH, and more tissue-building substances. Even the NFL, easily the game’s most controlled and resourceful environment for battling doping, could not prevent systemic use among its 1,700 athletes and personnel such as coaches.

Invalid urinalysis, random or scheduled, was exploited through huge loopholes. The technology was limited for detecting substances, and the relative few players subject to testing understood calendar gaps of the process for employing patent steroids. “Fear” of testing was marginal among users, trumped heavily by their confidence and motive for evading detection. The technology was utterly useless at the college and prep levels for its detection faults, lack of funding, and logistical barriers. In 50 states and the District of Columbia, college football had thousands of players at about 1,000 institutions while 1.5 million comprised prep football, scattered among more than 15,000 districts. The average cost of a steroid test was about $100, and a positive result could lead to court litigation, given the cultural factor of sports-minded parents bent on winning.

"Clean" prep football was impossible, and some former players urged parents to heed threats of youth sports from steroids to injuries. Kansas City columnist Jason Whitlock, a large man and former college player, suggested other endeavors for kids. “I wouldn’t criticize any parent who directs a child to stay away from organized sports,” Whitlock wrote for The Star. Former NFL lineman Brent Boyd testified about concussions before Congress in 2007. Suffering from vertigo linked to multiple head traumas in football, Boyd, 50, was reclusive and depressed, confining himself inside on a couch, “hiding from the world,” reported The New York Daily News. “Right now…,” Boyd said, “I would tell any parent don’t let your kid play football.”

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Note: The author files many items beyond works cited for this summary passage of book

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Usiak, D. (1989, May 18). State Senate panel told of steroid problem. United Press International [Online].

Victory, J. (2005, October 18). Undetectable steroids easy to get online. ABC News [Online].

Waller, S. (2008, July 1). Message to avoid steroids getting out, coaches say. Abilene Reporter-News [Online].

Walsh, C. (2007, February 17). Bigger steps needed to end steroid use. Tuscaloosa News [Online].

Ward, B. (2005, November 20). This just in—Athletes cheat, and always will. Minneapolis Star Tribune [Online].

Whitlock, J. (2002, May 30). Steroids have ruined athletics. Kansas City Star, p. D1.

Williams, B.Y. (2006, September 21). High school team under investigation. Kansas City Star, p. B2.

Williams, P. (2008, November 6). Straight talk is the best deterrent to steroid use. Washington Post, p. G12.

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Yeransian, L. (2006, January 14). HGH threat: Works like steroids but undetectable. ABC News [Online].

Yesalis, C.E. (2005, March 10). Statement of Charles E. Yesalis. In Committee on Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives. Steroid in sports: Cheating the system and gambling your health (H. Hrg.  No. 109-65). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Wulderk, L. (2007, March 8). U of M research shows link between sports, unhealthy weight control and steroid use in teens. University of Minnesota News [Online].

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Matt Chaney is a journalist, editor, teacher and publisher in Missouri. E-mail him at
mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information about his 2009 book Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the home page at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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Book Excerpt: 'Football Doping, Risks Evident in Cartoonish Player Physiques'


Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football
By Matt Chaney
Four Walls Publishing 2009

Book excerpt posted January 28, 2010

The excerpt series for Spiral of Denial culminates during holy Super Bowl week with summaries and conclusions of the book released one year ago

Legion of Critics Blasts Official Apathy for Increasing Body Sizes
There existed no evidence of systemic muscle doping in American football—so said insiders, media, and fans. That was the basic public excuse during the problem’s first 50 years. Approaching 2010, America continued to avoid potentially painful reform over drugs in football, preferring instead to gorge on the nationalistic blood sport as it stood.
 
The smoking-gun evidence, meanwhile, remained right in the face of America, had for decades, at least since the 1980s when juiced specimens abounded. Unnaturally large sizes of players were obvious at every level of football, viewed on television or in-person at the stadium. As former NFL lineman Steve Courson maintained publicly, he once toted around bagfuls of steroids in Pittsburgh, but no one had to peek inside for grasping reality. People need only see his build and that of others in football to understand the picture. “One of the reasons I was always open with my steroid use was because it was so apparent with my physique, and I thought it foolish to try to hide something so obvious, legal and tacitly condoned,” Courson wrote to a former teammate during summer 2005, in correspondence never delivered. "Currently, as of recent events, the media has decided to report this more openly and accurately. Part of that locally I believe is related to Mike Webster’s death. BALCO had a lot to do with the change in reporting. After two trips to Washington I am definitely disheartened, but not surprised by the incredible (myth, image, fantasy, lie or synonym thereof) that NFL management continues to spin on this situation. It has reinforced my views as a person."

Many voices backed Courson about increasing sizes and juice in football, led by athletes active and retired from multiple sports, along with coaches, weightlifters, trainers, sports organizers, medical experts, media, politicians, adult fans, and schoolchildren. “When you talk about the NFL, what’s the first thing you say? Guys who played in the 1970s would be a joke on the football field today,” said Curt Schilling, baseball pitcher.  Hard data founded the argument, weight statistics and comparisons spanning football during the age of pharmaceutical and bio-identical drugs. Among numbers, the starting offensive line of the 1958 NFL champion Colts averaged about 240 pounds while O-line starters for the 2007 Giants, Super Bowl champions, averaged about 6-5 in height and 314 on scales.

Evidence suggested a concentrated wave of huge physiques first hit the NFL during the 1970s, and by the late 1990s the league had 200 players weighing 300 pounds or more. That number doubled the next decade, approaching the year 2010, with about 350 players of at least 300 pounds on game rosters and more than 500 in training camps. An additional 100 players hovered near the 300-pound mark. A Scripps Howard review found the average NFL body weights had increased 10 percent since 1985, before the start of steroid testing, to a 2006 average of 248 pounds. The average for offensive tackles jumped from 281 pounds to 318. “When I played, a 300-pounder was a freak,” said Art Kehoe, Dolphins associate head coach and former NFL lineman. “Today, if you don’t weigh 300 pounds, you are a freak.”


For major-college football, 300-pounders were the majority among starting offensive linemen in 2008, and the size was consistent on rosters across Division II of the NCAA. At the prep level, top-recruited offensive linemen typically hit 300 on the scales—the online rating service Superprep.com often listed a dozen or more players at that weight among its top 40 prospects nationally.


Obesity contributed, particularly in teen players, but numerous witnesses and qualified observers said the 2000s football environment—still stuck on “bigger, stronger”—remained mostly about performance-enhancing drugs. Dr. Yesalis, the epidemiologist, strength coach, and weightlifter, repeatedly remarked God had not “changed the recipe” for humans, always citing additional material evidence of an embedded epidemic. Testing was invalid and football’s documented timeline of muscle doping continually hardened. Organizers now acknowledged they were wrong about the 1980s, for example. Yes, they conceded in official consensus, the problem was in fact widespread during that decade. Confirmed history alone rendered anyone’s claim of cleanup as illogical, given time’s unfettered progression in performance that constantly placed current players as the largest and most athletic ever.


Nonetheless, the football institution denied a problem, as the vast majority of active athletes, coaches, and organizers stayed with dubious excuses. They said gigantic physiques were due primarily to strength training and eating. “Fat” athletes had taken over the game, shoving aside muscled juicers, according to a 2005 company line voiced by NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, testifying under oath for the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform. “I think it’s nonsense…,” Tagliabue said of allegations about PEDs and sizes. “Today we have a young man who’s 6-feet-6 and 268 pounds playing quarterback. Are we to conclude that he’s using steroids? I don’t like to smear people in that fashion.”


Focusing on 300-pounders, Tagliabue contended drugs made “athletes lean and sculpted”—like that quarterback he failed to fully describe as such—and declared “high body fat” beset the league’s largest players. The 300-pounders “tend to be the antithesis of the sculpted, lean athlete,” Tagliabue testified. The commissioner maintained contemporary players simply lifted much harder and ate much more than erstwhile specimens—who trained rigorously, consumed massive calories, and abused anabolic steroids but were significantly smaller than present-day behemoths. Players union director
Gene Upshaw backed Tagliabue at the hearing. Upshaw likewise dismissed muscle doping as the key factor for sizes, saying random urinalysis was a certain preventive of that scenario. If anything, Upshaw said, colleges and high schools produced unhealthy football players. “They come to us the size that we get them,” he testified.

Five months later, however, a 300-pound NFL player dropped dead at the age of 23: Thomas Herrion, 49ers lineman, whose autopsy showed an enlarged heart and artery blockage. In addition, publicized studies found systemic hazards in league body weights. Within this context, management spoke differently than when testifying for Congress. Here the NFL contended that fat or unhealthiness was not the primary reason for player weights alarmingly in excess of healthy standards set by the universal Body Mass Index. Now officials contended the NFL primarily featured muscled specimens with low body fat, so the league could argue BMI standards were an invalid application for its athletes.


League medical liaison Dr. Elliot Pellman said the question of obesity among players still had to be answered by research. The league was commissioning its own studies. “There’s a 1-in-200,000 chance that an individual the age of Mr. Herrion will suffer a sudden death,” Pellman said. “It happens, and no one knows why it happens.” Pellman said obesity was a cultural problem, not football’s. Officials dismissed a study, based on the BMI, concluding that virtually all NFL players were overweight or obese. Bears nutritionist Julie Burns said NFL players were abnormally muscular humans. Tagliabue said, “We have athletes that are fitter than most people in society, bigger than most people in society, and doing things that are different and more demanding than many people in society.” PEDs, meanwhile, did not apply.


“Huh?” remarked Sam Donnellon, Philadelphia Daily News, on mixed messages from the league. Basically, official football answers on increasing sizes followed that “fat” athletes were the foremost reason, not drugs; however, if criticism focused on obesity, not doping, then the players were portrayed as muscular and healthy, possessing uncommon physiology. NFL and NCAA rhetoric alike reasoned that modern players gained incredible mass without stuff like steroids, HGH, IGF-1, clenbuterol, and GHB. The necessary presumption held that substances readily available and potent were undesirable, obsolete for modern players.

Impossible, critics responded collectively, a growing legion of insider witnesses and close observers of football, including media, athletes, coaches, and doctors. They rejected official word on drugs from painkillers to amphetamines, anabolic steroids, and HGH. “Can it really be true that the NFL, with more than 300 players who weigh more than 300 pounds each, really has no drug problem?” dismissed Dave Perkins, Toronto Star columnist. “Where’s the proof—other than the NFL saying it has no drug problem?” Anti-steroid trainer Sal Marinello always chortled at football drug rhetoric, contending the NFL and colleges were an historic haven for widespread PEDs. The strength guru and former college football player wrote for BlogCritics.org that “off-the-field training, nutrition and legal modes of supplementation cannot be given credit for the ever-growing NCAA and NFL players.” News writer John Eisenberg, Baltimore Sun, wrote, “A wise doctor who knows about steroids once told me to trust my eyes above all when trying to detect abuse because, as he put it, lifting weights can only do so much. Well, my eyes are telling me that college football, like the pros, has more than its share of juicers.”

Dave DePew, personal trainer and nutritionist, told The San Diego Union-Tribune he was turned off by pro athletes and PEDs, through with consulting for them. “Steroids will definitely help you, and I think most athletes know that,” DePew said. “The unfortunate reality is that most of these athletes will take advantage if they know they’re not going to get caught.” Player agent David Caravantes said pro football wanted “guys who look like Tarzan and don’t play like Jane.” The late Lyle Alzado contended the NFL could have few genetic wonders packing extraordinary muscle at any size without dope, perhaps a percentile among a thousand bodies. Charles Yesalis extended Alzado’s observation to include absurd sizes in college and prep football, and many agreed, such as David Meggyesy, 1960s NFL linebacker and retired union official. “I think [doping has] escalated even more, and the pressure on kids playing football, it’s there,” Meggyesy said. “If the steroids are there, they’re going to do it.”


“You can see all the signs,” said Bill Curry, a coach and former NFL center, in 2008. “You gain 40 pounds over the summer, there’s something wrong with that. All of a sudden you can’t get your headgear on, and your jaws are doubling in size, and I’m callin’ ya in and we’re gonna do a test.” Curry used anabolic steroids to make the NFL in 1965. In his day he saw 300-pounder players genuinely fat, but none could compete. “We just murdered ’em,” said Curry, who peaked in weight at about 245. “You could keep them on the ground all day; that’s where they wanted to be anyhow. They didn’t want to run to the ball.”

