Public-opinion force evident among athletes, officials and media

Fans, meanwhile, can handle truth of rampant drug use

Sport Iconoclast

Smacking fantasy of athletics

By Matt Chaney

Posted Tuesday, May 18, 2010

I'm hatin’ today on those persistent absurdities surrounding muscle doping in American football, the ridiculous talk and action that serve to cloak systemic use of anabolic steroids, biosynthetic growth hormone and more substances in the game.

Denial both direct and subtle powers the nutty excuses, nonsensical propaganda and surreal PR scenes. This trusted principle of evasion directs athletes, coaches, organizers, testing officials and media in a charade of anti-drug morality that affixes blame and punishment solely onto individuals, thereby helping sustain the problem throughout every level of football.

The spiral of denial, theoretical force of public opinion, is evident in the football-drug model encompassing those complicit parties, and actually lends sense to recent goofiness involving the NFL:

*A strapping young star, Texans linebacker Brian Cushing, says his body is a male anomaly, capable of producing high levels of human chorionic gonadotropin, a glycoprotein normally found in pregnant women.

*Associated Press football writers strip Cushing of their Defensive Rookie of the Year Award for his suspension of testing positive for artificial hCG, banned by the NFL as an accompaniment to steroid cycling, then the scribes re-vote to give that award right back to him.

*Former and current players turned sportswriters and bloggers, notably Ross Tucker, claim to see little or no PED use in the NFL despite the 50-year presence of anabolic steroids and the 25-year circulation of recombinant growth hormone.

*League and union officials still portray steroid use as minimal in the league, or “isolated,” and claim they see no problem with recombinant hGH, the widely popular performance-enhancer the NFL doesn’t test for.

*Politicians and anti-doping officials insist “Olympic testing” can stop muscle drugs in the NFL; meanwhile, WADA testing caught less than 1 percent of athletes at Beijing and has produced only one suspension for rhGH in 1,500 blood samplings since 2004.

For historical perspective, reality, anabolic steroids entered football by 1960, with high-school players the first reported users, about the same time that weightlifting blossomed under the training mantra of “bigger, stronger.” Androgenic drugs and juiced specimens covered the pro and major-college ranks within 20 years, and during the 1980s steroid users proliferated at elite levels, took over small-college football, and impacted competitive prep leagues, according to a wealth of evidence such as revelations from numerous players and coaches. I’m a witness and former perpetrator, having injected testosterone as a college player in 1982 and, later as a student coach, having driven players toward getting big as possible, which led me to find a bottle of “test” for one of them.

Documented information gets murky at the 1990s, the see-no-doping decade in American sport, as both the NFL and NCAA enforced drug policy that quelled insider allegations. The dying Lyle Alzado was an exception, his deathbed confessions of abuse and charges of lousy testing and pervasive doping in football; in addition, a 1993 investigative book alleged steroid abuse and other misdeeds in the Notre Dame program of coach Lou Holtz.

But the 2000s have broadened public awareness of drug pervasiveness in several sports, especially baseball, with hundreds of athletes exposed primarily through unprecedented criminal probes into trafficking of steroids and hGH. The NFL’s tight control on insider information endures, but a scandal blew up around the 2002-04 Carolina Panthers, numerous players exposed for receiving prescriptions including testosterone and growth hormone from Dr. James Shortt, later convicted of criminal charges. The case illuminated gaping loopholes for testing in the NFL and all sports, with those Carolina players among countless league-wide who have registered false-negative results through the employ of undetectable substances, or by timing use of patented drugs around known gaps in random urinalysis.

The ever-increasing sizes of football players constitute smoking-gun evidence of a continuing drug epidemic. Pro and college officials now acknowledge widespread use in the past while claiming to detect no signs at present. But players have only grown larger since the 1980s, with no reasonable explanation other than drugs to explain the difference, say medical experts and more qualified observers. When the NFL instituted steroid testing in 1987, the league had about a dozen 300-pound players; today, almost 400 such giants dot team rosters. Muscle doping is advantageous to playing every position, and the sizes of present-day quarterbacks average nearly the same for offensive linemen a half-century ago, at the commercial release of Dianabol pills.

Denial carries on, silly but effective in deflecting attention from football’s multi-generational muscle doping. The mythmakers remain resilient--jocks,  coaches, officials, testers and parrot news media--unified in the old, false-hope message that purports users to be scattered individuals and certainly not infesting the system. Their storyline, voiced consistently over five decades, always places widespread doping and poor detection as part of the past, with bona fide testing as always imminent. The narrative has never been true, and likely never will.

The Cushing case is demonstrative of spiral theory, the denial dynamic outlined by sociologist Stanley Cohen. Key forces take action, the groups who cast blame solely toward the individual, Cushing, while everyone, including him, paints an image of drug-free competition or the distinct possibility.