Fat was a factor for the largest modern players, Curry said, but he still saw drug use for their sustained speed and athleticism. More big bodies of the NFL astounded Curry, the many hundreds ranging from 250 to 300 pounds with tremendous strength, speed, agility, and minimal body fat. Summing up, Curry said, “Now you got guys that are cut-up 300 pounds, and then you got [athletes] that are 400 pounds who are obese, and they’re out there in the heat and cold, and they’re gonna die. When I watch an NFL game now, I find myself—I would love to just enjoy the football, but I start worrying about [jersey] number 76. He’s gonna die. Soon. He might die in this game, while I’m watching him. I know what he’s been doing, and it breaks my heart.”

“People want to see gladiators, and you just don’t get that way by eating your fruits and vegetables,” said Linden King, former Raiders linebacker and self-confirmed steroid user of the 1970s and ’80s. Former NFL safety Bruce Laird, who retired in 1982, said there was “no question” drugs impacted contemporary sizes of players, whom he believed faced health risks in the present and future. “You know those guys aren’t doing it on peanut butter, and beer, and whatever,” said Laird, a leader in the retirees’ cause for improved disability and pension benefits.
 
Former defensive tackle Charlie Krueger said he saw anabolic steroids sweeping the NFL as he left in the early 1970s. Krueger was convinced muscle doping drove modern football, especially for requirements in size, strength, and athletic ability. “There are many large, large people in [pro] football, college football, and some in high school football,” he said in 2008. “And they must be [juicing]. … I’m glad I was gone before this stuff invaded because you would be forced to use it or lose your job.”

In the debate over Herrion and health, one team official was pragmatic. "Is it good or bad that the league is so big? It doesn't matter, because the players are not going to get smaller," said Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi. "If anything, they are going to get bigger. Colleges are loaded with 300-pound linemen." One coach conceded PEDs were at least a factor. "I think part of this size thing happened because of steroids, the need to be bigger and stronger to compete with guys on the stuff," said Joe Bugel, Redskins line coach." 


Overall, valid scientific study on muscle doping was lacking, but a wealth of research supported increased health risks of football because of large bodies. Public debate on football brutality, the game’s traditional issue, reemerged during the 2000s through concerns funneling back to physiques, including orthopedic injury, brain concussion, and physiological malady linked to excessive weight. Media examined topics like obesity and sudden cardiac death of young athletes, along with NFL retirees’ body maiming, painkiller addiction, cortisone damage, and more disabling setbacks. The issue of healthcare topped the personal agenda of practically every American, and many NFL retirees banded together in complaints against the union administration of the fund for pensions and disability. Press analysis of health issues in football—including size statistics compiled by Scripps Howard, Newsday, and The Palm Beach Post—stimulated public discussion of medical information and witness opinion, so much that politicians dove in to stage a hearing on the disability issue in pro football.


Medical personnel said public focus on increasing sizes was overdue. “Football players have gotten so huge that it has become dangerous from a health standpoint,” said Dr. David Bindleglass, orthopedic surgeon and former college player. “No one in the world loves the game of football more than I do, but it concerns me that players seem to get bigger and bigger, and intrinsically, there has to be some natural limit to it. … Rationally, you have to look at this and wonder where it’s going.” Cardiac surgeon Dr. Arthur “Archie” Roberts was an All-American quarterback at Columbia who later played three years in the NFL. “There’s no question that the super-sizing that’s occurred in the NFL, college and high school [levels] the last 30 years has tipped the scales in a negative way,” Roberts said. “It means there is a serious alert for a health imbalance.”


Dr. Joyce Harp, the University of North Carolina, led a study team that concluded more than one in four NFL players in 2003 qualified for class 2 obesity on the BMI, according to height and weight. About three percent of players approached 400 pounds, ranking them class 3 obese. The NFL labeled the conclusions invalid because its players were unique specimens of the human race, but no independent scientists objected to the research. Harp remarked, “I don’t know what’s going on in the minds of trainers, coaches or other people who drive what happens in the NFL, but clearly there’s something going on when they have these guys getting so big.”

A
veteran player indicated something was up about steroids, if not injuries, while airing gripes at the league in 2008. Redskins cornerback Fred Smoot was mad about player fines over uniform attire. “I think they’re worried about all the wrong [stuff],” Fred Smoot told Dan Steinberg of washingtonpost.com. “If you really want to do something, stop everybody from using steroids that’s using steroids, instead of worrying about how the hell I’m dressed when I walk out there and play. You know what I’m saying? Worry about stuff that count, like people getting paralyzed.”


In the controversy over NFL disabilities, opposing parties avoided mention of anabolic steroids and growth hormone. Despite the contemptuous discussion and allegations—sordid details like debilitating injuries, painkillers, amphetamines, dangerous weights, fraud, and personal bankruptcy—the topic of muscle doping slid by quietly. “That has not been part of the argument. No one’s really brought that up,” said Ron Mix, Hall of Fame lineman and an attorney in worker’s compensation. “I got a feeling that’s part of the equation. … Just increased size by itself is an extra strain on the entire system, the skeletal system, the joints, and also the various organs. I mean, you have to be clinically overweight just to play [NFL] football now. That’s a requirement. Just about every position, the guys weigh far more than what physicians say is the ideal weight for them.”

Meggyesy said muscle doping was bound by silence in the league, “but there’s a whole range of issues around injuries, and the elephants in the living room are performance-enhancing steroids.” The retired player had a monetary interest for denying doping, such as healthcare and disability coverage, Meggyesy said, while management would not admit anything that left the league vulnerable. “It comes back to liability,” he said. “It all comes back to who is responsible.”

References

Note: The author files many items beyond works cited for this summary passage of book

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Matt Chaney is a journalist, editor, teacher and publisher in Missouri. E-mail him at
mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information about his 2009 book Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the home page at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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Amid Fiery Tempest, McGwire's Rhetoric Boils Down to Protecting the MLB System

Doping Corner

An established neighborhood of sport

 

By Matt Chaney

Posted Friday, January 22, 2010

 

Mark McGwire will no longer discuss his use of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone in baseball, so says a spokesperson for the St. Louis Cardinals, according to www.sportingnews.com.

 

And I say, Thank God. In my 50 years as a Missourian, I cannot recall a public persona capable of tainting this state like McGwire has since 1998.

 

St. Louis is laughingstock once more over McGwire, after he returned from years’ seclusion in California, hiding his doping secrets, only to receive an orchestrated standing ovation from loyal Cardinals fans at a benefit gala last Sunday. In so-called self-admissions since January 11, McGwire urges everyone to “move on” and forget the gargantuan fraud he generated from the city in 1998, abetted by a fawning media horde, as he launched 70 homeruns for the Cardinals to become world hero of the year.

 

The Cardinals franchise is slimed gain, badly, in the 12-year Big Mac Fiasco kept alive by cavalier manager Tony La Russa, himself a suitcase Californian inhabiting St. Louis part-time—and McGwire’s steroid enabler, defender and BFF since their affair began in the 1980s at Oakland. La Russa arrived as Cards skipper in 1996 and brought McGwire a year later in a trade with the A’s, spawning the most sordid chapter in franchise history. The ugly story isn’t over, of course, upon La Russa’s recent hiring of McGwire as team hitting coach.

 

Besides national scorn, infighting besets Cardinals Nation over McGwire, beginning with the fans’ split—many if not most blast him in public forums—and extending to the insider fraternity, especially between camps of La Russa and popular Hall of Fame skipper Whitey Herzog, who managed Jack Clark, the retired Redbirds power hitter. Last week Clark ripped McGwire and other steroid users in baseball, making hot headlines and, in St. Louis, drawing boos from the same fans who re-embraced Big Mac.

 

Herzog groused about it all to a reporter for The Post-Crescent in Appleton, Wisconsin. “I’ve got nothing to do with him (McGwire),” Herzog said Tuesday. “I don’t want to comment on steroids because they’re all lying. And they’re still lying. … The people in St. Louis give Mark McGwire a standing ovation the other day, and Jack Clark said every steroid user should be banned for baseball, and they booed him. Now, what the hell is the matter with society when that happens?”

 

A society bereft of strong values is in play here, for McGwire is not unusual with his situational ethics, as an athlete or any professional. He’s just typical of win-at-all-costs culture in modern America. Many people cheer him because they understand him, including for injecting steroids and HGH to reach a zenith of athletic achievement. He feels no responsibility to anyone for his doping in entertainment baseball. He loves his wife and sons, but at age 46 couldn’t care less about widespread doping in sport, given his actions, nor the thousands of young athletes drawn into steroids every year. Many Americans wouldn’t care either, were we to follow the McGwire path through American sport, fame and fortune.

 

McGwire doesn’t aspire to be heroic anymore, merely pragmatic. A tempest rages about the man and we critics strike from every direction, our barbs labeling him a liar, cheat, poor role model—but his simple motive is to go back to work in baseball. That drives his outlandish statements; he does care about Major League Baseball. McGwire’s “admission” of doping while denying performance enhancement is certainly ridiculous, self-serving; most importantly, however, the flimsy rhetoric insulates the drug-ridden MLB system, where prevention is impossible, like in any sport, with testing a time-proven failure for gaping loopholes.

 

McGwire is a powerful symbol of steroids for performance enhancement, but he is no different than 99 percent of American athletes caught for muscle doping since the 1980s, in baseball, football, track and field, more sport. McGwire wants to return to his game and therefore takes a hit for the team, in jock cliché.

 

A few thousand drug-sullied athletes took the fall before, blaming themselves only in order to come back, and McGwire takes his turn now, following proven talking points for shielding the system and training responsibility solely upon him, the individual.

 

Blathering in established nonsense of the protocol, McGwire portrays himself to have been an “isolated” user—the enduring lie of sport figures to deflect attention from a systemic problem. McGwire claims he doesn’t know or remember much beyond using tissue-building hormones for most his career in the big leagues. He says he used HGH “maybe” once or twice. He claims he neither used nor discussed muscle drugs with other players or baseball personnel, no one, and especially not La Russa. McGwire summarily dismisses allegations by former A’s teammate Jose Canseco and an FBI informant that he juiced heavily to aid his power hitting.

 

McGwire says using steroids to become a richly rewarded superstar was "a mistake," his “biggest regret.” And his absurd claim of no performance enhancement from the drugs—McGwire says the effect of injury recovery wasn’t an unfair advantage—serves the system by attempting to preserve the sanctity of his garish numbers, particularly the 70 homers in one season, later topped by the 73 dingers of doped-up Barry Bonds.

 

McGwire says he doesn’t feel unfairly singled out for drugs in Major League Baseball, and he seconds that by stating the game has no widespread problem, even if he couldn’t articulate well on Sunday in St. Louis. “Baseball’s done a fantastic job, uh, uh, doing uh, uh, doing—cracking down on the uh, with uh, drug policy…,” McGwire stammered in a hasty hallway meeting with two dozen reporters who were misled and herded for hours by Cardinals PR, another tactic for stifling information damaging to employer baseball.

 

McGwire struggled to finish about a clean MLB system, continuing: “Uh, doing the things they’re doing, and, uh, from what I’ve heard, they’re improving, improving it (testing and policy). Um… so, it’s—they’ve done a fantastic job, the players association, (commissioner) Bud Selig.”

 

And so went the Cardinals’ dog-and-pony presser for McGwire at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, a high-profile sideshow of the circus known as Winter Warm-Up fund raiser with fans, where autographs for left fielder Matt Holliday cost $100. In barely five minutes of questions from us reporters, McGwire uttered “uh” more often than Beavis and Butthead through an entire cartoon episode. This McGwire comedy naturally concluded with his protecting the system a final time, in response to another prying question.

 

“Mark, you really didn’t tell Tony (La Russa) that you used steroids?” a reporter asked.

 

“Absolutely,” McGwire began, before falling apart again. “Tony had, Tony… Tony La Russa—I kept this to myself. I… Ya know what? I, I spoke from my heart. And I spoke honestly the other night (with Costas). And, listen, that’s me. And I hope you all can accept this. And let’s all move on from this. Baseball, baseball…” McGwire paused for media yelling of further questions that he ignored while continuing: “Baseball is great right now. Baseball’s better, and let’s just all move on.”

 

Gladly, I thought, watching McGwire slip back through doors to a service corridor, in escape with his handlers. Please keep going until you hit California—and take La Russa with you.

Note: The following blog post is a transcript of the McGwire press conference on January 17, 2010, in St. Louis.

Matt Chaney is a journalist, editor, teacher and publisher in Missouri. E-mail him at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information about his book Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the home page at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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Transcript: Mark McGwire Press Conference, St. Louis, Sunday, January 17, 2010

St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Hyatt Regency Hotel

2nd floor hallway leading to service corridor off grand ballroom


Transcript posted by Matt Chaney, Friday, January 22, 2010 

 

Transcript begins at McGwire’s brief opening statement before about two dozen reporters, minutes after he received a standing ovation in the hotel's grand ballroom from about 2,500 fans attending the Cardinals' Winter Warm-Up weekend benefit. McGwire answers questions a little longer than five minutes before exiting back into the service corridor. Due to McGwire's excessive use of "uh" and other syllables for halting language, all audible speech on available recordings is transcribed below.

McGwire: … It’s awesome to be back. Uh, I mean it’s… Visiting the ballpark, uh, was phenomenal. It’s the first time I’ve seen it. Um. It’s, it’s just going to be a joy to go to the ballpark every day to work. Uh, but most importantly I’m just glad they got the [Highway] 64-40 [construction] finished, um, the freeway. That’s the only reason I’m coming back, is because they finally fixed it, and I’d told my wife, as soon as they fixed it, maybe, I’ll get lucky enough to get hired again. So. But, anyways, it’s, it’s, it’s a pleasure to be back, so, um, I’m excited to put the uniform back on.

 

Media: What did you feel as you got that ovation?

 

McGwire: Ah, just, ah—I can’t, I can’t describe it. It’s pretty awesome. Pretty cool. I mean it’s just, my stomach is just, my heart’s beating fast. It’s just, ah, ah… Ya know, the thing is you don’t know what to expect, but it, it was really cool. And, um, that’s why I’ve always said, Best fans in baseball [St. Louis].

 

Media: Mark, do you feel the weight of your shoulders is off the world now, since your announcement?

 

McGwire: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It took some time to a, to a, process it. Like on Monday night, I couldn’t, I couldn’t answer Bob [Costas live on MLB Network television] on that question, because I’ve never been in that situation before. But, uh, now that I’ve had some days to really think about it, and reflect, and to feel that, uh, it’s been lifted off. I had a chance to get this off my chest. Uh, uh, like I said, I, I wish I coulda done this, ya know, five years ago. Uh, we wouldn’t be having this press conference right now. But, uh, I feel a lot better about it inside.

 

Media: Do you think you looked honest, in the Costas interview? [McGwire signals for repeat of question.] Do you believe you looked honest, in the Costas interview?

 

McGwire: Dead honest. That is me. That’s my heart. That is, that is, uhh, something that’s uh—that’s just me. Uh, it’s honest.

 

Media: Do you think [your] coming out like this is gonna change the stain on baseball? It will change obviously the way they look at you—but as far as baseball’s concerned?

 

McGwire: [Clears throat] Well, baseball’s done a fantastic job, uh, uh, doing uh, uh, doing—cracking down on the, the uh, with the… drug policy. Uh, doing the things they’re doing, and they’re, from what I’ve heard, they’re improving, improving it. Um… so, it’s, they’ve done, done a fantastic job. The players association, Bud Selig.

 

Media: Mark, Jose Canseco said that you weren’t telling the truth when you didn’t know what drugs you used. And he named Winstrol, Deca and standard testosterone. Are you familiar with those?

 

McGwire: Ah, those names, yeah. I’m, I’m familiar with ’em, but, ah, like, like I said, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna… ah… I’m not gonna go down that road with, uh, with Jose. And, uh, ya know, I [chuckles]… this, this is just me. And, uh… uh…

 

Media: What about your brother and the FBI though, Mark? What do they—the FBI and your brother both say you used, ya know. And used for performance, and strength?

 

McGwire: Well, uh, well, my, my brother does know. Uh, I don’t know about what to say about the FBI, so…

 

Media: Mark, what’s your response to the comments today by Jack Clark, that you should be banned from baseball and he won’t even shake your hand?

 

McGwire: Nah… Well, I, I heard he said something. I don’t know what he said, but, ya know, like anybody else, hey, listen: Uh, they got their own opinions. Um, I was being as honest, as honest as I am, uh, from the heart. Ah, I got it off my chest, and, uh, it’s, it’s something we can just all move on from.

 

Media: Mark, you said you used HGH once or twice. Why did you only use it once or twice?

 

McGwire: Well that, ya know, again… Uh, uh, with Jose, I’m not gonna go down that road. I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna… I, I’ll take the high road with the Jose stuff, because, uh, that’s just the way I am.

 

Media: Mark, to everybody in there [grand ballroom], kids, you said, Don’t ever go down the road, the road of, uh, steroids. Why did you go down that road?

 

McGwire: Good question… Everybody makes mistakes in their lives. And it’s the biggest regret of my life.

 

Media: Why did you continue to do it, year after year?

 

McGwire: [Pause] I think I answered the other night. It’s the biggest regret of my life.

 

Media: Mark, when you decided that you were gonna make this admission, you knew it would be a huge news story. But, uh [repeating for McGwire], you knew that it would be a huge news story. The reaction and, uh, the news that it’s made: Is it what you expected, is it beyond, or?

 

McGwire: I, I didn’t—ya mean as far as on a national level? Or are ya just talking about just in the [ballroom] there.

 

Media: National.

 

McGwire: National level, I didn’t know what to expect. Um… but, obviously, it’s been big news, and, uh, ya know, me coming forward and, and doing what I did, on my own… And, uh, coming clean… I, I just, I [clicks tongue]… I don’t know what else to say. It’s just, it’s—that was from my heart.

 

Media: Mark, what is the legacy of the Bash Brothers [in Oakland]. What is the legacy of the Bash Brothers now that you have made this admission, and so has Jose?

 

McGwire: Uh, we were teammates. And we, we played on the team. That was about it. We were teammates and, uh… that was really about it.

 

Media: So what should people think about your respective accomplishments, now that you’ve made these admissions?

 

McGwire: That is up to them to make their, uh, their opinion. Umm… that’s, that’s up to them.

 

Media: Why would he [Canseco] still make stuff up, though?

 

McGwire: What’s that?

 

Media: Why would he still make stuff up?

 

McGwire: Ah, you’re gonna have to ask him.

 

Media: Mark, you really didn’t tell Tony [La Russa] that you used steroids?

 

McGwire: Absolutely. Tony had, Tony… Tony La Russa—I kept this to myself. I... Ya know what? I, I spoke from my heart. And I spoke honestly the other night [with Costas]. And, listen: That’s me. And I hope you all can accept this. And let’s all move on from this. Baseball, baseball [speaking over media questions]… Baseball is great right now. Baseball’s better. And let’s just all move on.

 

Media: One more thing, Mark…

 

Brian Bartow, director, Cardinals media relations: Thank you. Thank you.

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Book Excerpt: 'American Public Hardly Blinks at Doping in Football'

Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football
By Matt Chaney
Four Walls Publishing 2009

Book excerpt posted January 11, 2010

The excerpt series for Spiral of Denial culminates in the weeks before Super Bowl 2010 with summaries and conclusions of the book released one year ago

Forget It: Fans, Most Media Don't Care
Football fans and media were incapable of facilitating change in the game. Americans would not protest or fall disinterested in football, unless drugs were removed and mere mortals made to compete. Fans and media were enticed by winning at all costs and drugged-up supermen to stage the play, spill blood. Americans wanted their football, revered cultural tradition, regardless the costs. “You’re talking about some powerful forces,” ex-49ers lineman Charlie Krueger said in 1989, speaking of football injuries and the abuse of pharmaceuticals. “The only people who can change this is the fan, and the fan doesn’t give a damn. The fans don’t care, as long as they get their game. The owners put out a product, and the people want that product.” In decades following Krueger’s comment, market demand for the NFL only ramped up.
            During the 2000s, several popular sports enjoyed retail immunity for issues such as drugs, injuries, and thuggish behavior by athletes, including abuse against women and children. The American public hardly blinked over a succession of sports stars exposed for performance-enhancing drugs, other than to devour the sensational details. By the end of President George W. Bush's second term, a wealth of press coverage established that athletes relied on anabolic steroids, growth hormone, insulin, blood-boosting EPO, amphetamine and cousins, painkillers, and more to compete in football, baseball, track and field, cycling, and other sports. So-called isolated doping was rendered impossible, not only for sport but for the culture at-large. 

Genuine outrage against doping athletes was not discernible. Grandstanding by politicians did not count nor did the booing of Barry Bonds. The mass popularity of sports continued to be measured in huge revenue and audience numbers. “Fan sensibilities have not been offended as much as they’ve been anesthetized,” wrote William C. Rhoden, New York Times.

Sports columnists critiqued public apathy over sports doping. Veteran sportswriter Art Spander did not detect “the slightest bit of interest” among fans. Another long-time scribe, Jim Donaldson, Providence Journal, wrote, “Foremost among the things I’ve learned in more than 30 years of covering sports is that when values are in competition with winning, values almost always lose.”

“If there was ever any doubt that athletes are made of Teflon, as long as they perform, the last few years have proved the point,” wrote Gwen Knapp, San Francisco Chronicle. “They can be charged with rape, exposed as dopers or accused of beating their wives by their own children over 911 calls, and their fans will rally behind them. Often, the adoration just grows stronger, because their heroes have been victimized by the media, or vindictive spouses, or calculating bimbos, or the French.”

“Baseball fans don’t care whether Bonds did or did not use steroids. They don’t care,” stressed Bob Kravitz, Indianapolis Star. “The things the media care about, the things Congress professes to care about, are of no concern to the multitudes who pay to watch Bonds hit baseballs.”

Football, observers noted, had it easier than baseball and individuals such as Bonds and Mark McGwire. “I’m not saying it’s wrong for baseball to come under attack,” said Mark Fainaru-Wada, investigative reporter and co-author of Game of Shadows. “I think the question is whether football’s gotten the attention it’s deserved.” Hank Steinbrenner, Yankees senior vice president, did not understand how football escaped doping scrutiny that dogged baseball. “I don’t like baseball being singled out,” Steinbrenner said. “Everybody that knows sport knows football is tailor-made for performance-enhancing drugs. I don’t know how they managed to skate by. It irritates me. Don’t tell me it’s not more prevalent. The number in football is at least twice as many. Look at the speed and size of those players.” Football fans did notice the game’s increasing sizes, but only to marvel. They preferred not to see anything amiss. “Steroid scandals? After the 2004 Carolina Panthers went to the Super Bowl, it was revealed that several of their players had taken steroids,” wrote Bruce Arthur, of The National Post in Canada. “But that became nothing more than a blip.”

“Nothing in sports seduces Americans the way the National Football League does,” wrote Michael Wilbon, Washington Post, continuing:


The games have become a national sporting prescription, able to divert attention from just about everything that ails athletic competition, from Barry Bonds to Tim Donaghy to Michael Vick. … If it seems as if the NFL is bigger, better, smarter and more relevant, that’s only because it is. People don’t want to hear, particularly, that a Rodney Harrison has been suspended for HGH, or that an assistant coach, Wade Wilson, has been suspended. If a baseball player uses a performance-enhancing substance, he’s a bum and a national disgrace; if a pro football player does it, he’s just trying to, you know, get an edge, be all that he can be.


“It’s a gladiator sport,” said Todd Boyd, sport sociologist at USC. “People may

give a certain amount of slack to football players because there’s this unspoken sense that, in order to play the game well, you need an edge. That’s what people want in a football player. Someone who’s crazy and mean.” Football players were “99.4 percent disposable,” surmised Adam Gold, blogger. “Other than the true superstar players and the guys that hang around for an extended period of time, the players are interchangeable and completely expendable.” Jim Souhan, Minneapolis Star Tribune, observed that “football combines two of the most powerful and popular aspects of modern American life: violence and TV.”  Some football fans were not concerned enough to act against doping.  Dave Pell, self-described “NFL addict,” wrote in an online post:


I don’t want to sound preachy here. But this is a game that is all about rage and violence. We are all sitting in front of the tube waiting for that perfect crushing and violent blow. And if we don’t get it there, we flip on the Playstation and direct animated versions of our favorite players to crash into each other.

Should players take steroids? Of course not. But pretending that the biggest health problem facing NFL players is roids is like holding hearings on the sport of boxing to determine if the corner stools are ergonomically correct.


            Most fans wanted “good” football stories, the happy stuff, and media accommodated, following the Golden Press rule for making fans part of benign, trivial coverage. In turn, most media relished football and avoided stories about steroids and HGH. “Tailgating, and all the fanfare that goes with it, is one of the reasons I love college football,” wrote Lya Wodraska, the Salt Lake Tribune. “But enough about my thoughts; we at The Tribune want to know what yours are.” Wodraska continued:


How is it that one sport can have so many reasons for loving it? Is it the tailgating? All the hoopla that surrounds the sport like the school band, the raucous student sections or the pranks pulled before big rivalry games? Don’t forget that glorious run of bowl games at the end of the year. … There are personal elements, too, like family allegiances and that old college sweatshirt that is faded, stained and threadbare but that you just can’t bear to throw away. Doing so would seem like tossing away all those memories of post-game frat parties or countless Saturdays spent yelling at the TV.


            Writing of the 2007 college team at Utah—where 1970s school officials distributed steroids to athletes and where contemporary teams competed in big-time college football, amid a wealth of evidence for systemic doping—Wodraska asserted that playing football for the Utes was “a refreshing ideal in today’s talk of steroids and contract holdouts, isn’t it?”

Some sportswriters were different, critics in media who saw social ramifications for over-indulgence in football mythology, but fans fired back. When the Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock called steroid users “victims” of drug-sodden sport systems, reader Craig Davis responded in a letter to the editor. “As it is plainly evident, a person is a victim only when acted upon by a force outside of his control…,” Davis wrote. “We don’t care about cheating drug users. Steroid users choose to use, and as such, we have no sympathy whatsoever for them.”

Whitlock, former college football player, had writer allies in empathy for juicing athletes—and in criticism for ostrich fans and media. “We live in a culture that artificially manufactures superheroes, while at the same time wants to be told quick morality tales. It has an insatiable appetite for both,” wrote author Laura Robinson, former Canadian rowing and cycling champion, for The Ottawa Citizen. Fans “must watch because they need men, who, thanks to performance-enhancing drugs are nearly as artificial as someone who comes from the planet of Krypton, to perform modern parables.” Fans demanded “their heroes,” said author David Wallechinsky. “They don’t want a drug scandal. They want to look the other way.”

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Note: The author files many items beyond works cited for this summary passage of book
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Matt Chaney is a journalist, editor, teacher and publisher in Missouri. E-mail him at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information about his book Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the home page at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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Book Excerpt: 'Football Violence Fuels an American Spectacle'


Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football
By Matt Chaney
Four Walls Publishing 2009

Book excerpt posted January 4, 2010

The excerpt series for Spiral of Denial culminates in the weeks before Super Bowl 2010 with summaries and conclusions of the book released one year ago.

The Spectacle

"Football has been so enshrined as a spectator sport, both in college and professionally, that it would be impossible for revisionists to alter it without protests of an almost revolutionary character."
James A. Michener, author, 1976

On occasion when I was a football player, the game's brutality startled me, jerked me awake from the fantasy. During a game in high school, 1976, I witnessed a crushing hit on a kid running the football, an opponent. My teammates drilled him high and low, and the cluster of them went down with his blood-curdling screams. He lay shuddering, holding a leg perfectly still for a compound fracture near the foot. Two white bone shards protruded from his sock slit in ribbons, bloody prongs of fibula and tibia, lower-leg bones, snapped off near their union at the ankle and jabbed through skin.

I was shocked, nauseous instantly.

Then I heard cheering from the stands. Some fans applauded our first-degree assault on a 17-year-old, and my concern began to subside. The moaning kid was carted away to an ambulance, out of sight, and a referee blew his whistle. Play resumed immediately. “Huddle up!” yelled our defensive captain. The shared football fantasy rolled on, for it was strong, resilient enough to easily obscure the life-altering injury for one teen in this game. More seriously injured kids could follow too, and the game would continue until no precious time was left on the clock.

My concern was gone, and a couple series later I sacked the quarterback, ramming into his head as he stumbled, trying to flee another pass rusher. Adrenal sensations shot up my spine and through my head—my first “head rush” on a football field—intense feelings of pleasure, as though floating. My high was narcotic-free, “a natural,” a feeling of reigning over my immediate world, that football field. I knew I couldn’t be stopped. I was tingling, hardly able to wait for the next snap of the football. The experience was power.  Never before had I felt like this, doing anything, anywhere.

The quarterback got up slowly, and my teammates slapped me joyfully. We were awash in victory frenzy, so sweet. The opposing players were mostly older and bigger. They were supposed to beat us, to deny us our crack at the conference championship, but we were flat kicking their asses. We were pounding them. And, for the first time, I heard fans cheering for me, real fans, other than my mom or some goofy girl. Fans adored my play. I wanted more of this entire scene, the physical, mental, and emotional, much more.

Six years later, I was a guided missile in college football, highly aggressive and zeroing in on everyone with my facemask. I meant to knock people unconscious including myself, if necessary to finish a kill. Seeking and destroying opponents was very gratifying for me, exhilarating, as a young man insecure about buckling down to live real manhood, to be truly responsible and productive in my life.

But I couldn’t shake troubling doubt over football, particularly when a severe knee injury ended my 1982 season abruptly, right before the homecoming game. Then I had nine days in a hospital to think about my football reality. I understood the fans for craving some ass-kicking out there. We players wanted that. But I also had to wonder, question, whether I was crazy along with society over this fucking game. I was flat on my back in a hospital bed, my right leg encased in blood-soaked plaster, the first of several casts I would wear for 23 weeks. Just days ago I was Big Man On Campus and on the brink of becoming Football Hero. Now I was headed home to my parents, for a long while, and my mother would have to bathe me again.

            That hospital bed reduced me to sniffling in regret, overcome with self-pity. A sad pastime was watching bloody fluid drip from out the cast, through long tubes sewed-up in my surgical wound—a week after surgery, that tubing was embedded in mending tissue, but apologetic nurses had to yank it out. I sat up yelping, an energy reflex to searing pain.

The nurses also stuck me with needles, constantly. But, what the hell. By then I could recall using needles to inject myself with anabolic steroids.

Jesus, why did I play football?

*       *       *       *       *       *       *

In 1983, Dr. Michael Oriard, a young academic critiquing football as spectacle in America, stirred controversy in writing a guest commentary for the New York Times. Oriard contended that violence and casualties were football’s base attraction, for fans and players alike. Americans wanted brutality packaged as sanitary before their very eyes. Football was mere violence but sanctioned, seemingly benign, revered and consumed by the culture as a civilized pastime. “Injuries are not aberrations in football, or even a regrettable byproduct,” Oriard wrote. “They are essential to the game.” Oriard did not need his Ph.D. to make the connection; as a former NFL and Notre Dame lineman, he had long understood the culture’s obsession with spectacular, bloody football. In boyhood Oriard experienced “intense pleasure” from the game’s physical contact, smashing other kids.

Former football players speaking out like Oriard had faced society’s reaction, which was typically unfavorable. Americans, they found, really did not want to hear about any problem of consequence in the game. Media and fans constantly discussed and argued the trivial, such as a referee’s call, a coach's ability to win, a player's contract holdout, but their desire and energy vaporized for addressing big-picture troubles. Most Americans avoided making a public issue about any problem of football, so Oriard drew criticism for his Times viewpoint. Football organizers and fans wanted to dismiss him as a malcontent, just another former player harboring a grudge. At least one person reacted by writing a letter to the newspaper.

David Jenkins, self-described as “a British import” and obviously still learning about American football, believed that a player always controlled his own health. Jenkins, ignorant of coaches' control, saw a player as “a fool to himself” for risking injury, “especially when 30 of his colleagues on the sidelines can replace him.” Jenkins' remedy was to abolish the helmet, “the main injury-causing weapon.” This fan saw Oriard as causing more harm than good for football. “Injuries are not ‘essential to the game,’ and are not in any other game either,” Jenkins opined. “Such a disturbing attitude as Mr. Oriard’s can only encourage reckless and brutal behavior on the field.”

Oriard responded to Jenkins: “Rather than simply condemn or defend sports like football, I wanted primarily to point out a cultural dilemma: We can’t have sports whose appeal depends in part on their participants’ physical courage without accepting the consequences—frequent injuries.” Reform to eliminate injuries, Oriard noted, was out of the question for football. That “would require rule changes that remove physical risk altogether,” he observed. “I cannot imagine that happening without a profound change in the entire culture. Rule makers are very conscious of what fans want.”

Jenkins' fantasy of American football aside, the oblivious Brit wanted the same as every fan and player. Physical risk, in fact, was football's initial allure for the boy Mike Oriard.

Growing up a Baby Boomer in the Northwest, Oriard discovered the game in typical fashion for the young male. Football was a social force around his native Spokane, for all ages, and the game and its scenes made profound impressions on the boy. A gifted youth, Mike excelled intellectually as well as physically. He competed hard in school, amassing straight A’s, and his motivation for football was likewise powerful. “From the very beginning, football was more than a game,” Oriard recalled in his 1982 autobiography, End of Autumn. “Softball and tag and red rover and kickball were games. Football was something more.”

The game was no make-believe for a youth who attempted it. Football posed physical confrontations at high speed, blocking, tackling, and running with the ball, and Mike discovered the consequences were real and immediate. Exhilaration and pain occurred often in the same instant, such as when scoring a touchdown while getting hammered by tacklers. Football confronted young Mike in his perception of masculinity, and he strove to meet the challenge, to prove his manhood. He succeeded, at least in becoming respected, even feared, on a football field.
            Mike first played "sandlot" football in his neighborhood, open games among boys in vacant lots and yards. Tall for a 7-year-old, Mike faced older boys in sandlot, and while he took some lumps, he won enough collisions to become smitten with the thrills. Football affirmed Mike's self-worth differently than other games, through legitimate drama. "Scoring a touchdown was a real event that required no pretending to be meaningful," Oriard wrote. The game "grabbed my imagination and deepest longings in ways baseball never did. Football players seemed to me braver, more heroic, than other athletes."
           
In 1993, Dr. Michael Oriard, professor of English at Oregon State University, released his Reading Football: How The Popular Press Created an American Spectacle. A qualitative study, the book clearly identified football’s cultural power. The lifeblood of this sport, Oriard had discovered, lay in its grand storylines produced by mass media, typically more myth than hard fact, and consumed by Americans for more than a century. Oriard achieved the book's scholarship through Herculean reading and analysis of old football stories and illustrations by the thousands, dating to the founding of the sport at elite college campuses following the Civil War.

Imperative to football's establishment in America during the latter 1800s, Oriard found, was its ability to serve as a “major cultural text,” or a perpetual drama of recurring media themes that overall served as feel-good mythology for the country. The print stories had to be compiled and delivered in tasty versions of the reality on the field, a game of violent moments, often thrilling, broken repeatedly by boring stretches. Football, therefore, became the great American spectacle, thanks especially to the Golden Press. The newspapers and magazines capitalized on special content possibilities offered by the sport, producing the stories to spawn enduring football fantasy. “That the popular press was primary, the game itself secondary, in football’s extraordinarily rapid emergence as a popular spectacle and cultural force is one of the inescapable conclusions of my inquiry,” Oriard summarized. For marketable content, “the games themselves are authentic in ways that no commodity can be,” he observed, adding, “Those who describe professional football players as 'entertainers'—a familiar claim—ignore the fact that their injuries are real, their careers short, their livelihoods at stake when they play. ... Fans know the difference between football games and movies.”

Football fans did anticipate the violence but wanted positive meanings attached to the bloody acts, and football writers obliged the masses willingly, loving the game as fans themselves. They sought to rationalize the carnage too, and developed popular themes to serve the purpose. In media stories, football really was not violent in the depraved sense; rather, it was Necessary Roughness for a boy or young man, a strenuous physical activity that built character, even if it tore apart his body. A coach was not a tyrant, not a sadist; rather, he represented Coaching Genius, a moral leader who taught and motivated young men to perform and achieve as a team—a widely popular storyline for industrializing America. In addition, a football player was not a thug; he was Gladiator Hero, exhibiting positive qualities every young male should emulate. Fans, moreover, needed to feel good in their role, so the media portrayed football as Social Event for Americans, a must-see, wholesome, patriotic happening—not a public bloodletting.
*       *       *       *       *       *       *
In just four months, six former NFL players died in their 40s of natural causes, from Christmas 2004 through mid-April 2005: Reggie White, Charles Martin, Reggie Roby, Todd Bell, David Little, and Sam Mills. Ailments included heart disease and cancer. Doping expert Steve Courson, a former NFL lineman, had his suspicions in considering the dead as a group, particularly because all had played as large specimens for their frames. The giantism of modern football concerned him foremost, body with excessive mass ranging to 150 percent above recommended weight on the Body Mass Index scale.
            Regardless how added weight was acquired, and whether it be fat or muscle, Courson was sure health consequences and even death were becoming manifest in some players, retired and active. "What I fear about the NFL, the bodies are just going to implode," he said. "Especially now that we're on the doorstep of genetic engineering. We're walking into a very scary bio-technical world." The modern game's terrible contact injuries had to be expected, Courson said. "The size and speed denominators are just getting nuts. Modern training combined with the advances in pharmacology, you're creating missiles and weapons of a different dimension."
            Courson predicted a collision death for contemporary pro football, and exactly one week later it happened, claiming a 26-year-old player in the Arena Football League.

            Sunday afternoon, April 10, 2005, the Los Angeles Avengers hosted the New York Dragons before 11,000 spectators in the Staples Center. During a first-quarter kickoff, Avengers lineman and team leader Al Lucas, 6-foot-1, 300 pounds, was struck in the head while making a tackle. Lucas lay motionless with a severed spinal cord as trainers and medical personnel tended to him. Worried teammates looked on, some kneeling in prayer. After 10 minutes on the carpet, Lucas, a husband and father, was immobilized and removed from the field.

Football reality thusly witnessed, play resumed immediately, the shared fantasy rolling on in the arena. A referee blew his whistle, two teams huddled up, and fans awaited the next snap. The Spectacle was so strong.

Around halftime of the game in progress, Lucas was pronounced dead at a hospital in Los Angeles. Later, the Avengers won, 66-35, and Lucas' teammates were finally informed of his passing, “creating a tearful scene in the corridors outside the locker room, with players and employees leaving the arena dazed by the news,” reported Chris Foster for the Los Angeles Times.

“I just wish this was a bad dream,” said Avengers receiver Tony Locke. “I want it to be over.”
References
Arena Death. (2005, April 11). Football player dies during Arena game. Kansas City Star, p. C2.

Courson, S. (2005, March 27). Telephone interview with author.

Courson, S. (2005, April 3). Telephone interview with author.
Flaccus, G. (2005, April 12). Avengers teammates remember Al Lucas. The Associated Press [Online].

Foster, C. (2005, April 11). Arena football player dies after injury. Los Angeles Times [Online].

Jenkins, D. (1983, December 11). Letter to editor. New York Times, p. 5—2.

Michener, J. (1976). Sports in America. New York: Random House.

Mueller, F.O., & Diehl, J.L. (2004). Annual survey of football injury research. Chapel Hill, NC: National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. [Online].

Oriard, M. (1982). End of Autumn. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Oriard, M. (1983, November 20). Why football injuries remain a part of the game.  New York Times [Online].

Oriard, M. (1983, December 11). Response to letter to editor. New York Times [Online].

Oriard, M. (1993). Reading Football. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.
Telander, R. (1989). The hundred yard lie.  New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Matt Chaney is a journalist, editor, teacher and publisher in Missouri. E-mail him at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information about his book, Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the home page at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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Whoring Jocks Challenge Halting Sportswriters

Sport Iconoclast
Smacking fantasy of athletics

By Matt Chaney
Posted December 14, 2009
 
Old Problem Demands Modern Response by Sport Media


When Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez were publicly accused for performance-enhancing drugs in separate cases, sportswriters gave 'em hell, righteously, but many media overlooked revelations of extramarital affairs by these baseball icons.

Generally, sportswriters have always ignored jocks gone wild on sex.

The problem of whoring athletes only recently incited palpable national disgust, with PGA superstar Tiger Woods the trigger culprit. But blame the sport media too, or the "toy department" of news, which has shirked proper journalistic response on events spanning centuries.

Consider the erstwhile college football team that partied hearty in New York, celebrating victory in a big holiday game. The gang went wild along Fifth Avenue, where the "tipsy" football  players "chased" a lone "tenderloin lassie," as a witness reporter would characterize the incident.
 
The "singing and whooping" players herded the fleeing woman down the block, "half hoisting her" and "half hugging her," per the writer's words. At the corner she was snatched up and carried west on 23rd Street, before a "rough tug" tore away a piece of her petticoat. "There was a wild scrimmage for the trophy, and in the set-to the leader let go of her and she escaped."

Fun for the football players, not the harried woman.
 
The time was Thanksgiving 1892, when media already designated females as adornments in football's world, as sex objects for athletes and fans, according to modern findings by cultural analyst Dr. Michael Oriard, professor of English at Oregon State University. A former college and pro football player, Oriard analyzes thousands of football texts from the Victorian Era to present.  

Print coverage was extensive for that holiday game in New York, with an army of scribes waxing in prose for newspapers and magazines. Several surely witnessed the football players' wilding along Fifth Avenue, mobbing the female target, but only the one writer mentioned it. Oriard observed, "This near-rape of a 'tenderloin lassie' by the privileged sons of Yale and Princeton did not appear in other reports on the game."
 
Woods, meanwhile, has enjoyed privilege with contemporary scribes that lingered past the ridiculous auto crash outside his Orlando mansion on November 27. Although Woods' initial excuse stunk badly, posted on his Web site, many sportswriters proclaimed he still deserved benefit of doubt.

Never mind, other media ran with the story, cyber writers along with a few sport reporters, and today the fraudulent mythology of Tiger stands properly debunked in public.
 
Now we know this husband and father kept numerous mistresses while cashing hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsement fees--a fortune gained in part for his misleading public image as devoted family man, perpetuated by news media.
 
Yet some writers, commentators and editors will persist in classifying an athlete's infidelity as private business, even for a Tiger Woods. A jock must behave horribly with sex to draw any response from them.

Such self-imposed media obliviousness isn't lost on male athletes, who become savvy early as high school. "We know, as athletes, when 'it' begins," said former NFL player Darryl Henley. "It is when you know you are good enough to get away with stuff--and make no mistake, the better you are, the more you get away with."
 
Henley spoke as an inmate at federal prison, serving a 41-year sentence for drug trafficking and murder conspiracy, during a 1998 interview with authors Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger. Their subsequent investigative book, Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in The NFL, is a mind-blowing account of jock mayhem that includes crimes against women like robberies, beatings and rapes.
 
The incidents were downplayed as news or left off sportspages entirely, and some female victims didn't bother to notify justice systems that favored local athletes and teams. Most sportswriters also managed to bypass this important book, although some noticed enough to gripe and dismiss Pros and Cons as exaggerated reality. The documented victims could be damned.

I recall sportswriting in the 1980s and 1990s, when most media viewed anabolic-steroid use as personal troubles for isolated athletes. Editors told me the topic was stale news, even then. Sport organizations had no real culpability for steroids, according to prevailing media attitude, and there was no public issue.
 
Translation: Media were loathe to probe and criticize juicing jocks and doped games just a decade ago, however widespread and apparent the PED abuse. Today we know how well that approach worked out.

In the same period, I covered enough of Major League Baseball to see and hear of rampant sexual activity by married players.
 
One Cardinals star was blatant with mistresses while raking in endorsements based on his wholesome image, courtesy of sportswriters. At spring training, following a day game at Al Lang Stadium in St. Petersburg, I saw this athlete kiss his wife and sons goodbye then head across the street to the Hilton, where he joined a young woman waiting in the lobby. They walked out the front door together, 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and departed in his luxury convertible while looking on were scribes, photogs and fans. Later the player's wife divorced him, their family devastated by the truth.

A retired Cardinals star, married with grandchildren, was rumored to prefer young sex toys, as in girls, teens. He was a crude old bastard and self-indulgent, capable of rude callousness toward fans and media--a classic ingrate of big-time sport--and I could see him as a pervert. I'd known male coaches like him in high school and college.

I also found that bachelor pro athletes could take whoring to extreme, in part because they knew we media wouldn't report it.
 
By 2000, Chiefs football star Derrick Thomas was worshipped in Kansas City. Thousands of adults and children wore his familiar jersey, No. 58. But Thomas died of complications following an auto accident, spurring Kansas City's shocking discovery he had fathered seven children out of wedlock with five women. In addition, most of the millions Thomas had earned in pro football were gone, squandered largely on material pleasures.

Local media had inflated Thomas' public image for a decade, grossly overplaying his good character while consistently burying his glaring faults, and the ill-informed public was angry in his wake. Media, suddenly on defense, suggested or flatly stated the late athlete's sex life was a private matter.

I couldn't go along anymore, striving myself to properly report both positives and negatives about athletes and games. Then a report of possible sexual assault by college basketball players landed in my lap, involving a 19-year-old coed who told police she was gang-raped in a dark dormitory room. The sex began as consensual with one player, she said, but others joined in against her will.
 
I remembered a chilling story involving my college football team in the early 1980s. Around 1990, a former female athlete of the university told me she'd been raped by a former teammate of mine in the jock dormitory. The perp was handsome, seemingly nice, and she'd gone to his room as a naive freshman, anticipating kisses and hugs instead of the brutal attack.
 
"Why didn't you report it?" I responded, angry with him and sorry for her.

"I didn't think anyone would deal with it," she said.

I couldn't dispute her. Local sportswriters definitely would have ignored her plight.

Thus, years later, I was determined to make a difference in the case of coed and basketball players. The investigating police officer saw evidence of sexual assault and was hopeful my coverage would lead to new information. But officials and boosters of the college, led by its female president, influenced an editor of mine to ensure the story died quickly.
 
My news report was hijacked after I filed it. The editor took over, deleting solid information and rewriting other passages to absolve the school of responsibility and the athletes of criminal wrongdoing. And he published my byline atop the front-page story!
 
The female accuser was stunned by the news account, feeling discredited and alone, and she dropped pursuit of a criminal investigation.

The editor's audacity enraged me, and I confronted him to vent and offer my resignation. He apologized, persuaded me to stay on, but our rift was wide and within months I left the newspaper and daily sportswriting for good.

Sport media go on, and my journalistic type remains scarce in the business. Nevertheless, public issues continue to fester around athletes and games, legit news that cannot be ignored in this age of instantaneous information, events including wanton sex by jocks.

Sportswriters may reject news criteria qualifying infidelity for a celebrity jock--whoring around by Tiger Woods is major news, undeniably--but mainstream scribes have to heed their competition for scoop.

"The sports media are caught betwixt and between," veteran sportswriter Frank Deford commented for www.npr.org. "In the innocent past, it was rather a gentleman's rule of thumb that an athlete's off-the-field behavior should not be the subject of coverage unless it appeared to affect his performance on the field. ...
 
"But as the tabloids widen their reach into sports, it may be rather more difficult for sportswriters to keep on ceding a part of their beat to the celebrity hounds."

E-mail: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For information about his 2009 book, Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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Courson Perspective Ever Fresh for Doping in NFL, Culture

Steve Courson, an offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 1977-85, was America's first professional athlete to fully disclose use of anabolic steroids for performance. Courson voluntarily told his story to Sports Illustrated almost 25 years ago as an active NFL player, detailing his juicing on 'roids from NCAA football into the league, then was blackballed from the game. Only a handful of elite athletes since Courson are comparable for open honesty in the issue; he spoke whole truth as he knew it, short of naming individuals.

By Matt Chaney

Posted November 24, 2009

For this writing I remember a fine friend in Steve Courson, who died in a tree-cutting accident on November 10, 2005, at age 50. As in sudden death, questions go unanswered for family and friends of Steve, particularly for his future lost. He was an extraordinary individual, vibrant and talented.

But no one has to wonder what Steve would say today about drugs in sport, the contemporary headlines of the issue he ruled.

Steve would let rip with the same talking points he'd built and honed by the final year of his life. After 20 years working the public debate over sport doping, he was expert like no other, with honesty and multi-experience keeping him at vortex of the volatile issue.

He began with simple anabolic-steroid use in major-college football, 1974, a teenager bent on winning, handed a doctor's prescription for Dianabol pills paid by the University of South Carolina. Steve graduated to studious abuse of steroids in pro football, injections within drug combinations, and he blew open the NFL's worst-kept secret in 1985: Unflinchingly, Steve discussed his steroid aid and football's systemic problem for a milestone story in Sports Illustrated, then the world's premier sporting publication.

Summarily tossed from the league, Steve was forced into retirement at age 31, but soon a devastating problem emerged: Doctors diagnosed him with dilated cardiomyopathy, damage to the heart's intricate muscle fibers. Steve suspected football lifestyle had spurred his grave illness, including steroid abuse, maniacal exertion, massive weight gain and alcohol abuse, and doctors placed him on a heart-transplant list for years.

As Steve fought through a slow recovery, he continued study of sport doping, meticulously documenting his argument for writings, speeches and media quotes. He saw a doping epidemic in American football, but pointed to a larger problem, pandemic in scope, the human embrace of drugs and more synthetics for enhancing physical performance and image. Twenty years ago, Steve charged the grandest hypocrisy lay in cultural affinity to blame mere individuals, a dangerous denial prone to manifest in ugly spectacles such as media and lawmaker floggings of the few athletes exposed for muscle doping.
 
He met teens and parents on a speaking circuit, informing them about PEDs, attesting to inherent risks for mind and body. All the while he existed barely above poverty level, beset by medical bills while losing $500,000 in bad investments. He was obese and in fragile state, bloated above 300 pounds due to medical procedures and inability to exercise stressfully.

Steve testified for Congress a first time in 1989, and he penned journal articles and book chapters on drug history in sport. In 1991 he produced False Glory [Longmeadow Press], his first-person account of brutal personal compromise for excelling in football--such as the athlete's submission to drug use. The book was critically acclaimed but didn't sell well, lacking tell-all sensationalism because Steve wouldn't name his drug cohorts in football, including superstars. He received just a few thousand dollars for years of book research and writing.

Steve regained health, year by year. Eventually doctors removed him from the transplant list, and they declared his condition completely reversed in 2004. With a clean bill of health, not to mention an incredibly cut body at 245 pounds, Steve proudly ended his modest disability compensation from the NFL and players union.

Meanwhile, Steve gained overdue recognition as a foremost expert on doping, while BALCO revelations led a torrent of scandalous news about athletes, actors, musicians, police officers and more public figures. Steve was a busy man in 2005, writing, speaking, granting interviews, and he testified on Capitol Hill for a final time.

Steve and I conversed frequently that year, mostly via telephone and daily in some stretches. Periodically, I interviewed him on-record for my book on muscle drugs in football, taping about 20 hours of discussion between us. I had much in common with Steve, as a former steroid user in college football [1982, Southeast Missouri State] who had also moved into study, writing and speaking openly on the problem.  

This essay features Steve's perspective on doping topics at end of his life, culled from interviews with me. Most comments were previously unpublished, with a portion appearing in my recent book, Spiral of Denial

Steve's views resonate today, relevant yet, and that is in part for his expertise, a credit to him. But their power also lives because nothing has reversed rampant doping in Steve's wake, and that is discredit to human nature.
 
Steve's on-record comments are juxtaposed with current doping events or scandal springing from the same maladies of his time. Topics include the following: invalid testing or useless anti-doping; undetectable substances like human growth hormone and low-dose testosterone; health and disability; obfuscation by officials in sport and anti-doping; hedged insider confessions or acknowledgments, and outright denial by athletes, media and fans; and future implosion for the football institution over player sizes, drugs, secrecy, medical costs and liability. Steve does empathize for the athlete's dilemma with PEDs, for his life demonstrates honesty can imperil more than a jock's personal sporting legend.
 
Timely comments even cover Mark McGwire, who's spent most this decade in seclusion, evading questions about his apparent doping in baseball. Steve's insider advice is still useful to McGwire, particularly for the disgraced slugger's pending news conference, certain to be a fiery reentry to public life as Cardinals hitting coach.

Truth and denial
In 2005 Steve Courson loved the comedy parade of lying athletes, their outrageous denials against allegations or queries regarding performance-enhancing substances. Steve's voice and laugh were deep, booming within a closed room, and he roared at baseball star Sammy Sosa's televised act before Congress, when the outgoing Dominican suddenly got quiet, halting at steroid questions under oath, nervously twiddling pages of his prop English primer.

Steve anticipated the Sosa reaction for typical juicing jocks caught red-handed, their mumbling and stammering in acknowledgments that were incomplete, dubious, nonsensical or downright silly. "When you look at all the people who have talked about this...," Steve said, "it's either they did it for an injury; they didn't realize it was a steroid; it was a [tainted] supplement; or they just did it once. I mean, they're at the point of looking ridiculous."

Steve would howl at today's clownish stars of the so-called full confessional, like Andy Pettitte, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz in baseball. Whining and crying about "making a mistake" with PEDs have gained popularity among athletes, especially those facing public pressure based on strong evidence of guilt. Jocks might only vaguely recall their doping, yet they reap public-relations return by deflating scandal.
 
But flimsy excuses, Steve would actually understand. He didn't condemn an active athlete for evasion or outright denial. Foremost, Steve contended the modern athlete turns to PEDs for merely competing in a drug-soaked environment.

Besides, openness was hazardous. In strictly pragmatic terms, Steve recommended the tainted athlete to decline comment, reveal nothing for career sake--or opt for that fake contrition by issuing cheesy excuse and apology. Steve used himself as example for honesty's consequences, his lost opportunity and finances over speaking out that provoked football forces and their tentacle influence throughout society.
 
"I've gone through 20 years of bullshit, for speaking just the truth," he said a few months before his death. "And it's the truth that everyone knew. I'm still trying to figure out what happened. ... What about punishing teams for the discretions of their players? Because don't be foolish enough to believe their coaches don't know."

Image preservation for the lying or evasive athlete, Steve insisted, is motivated by security concern as much as ego or vanity. And within doping hysteria of 2000s America, the user athlete must worry about grand juries, criminal charges, and summons by politicians to testify. Just a few celebrity athletes caught doping feed the political processes for years.
 
"We realize that we live in a very image-conscious society," Steve said, "and nowhere in society is image more paramount than the world of sport. It's everything, for whatever reason, and nobody wants to compromise his image because of the stigma associated with steroid use."
 
Sport and society trash individual athletes who get caught as "part of the institutional strategy," Steve said. "Basically, the theory of 'a few bad apples' has been historically employed as sports propaganda. Therefore, when you consider all those factors, and then you combine 'em with the fact that, as of 1990, [steroids are] against the law, and the huge money involved, [denial] shouldn't surprise anybody."   

However, Steve wouldn't have done differently than in spring 1985, when SI investigator reporter Jill Lieber called him cold to ask whether he used steroids. In 2005, he still would've answered, "Yes."  

"I look at it this way...," he recalled. "Here I was, responding to my [football] environment, and I had the love-hate relationship with the drugs. I loved what they did for my training, but I hated compromising myself to a system where I felt I had to do it to retain my employment. ... I felt like I was in no-man's land. I just felt caught."

Steve wasn't subject to steroid punishment by the NFL; the league hadn't yet devised a policy. But he was bound by the game's code of silence, especially regarding widespread steroid use, and he was sick of it.

"The game is full of compromises," he said. "We compromise ourselves when we go to training camp. We'd rather be at the beach. We compromise when we have some jerk-off coach run you down in front of your teammates, humiliate you, because it's all part of making the team better, and you hold yourself back. You compromise when they stick the pain-killing needle into your knee when they need you to play. So the drugs are just another compromise."

"And, for me in 1985, I make all those compromises to play that game, and then I'm starting to have some health problems. ... I'm caught between these extremes here, and now I'm being asked to tell the truth about this. I'll compromise to a point, but I'm not going to lie about it. I was willing to compromise to do what I did, use the anabolic drugs."
 
"I would do all that for them [the NFL], but not lie for them."
 
User rationale
"To be honest, I liked playing football," Steve said in 2005. "Despite all the bullshit, I liked the game, you know. There's something about it; personally, it was the camaraderie, and the challenge of it. ... That continued to drive me to use the drugs, even though I got to the point where I didn't want to do 'em. I never really was that crazy about doing 'em, but then again... you invest all that time. You pour yourself totally into that game, it's real hard to step back."

"I think the big thing is--and what really gets obscured in all this, as far as athletes--athletes respond to their environment. If you look at my drug use throughout my career, I responded to my environment and my challenges. ... When you talk to most athletes, nobody likes [PEDs] but they feel they have to. And I think that is pretty universal."
 
Entering college football at age 17, Steve was already a wonder of genetics and work ethic, a great package of speed, power and size at 6-foot-2, 230 pounds, with 4.7-second time in the 40-yard dash. But he still needed drug augmentation, to succeed as a lineman in the big time.

A self-taught weightlifter in the 1960s and early 1970s, Steve bench-pressed 400 pounds as a senior in high school  Then, at South Carolina, "I was just thrust into an environment where I was up against bigger, older guys, as a young kid," he said. "I knew I had to get bigger to do what I needed to do... . By the time I got to SC, strength-wise I'd pretty much hit the wall. I could've gotten bigger over time when I was in college, but I probably only would've gained 10 more pounds."

Encouraged toward steroids by a young assistant coach, Steve did only a six-week cycle of standard 5-milligram Dianabol tablets, therapeutic dosage, while training intensely and gorging on food. His genetically gifted body really responded to the drugs; his 40 time improved to 4.5, his bench press increased 50 pounds, and his weight expanded 30 to a size, mostly lean mass, that he maintained the rest of college football.

He upped the cycle of D-bol in the summer 1977, as a fifth-round draft pick of the Steelers, consuming one 15-mg tab daily for six weeks. "The second cycle, which I thought was huge at the time, I was so naive; that was less than a lot of women sprinters use today. So, in retrospect, I was near a 500-pound bench [press] with dosages of steroids that were actually minuscule."

"And when did my drug use take the next big leaps? When I was competing in the NFL strong-man competitions. Then, toward the end of my career, being regarded as one of the stronger players and competing in powerlifting."
 
By 1982 Steve was versed in steroid how-to information and had gathered anecdotal advice from juicers throughout football and weightlifting. He stacked multiple injectable and oral steroids in protocols considered state-of-art for the time, with his body weight reaching 285 pounds for the Steelers and his bench press around 575. With 405 on the bar, he cranked out 14 repetitions.

I asked Steve: "You never felt you were getting that far ahead of anybody? Your increasing use of steroids, to the point of abuse, was a response to your escalating environments?"

He laughed. "Well, part of it was response, but response in wanting to dominate. I was not there to bring up the trail."

"And who is content to be just an NFL special-teams guy, or third-teamer?" I suggested.

No one, Steve affirmed. "That's why unless they develop a testing technology that's foolproof, don't even think those drugs are going anywhere."

Steve didn't believe valid testing was possible without a fortune in funding for research and development. In 1989 he told Congress that doping's popular solution of the moment, random urinalysis, couldn't work effectively against techniques such as undetectable HGH, low-dose testosterone and designer steroids. During that period, Steve advocated open use of muscle drugs for elite athletes, under doctor supervision, but later abandoned the stance for concern about teenagers and modeling effect. 

By 2005, Steve saw steroids as having saturated prep football, based on evidence that included invalid prevention, Internet accessibility, street dealers, and news reports. Moreover, he privately discussed the matter with teens, parents and coaches.

"Today, it starts in high school," he said. "[Teen players] learn about the drugs and how they work. Then they learn about beating detection in college football, and by the time any get to the NFL, they've learned how to be tested and they know the score."

Invalid testing, red herring of anti-doping

The stark fact of sport doping in continuum, now spanning generations of competitors such as fathers and sons in football, is that higher-aspiring athletes are confronted by the question of whether to employ anabolic steroids and more tissue-building hormones.

The athlete's drug dilemma typically begins in teen years, during high school, and always by college. Often a parent, relative or family friend is the persuasive informant and first source for muscle drugs, primarily steroids and costly HGH, according to news reports and information I've gathered for years from witnesses speaking off-record.

Yet America wants to believe that testing is effective against muscle doping in sport, particularly beloved football, our cultural religion of brute violence most conducive to drug use.

And America tries to frame the doping football player within a familiar, foolish stereotype: the isolated individual committed to cheating against the large majority dedicated to fair play--or the majority afraid to juice because testing is so effective, as testing promoters spin it. This dangerous misconception has been nurtured along by the officials of anti-doping, or sport organizers and testing contractors, since advent of steroid urinalysis at the 1976 Olympic Games.
 
In football and all sport, steroid testing is a false hope that serves to absolve the system, blame players alone, and promote societal denial.

Meanwhile, muscle drugs roll on in football, a half-century since Dianabol's release, sweeping up new young players annually by the thousands, all levels. Guys keep getting bigger, deadlier for themselves as well as peers, and Steve wouldn't be surprised.

"The industry wants athletes to compete in a win-at-all-costs environment, which means they're gonna take drugs, yet pretend that they're not," he said in 2005. 

Steve believed, as I do, that athletes would overwhelmingly support valid anti-doping--including monitoring that invaded their privacy such as year-round testing--as long as the vast majority could truly play clean and compete. That's impossible, unfortunately, for the near term and likely forever.
 
Conventional testing is unequivocally fault-ridden, subject to methods of evasion that include timing patented steroids around scanning periods, or employing undetectable substances year-round. Low-dose testosterone and growth hormone fly under screening.
 
The so-called HGH blood test ballyhooed by Olympic and WADA officials is woefully inadequate, say experts, for problems such as high cost and a detection window of only hours following an athlete's use. More methodological cracks are unlikely to withstand a court challenge, particularly the test's lack of vetting by independent scientists. The prominent naysayers include two testing experts associated with WADA, Dr. Don Catlin and Dr. Peter Sonksen. Indeed, WADA hasn't announced one suspension for HGH despite years of blood sampling among thousands of Olympic athletes.  

Unknown designer steroids are undoubtedly in circulation, with anti-doping authorities having identified about three in a quarter-century of the ghostly drugs. Catlin calculates 2,000 varieties are possible. 

And the grandiose, expensive, struggling new initiative of blood-profiling, purported to identify drug use without reliance on chemical or bio signatures, offers no potential for helping the masses of amateur athletes. Even if such monitoring works effectively and can overcome legal challenges--critics say likely not on both counts--it is cost-prohibitive for employment among a vast population such as American football, which includes about 1.5 million teen players scattered among 15,000 school districts.

Bottom line in football, anti-doping does not protect the player from drugged rivals, despite the 1994 California court ruling that testing must ensure athletes' safety and competitive fairness--the compelling mission that appellate judges determined supersedes individual right of privacy.

HGH in football
Growth hormone was used in NFL and NCAA football by 1985, players later reported, but Steve didn't encounter it until after retiring. "It was late '87, beginning of '88. I was training because I was thinking about pro wrestling. I was hittin' the gym and hittin' [steroids] again, and I would periodically run into some of the current players. Through interaction with them, I was clued in that some were using HGH. That was the first time they were facing non-punitive drug testing in the NFL."

"From what I understand, growth hormone works better when you supplement it with an androgen like testosterone." Steve noted the 2000s Carolina Panthers players who received HGH and steroids from Dr. James Shorrt, the South Carolina physician convicted of illegal dispensing and sentenced to a year in prison. During football season, Shortt provided some Panthers with multiple units of testosterone cream, which helps defeat testing on only hours' notice.

Low-dose testosterone and HGH are the most desired combination for beating testing in the NFL and NCAA football, according to news accounts, off-record sources of mine, and those whom Steve regularly consulted. In the cyber chat world, steroid forums, posters identify themselves as NCAA players and discuss "test" and "growth" for circumventing drug scans, among methods. Prep players join in, asking questions. 

This only reflects culture, again. These days I meet many Average Joes on the juice for looks, weight loss, health, whatever they rationalize. They range in age from 20 to 50-somethings. I haven't juiced again since one steroid cycle in college ball, and I'm content with my body today at 6-2 and a solid 190. I diet well and still work out strenuously, despite hindrance of football injuries.

But in 20 years I'll hopefully reach 70 years old, and ask me then what I might try for hormone replacement and muscle restoration. Heck, ask me in 10 years, at age 60.
 
Many old footballers like the juice for hormone replacement, feeling younger and healthy, they believe. And synthetic or "recombinant" HGH is favored, as a biosimilar or DNA clone, versus synthetic testosterone and anabolic steroids considered harsher reacting.

Anonymous inside sources of mine and those Steve consulted contend many NFL retirees inject muscle drugs after their playing days, including some TV broadcasters, and published reports support the grapevine talk. Former lineman Brad Leggett and Ed Lothamer openly discussed their HGH use with journalists, and former quarterback Wade Wilson confirmed use after police disclosed his purchase from Internet dealers. In 2006, then-Steelers physician Dr. Richard A. Rydze purchased large HGH quantities from a cyber pharmacy, and investigators said an NFL retiree was mentioned among Rydze's clients for the drug, according to reporter Mike Fish of ESPN.com. Police probes also fingered active and injured players for acquiring HGH online: safety Rodney Harrison and quarterback Tim Couch.
 
Rumors of active players swirl about the anti-aging industry, and Steve heard names while looking into legal prescriptions of HGH and testosterone for himself in 2003. He was 48 in age, 15 years removed from his last cycle of steroids. "I was contemplating hormone-replacement therapy as a way to reverse the last of my cardiomyopathy," he said. "I talked to an anti-aging clinic not too far from me [in western Pennsylvania], and their main headquarters was in Palm Springs. I was testing the waters and getting information, still trying to make up my mind if I wanted to do this, before I decided against it.

"Well, in having a phone conversation with one of the main honchos in Palm Springs... he mentioned off-the-cuff a couple NFL [active] guys that they were providing with growth hormone. They were his clients. He said it real nonchalantly and they were big names. We're talkin' major names."

For decades NFL officials and players tried to deny growth-hormone use in the league, despite no test and mass marketing of the synthetic versions. Only a few players publicly alleged a problem existed, notably Howie Long, All-Pro defensive lineman of the 1980s and early '90s.
 
Official rhetoric has altered slightly under commissioner Roger Goodell, who succeeded Paul Tagliabue in 2006, but players and management stick to humorous claims. Union president Troy Vincent said genetic wonders inhabit the league, not juicers, suggesting baseball has more growth-hormone users than pro football.

Goodell says he doesn't believe significant use occurs in the NFL, and currently he explores the possibility of outsourcing league testing to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, WADA's American arm. The possibility is intriguing on several fronts, including that USADA utilizes the toothless test for HGH, which could obscure pro football's problem by churning out false-negative results, or data insufficient for withstanding legal challenge from affluent jocks. 

Steve recognized the politics going down four years ago, when congressional heavies like Rep. Henry Waxman began suggesting pro sports should adopt "uniform" or "Olympic" testing. Government-funded and -influenced WADA and USADA lobby incessantly for gaining testing of pro sports, and the agencies are handy red herring as a "solution" for politicians such as Waxman.
 
Lawmakers bungle the issue today like their predecessors of 1989, when Congress promoted faulty random urinalysis for its adoption by the NFL and NCAA. Steve dealt with both fiascoes on Capitol Hill. "After two trips to Washington and analyzing information, it isn't hard to figure this out," he said. "What I see this going to, there's going to be a little play in Congress, because they have to, ya know, as far as the public goes. And they may push to get [NFL testing] under the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. That depends legally what's going on. ... But life will go on." And athletes will continue roaming the no-man's land Steve had inhabited, feeling unprotected, unable to resist doping.
 
"How would average Americans like going to work every day, knowing or feeling that they had to use a drug to compete in their workplace, yet couldn't freely talk about it," Steve said. "It's fucked up. The coercive aspect of it, it's terrible."

Football physiques, risks and disability
As a one-cycle juicer in college football, or a "dabbler" in steroid parlance, I didn't believe mere use doomed anyone to the proverbial bad end. I knew football was hazardous for my longterm, with my injuries of knee dislocation and nerve damage, but not 2,000 milligrams of testosterone injected over five weeks.
 
Later, analyzing sport doping during the 1990s, I sought conclusive proof of serious health consequences for steroid abuse. I wanted information to document my belief such extreme behavior was harmful, but no evidence transpired in the literature of clinical research.

Mainstream media were replete with claims that sounded plausible, such as the stricken Lyle Alzado, declaring his 22 years of crazy juicing caused fatal cancer. But there was no proof or expert consensus, and Alzado was rebuked by medical scientists for directly attributing his brain tumor to anabolic steroids. He died in 1992.

I considered the steroid users I knew in sport and bodybuilding, many longtime users and abusers. There were suspect signs in the worst cases, including two cardiac angina episodes, but only acute effects of hormone cycling were apparent, hair loss, irritability, and pimply, pock-marked skin. I saw none of the health mayhem and death thrown about in typical news about steroids. Not even one certifiable 'roid rage, among juicers I knew. And thus my references to health hazards became less pronounced for public writings and media interviews about doping.

Steve Courson classified the rhetoric of exaggerated risk as "scare tactics," a manifestation of society's shallow moralizing against use that doesn't fool anyone seriously considering PEDs, particularly teens.

Sport's children of risk always see through the smokescreens about supposed dangers. Young athletes are determined and calculated for achieving success, and they know what's up with PEDs. In football, players don't see drugs kill and deform people over the short term, only peers who juice and thrive. "The fine line with kids is presenting facts in a balanced way, not overstating or understating reality, because kids will turn you off," Steve said. "If you give them one thing that's wrong, then they won't believe anything you've told them."

Getting to know Steve in 2005, I was impressed by his intellectual handling of health risks in doping. Steve had little use for supposition in his arguments, and he ignored common claims of deadly risks with steroids. I could have expected differently.

A decade previous, Steve sued the Bert Bell Fund of the NFLPA over his cardiomyopathy, seeking full disability compensation instead of the minimal amount he received, around $20,000 annually. Steve's lawsuit alleged steroids and other factors of pro football led to his condition, including alcohol abuse the institution encouraged. The civil action occurred in the 1990s, America's no-look decade for steroids in sport, and Steve was unpopular in the public arena, characterized as an ingrate jock attempting to rob the NFL for his own abuse of steroids and alcohol. He lost the court case too, for lack of supporting evidence.

Steve moved forward, seeking steroid-related information that he could stand on in persuasion about dangers. I was moving parallel with Steve in the issue, as my work blew up in the 1990s through study for my grad degree, capitalizing on electronic search of news and other databases.
 
By the time Steve and I finally collaborated, both of us were focused on football's increasing player sizes as risk for all levels. Reason or cause for the behemoth physiques wasn't our foremost concern, although anabolic drugs were the singlemost explanation, according to experts such as our mutual friend and associate Dr. Charles E. Yesalis, epidemiologist at Penn State.
 
A wealth of research and expert opinion supported our stance that physiques of American football were a health scourge, whether too-big players were obese, muscular, or a combination thereof. Some sports columnists argued similarly, including Rick Telander, Chicago, Dan O'Neill, St. Louis, and Sam Donnellon, Philadelphia. Then football-focused research hit the news, concluding most pro players qualified as overweight or obese according to criteria for the Body Mass Index; another study would produce correlate findings about prep lineman in Iowa. Thus hazards of football sizes were a strong presumption at that point, hardly debatable to the contrary.
 
Nevertheless, doctors and researchers affiliated with football did disagree, and so did NFL officials, claiming more information was required for conclusive judgment. Steve didn't care what they said.

"No matter what they do, they can't shut down the monster," he said. "They don't really understand, nor do they want to. But guys are continuing to get bigger and continuing to press the envelope. ... The issues of size are going to take their toll, if not immediately on the field, then not so later in life. But you're going to see somebody have a stroke or a heart attack right there on the field."
 
Prevailing evidence and opinion confirmed a range of potential maladies for excess weight, especially fat, while obesity could lead to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, hypertension and osteo-arthritis. During 2005, Steve expanded his crusade against obesity, viewing it as national health crisis and proposing that "eliminating obesity would put a massive dent in those needing early advanced health care."

For immediate danger and toll, super-sized dudes pounded each other on NFL fields, pulverizing bone, tissue, brain matter. Injuries were an issue, as always, including cases of paralysis, and debate on football concussions was firing up.

Steve saw drugs' imprint on the grid carnage, of steroids, growth hormone and more. "Anyone who can think knows that players are bio-chemical machines, basically killer drones," he said. "I knew back in '82 and '83, when I really started getting into the anabolics, that I was a lethal machine at that point, with my parameters of size and speed. On or off the field I could really hurt somebody, and that scared even me."

Contemporary players really frightened Steve. Standard weights at his old guard position were 40, 50 pounds heavier, 310 to 325. NFL players weighing 300 were scarce in Steve's time, a few dozen perhaps; now about 400 players in training camps topped the mark, and some linemen pushed 400 on the scale. Steve was awed by the huge quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, linebackers, defensive backs. Modern players were so much bigger and athletic, surely employing stuff Steve had never used. "It's combination of 'growth' and anabolics--an androgen with GH," he estimated of the key difference.   

Easy to understood why modern quarterbacks would "gear up" like anybody else. "Look at the shots they take from some of those creatures coming across the field," Steve said. "What I'd be worried about is somebody hitting me like an outside linebacker, about 260 running a 4.5. The D-linemen wouldn't scare me as much as those freakin' missiles coming at you now."

Steve figured collision death would soon strike a modern NFL player, killing him in the ferocious contact. "Amazing it hasn't happened yet," he said. "Fans and media want to see the big hit, but then everybody wants to see the guy get up. The entertainment's good, as long as you're not out there."
 
Steve also worried about NFL retirees, the serious illnesses and death haunting his age group and younger--or the generations most prone to drug use in the pharmaceutical age.
 
In just four months, from Christmas 2004 through mid-April 2005, six retirees died in their 40s of natural causes: Reggie White, Charles Martin, Reggie Roby, Todd Bell, David Little, and Sam Mills. None was ever accused publicly of drug use, and causes listed included heart disease, sleep apnea and cancer. Steve had his drug suspicions regarding the group as a whole, but he was more concerned with BMI ratings. All the men played pro ball as large specimens, per their respective standing heights, and several competed much heavier than healthy weights prescribed by the Body Mass Index. Steve viewed the sobering run of individual tragedies as another jolt of reality for widespread malaise, more rumbling of the big earthquake ahead for football.

"What I fear about the NFL, the bodies are just going to implode," Steve said. "Especially now that we're at the doorstep of genetic engineering. We're walking into a very scary bio-technical world."

Steve was transfixed on the growing battle over disability between retirees and the NFL, with concussions and permanent brain damage at the forefront of public discussion. Steve's own harrowing past was one thing, but he still grieved for close friend Mike Webster, a distressing story of dementia, depression, sensory loss and drug abuse. The Hall of Fame center was the iconic muscled lineman for the 1970s "Men of Steel," four-time Super Bowl champions, but "Webbie" died at age 50 in 2002, destitute.
 
Some friends said Webster was scattered in reasoning by his final years in pro football at Kansas City. His cause of death was listed as a heart attack, but the Webster family sued for retroactive compensation over his brain damage and won, claiming a judgment totaling almost $2 million from the NFLPA's retirement and disability board. The lengthy, acrimonious case set legal precedent for claims by more retirees.
 
Webster had several personal issues involved, Steve said, including dependence on painkillers and amphetamines. During the court case, medical documents disclosed Webster's "experimental" steroid use with the Steelers. "Now it's out there that he used steroids," Steve said. "The bottom line with Mike Webster, it's a real shame. Here's a guy that gave 17 years to the league, and you know the reason why he's no longer with us: The fact that the win-at-all-costs mentality in football, as much as anything, killed that man. The combination of the head, the medication, everything that went on; I mean, he's the prime example. We still don't want to be honest about the reality of what goes on out there. ... It's got to be embarrassing for the [Steelers] organization. It has to. That was so unnecessary."

Steve knew untold victims remained among retiree ranks, and while the NFL and union constituted a billion-dollar entertainment enterprise, Steve calculated there wasn't enough money to go around for adequate compensation. And the game's violent maw kept spitting out casualties, from preps to pro, thousands annually.

"The problems aren't going to be straightened out; I'm more convinced of this than ever, of what's going to happen," Steve said. "The machine basically eats its own, and it's going to end up self-destructing." 

Drug openness, safety reform--or football implosion
Steve Courson granted an honesty mulligan for active athletes caught doping, as long as none's denial got ridiculous enough to insult him.

But he objected to dishonesty or evasion by former jocks, especially NFL retirees who spoke publicly about muscle doping without remotely allowing what they knew. Steve's conflict with former Steeler teammates on the matter is well-documented among his autobiography, my book, and news accounts published by The Baltimore Sun and ESPN.com, reporters Jeff Barker and Mike Fish, respectively.

"Jockocrats" really irked Steve, the breed defined by sport critic and author Robert Lipsyte. These ex-NFLers were blessed with lucrative jobs post-football, yakking on television around games drawing boffo audience. Jockos were notorious as league apologists at the hint of doping scandal, or saying nothing at all. Moreover, Steve heard of one Jockocrat, at least, who used growth hormone for appearances sake. I also became acquainted with one who confirmed his HGH use.

On March 25, 2005, Steve raged about ESPN analyst and former Pittsburgh running back Merril Hoge, who defended legendary coach Chuck Noll and old Steeler teams against steroid allegations from Jim Haslett, Saints head coach. Haslett admitted his juicing as a player and in the process implicated Steeler teams and even Steve by name. Steve didn't mind, and he commended Haslett for honesty during a live satellite interview on ESPN's "Cold Pizza" show.

Hoge followed Steve on camera, from the studio, disparaging Haslett and portraying Noll as vocally anti-steroid. Afterward, Steve fumed in an interview with me. "Merril was basically giving the company line, going through how Chuck Noll was always against this, and I'm biting my tongue," Steve said. "I'm thinking: 'Yeah, Merril, but why in 1989, when you were in Pittsburgh, did the Steelers draft Tom Ricketts and Craig Veasey, who had tested positive for steroids in the first and third rounds? And [there was] Terry Long, who tried to commit suicide after he tested positive. Chuck Noll never knew anything about this, huh? If Chuck Noll were so much against this, then why were all the guys who were taking steroids on the field, playing? Why weren't they sitting on the fucking bench? Gimme a break, you can't be that stupid."

"The lying is just so pathetic, and now it's being shown for how pathetic it really is... the hypocrisy is obviously driven by money."

Steve believed retirees' silence on steroids was already turning against them in the tempest over disability. The festering complete truth on drugs, he said, required addressing by retirees in discussing their ailments tied to football. Retirees talked publicly on almost any negative topic, but, like active players, few said anything material about steroids or growth hormone. Lack of openness about muscle doping was emblematic of wider denial by the football institution that approached fatal phase in the 2000s, we both believed, for varied issues that included medical costs.
 
Today, four years after Steve's death, the decade closes amid world economic crisis. American football already could be at brink of wholesale change, major downsizing, depending on fluid state of the insurance industry. Perhaps only costly private clubs and leagues can mean long survival for the sport, removed from public schools and colleges.

Contrary to popular belief, football isn't birth rite of the American male. Football doesn't even pay its full bill for damages, the multitude of knee injuries, concussions, unhealthy physiques, drug abuse and more. Insurance and healthcare pick up the slack and pass it on to consumers in higher costs.

Football is expensive indulgence for every American, fan or hater, and its doping problem will not continue unchecked forever. Ridiculous player sizes will ensure that. "They've gone too far with it as it is," Steve said, referring to the game institution, all personnel and associates. "They know drug testing can't solve their problem, it's just whether their greed and arrogance is going to kill 'em. ... Litigation is gonna kill 'em."
 
Steve and I didn't believe all was hopeless, however. Adopting size limits in football could provide immediate relief by capping use of anabolic substances, turning back obesity, and reducing injuries. Our general plan would restrict body weights according to the BMI, per individual frames. For example, a 6-foot-2 player could be allowed 25 percent above his highest normal BMI weight, or a limit of about 242 pounds for game eligibility.

But no good step is possible without first a revolutionary turnabout on self-disclosure by football, unprecedented public discussion. "Basically, you have to owe up to the cartoon," Steve said. "And for decades, the carton has been assisted with anabolic drugs. Hello."


Homerun PR tips for McGwire
Certainly when provoked, Steve Courson's razor criticism shredded jocks who dope and hide, cutting through facades to their core motives. But Steve was also a former big-time athlete who juiced; he had empathy. And he remained a fan of games and competitors, all ages.
 
Steve enjoyed Major League Baseball, and in 1998 he was like most Americans, mesmerized with the homerun drama of Mark McGwire versus Sammy Sosa, superstar sluggers of the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs.

McGwire and Sosa were even good buddies, proclaimed their attendant media flock, and the loving rivals hugged and back-slapped for cameras en route to obliterating Roger Maris' season homer record. Multiple media documented practically every move of the duo except drug use, and Steve consumed the happy mythology like everyone else.

Steve was sure Big Mac and Slammin' Sammy were juicers, heavy ones given their looks, and he wasn't surprised when AP reporter Steve Wilstein revealed McGwire used "andro," the anabolic-androgenic steroid. That didn't spoil the grand show for Steve, and America blasted the snooping reporter, not beloved Big Mac.

"The McGwire-Sosa thing? I knew what time it was. And I loved it!" Steve later recalled. Having no children himself, Steve took his cherished nephew to see McGwire in Pittsburgh, arriving early at the ballpark to witness Mac's unforgettable moon shots in batting practice.

Steve was fascinated of Big Mac legend in particular, anointing McGwire the quintessential figure for modern games. Sport was premier entertainment in the new world of perpetual media, having eclipsed Hollywood in pop culture, and McGwire was bigger than Brad Pitt. Steve, former calculated juicer of the NFL, ranked McGwire vintage '98 for epic stardom in sport, on par with Ruth, Jordan, Gretzky, Louis, spanning the century of celebrity athletes.
 
For historic talent in his time, McGwire combined natural athleticism, work ethic, mental preparation, and cutting-edge technology--especially drugs. Otherwise, Big Mac mania wouldn't have happened for the world. Steve couldn't have fathomed it.

So Steve was disappointed in the utter fall from grace for McGwire, who bottomed in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2005. A shrunken, cowering former athlete, Mac sniffed around steroid questions under oath, refusing to answer directly.

McGwire's disastrous appearance before Congress surprised Steve, who'd expected him to tell the truth, especially in light of the revelations from Jose Canseco's tell-all book Juiced and a New York Daily News expose that unleashed convincing allegations that Canseco and McGwire juiced together at Oakland in the early 1990s.
 
Canseco wrote of personally using steroids with McGwire on multiple occasions, and former FBI informants who had played roles in the FBI steroid sting Operation Equine of the early 1990s linked McGwire to a steroid dealer and training guru named Curtis Wenzlaff. The informants said Canseco and McGwire used steroids and protocols supplied by Wenzlaff, and one informant detailed a stacking recipe allegedly employed by the ballplayers.

The ballplayers weren't questioned--the FBI was going after suppliers, not users--but the new information silenced any question of McGwire's doping as far as Steve was concerned.

The night before McGwire testified, Steve played the role of advisor in an on-the-record interview with me, hypothetically recommending the proper approach for the cornered jock to take at Congress. Although McGwire didn't take Steve's advice to be open and honest, that advice remains useful for the disgraced hero, since McGwire, named the Cardinals hitting coach by manager Tony La Russa, will face questions and challenges by the time spring training opens in February, if not sooner.

"There's times in life where you've got to speak your piece," Steve told me on March 16, 2005. "And if I were McGwire, this is what I would say: 'Yeah, I doped, and I feel embarrassed by it. But I did it in part to enhance my own ability, my own training, and to make myself a better ballplayer. I also did in part to help the game of baseball be more entertaining.' If he would say that, I think the public could handle it."
 
"I think people would appreciate it if he came clean, finally," I said.

"And explained why he did it," Steve reiterated. "He could explain in terms that everybody could understand. Explain that he denied it for so long because he didn't want little kids following his route."

"But baseball's spiral of silence about doping," I noted. "McGwire's bound by the code--"

"No, he's not," Steve answered quickly. "He's retired... he's got no excuse. I'm sorry."

E-mail: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information on Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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