Cushing yammers about unnatural hCG level, whatever he’s saying there, but the athlete claims unequivocally he didn’t use the prescription drug because of synthetic androgens, or to restart natural testosterone after a steroid cycle shut it down. That’s a tough sell. Cushing’s bio on the Texans site lists him at 6-foot-3, 262 pounds, while describing him as “fast.” Back home in Jersey, where steroid rumors began about Cushing in high school—hardly atypical of an NFL player, incidentally—his personal trainer calls him the proverbial genetic wonder or freak, terminology found nowhere in medical literature.

The dubious excuses of NFL management and union officials are cursory at this point. Our football-obsessed culture allows them to blather BS, always, and these days every official knows muscle doping is a ticking liability bomb. So they offer their own flimsy rhetoric about Cushing, regurgitating the unchallenged theme that a rule-breaker like him “cheats” a presumed large majority of “clean” players. 

Nevertheless, a jock offender, coaches, officials are easy marks in critique of any doping case. The focus here is full range of denial for systemic doping, the spiral’s complete circuitry for dimming an issue from public view, and the self-serving postures of so-called watchdog groups are significant, the sport media and anti-doping agencies.

Football writers have enabled muscle doping from the beginning, looking away since the 1960s, and today stand thoroughly informed on the terrible situation. But generally the beat reporters of football are worse than ever for ignoring steroids and hGH, particularly regarding the teams they cover daily. Periodically sportswriters and editors get touchy-feely at industry conventions or meetings, and they resolve to really probe issues that threaten athletes, games and society at-large, like drugs, injuries and violence. Then they go home to the beats, back to their local teams and cozy sport associations, and do nothing.

Yet some football writers reared viciously on Cushing last week, attempting to retroactively remove his AP rookie award of 2009, when his appeal of a positive test result took its confidential route through league arbitration. The scribes were exhorted by Peter King, the Sports Illustrated football expert of all time, to follow their thorny path of both defrocking and reelecting Cushing as last year’s best defensive rookie. See reviews of the folly elsewhere, or simply read pathetic and hypocritical in a handy dictionary.

If football writers truly wish to take a stand on doping, they can start by cleaning their own house, finally getting to work on this critical issue. They can also grow stones by defrocking one of their own—King—for a horrid record of burying his head about football doping since random urinalysis and Alzado’s demise. From 1992 until BALCO revelations a decade later, King hardly mentioned “steroid” amid his voluminous reporting and bloviating in print, cyberspace and on television. And forget about human growth hormone in the period—King did. He also churned out books, big, happy ones regaling the legends and bereft of drug content, of course.

In 2009, football writers honored King with the McCann Award, bestowed at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Now they should take it back, for his gross negligence about muscle doping during a lengthy career. He should return it, if suddenly so committed to punishing guilty parties like Cushing and himself. But even today, King issues non-denial denial on behalf of his good buddies throughout the NFL: In straight face, King repeats the official line about scant doping in the league, offering his, ahem, expert estimate that about 10-15 percent of players are users—for all PEDs!

King has a compatriot scribe in blinders at SI, retired NFL lineman Ross Tucker, whom big Peter has chummily referred to as  “a Princeton guy.” The 6-foot-4 Tucker, who topped 290 pounds for Princeton and hit 316 in the NFL, also enjoys broadcasting gigs after dropping about 50 since his playing career ended in 2007. Tucker estimates that a puny 5 to 10 percent of NFL players use PEDs.

How did Tucker traverse a vacuum of purity through cutthroat football, foremost the NFL jungle? “Maybe I am naïve...,” he allows on SI.com. Yeah, or he’s moronic, maybe dishonest. Christ, about 10 percent of players juiced on my team at little Southeast Missouri State in 1982, at cusp of steroids’ flood through NCAA Division II, where the rate could never be so low again. And we erstwhile juicers at small colleges barely grew half the size of Tucker and his peers of the modern NFL. Tucker's doping estimate for the league definitely sounds asinine, but he isn’t that stupid; his denial of a bigger problem merely protects the sport-media complex that rewards him, still.

Likewise, earnest rhetoric is lost on anti-doping officials, who seemingly make PR stunts their priority anymore, versus real work toward preventing PEDs. Olympic testing is inept at best or an utter failure at worst, plagued by woeful resources, impossible logistics, shaky science and daunting legal questions, according to a host of expert critics worldwide. But WADA officials figure their best defense is a nervy offense, constant trash talk through media, their lobbing insults at invalid testing of the NFL, Major League Baseball, and other sports. WADA and USADA, struggling for funding and backed by politicians, hope to gain testing for U.S. pro sports, and the mission appears to emphasize smokescreens to veil their own inadequacy at anti-doping.

Finally, football fans complete the circuit of denial about muscle doping, but they generally admit they don’t care, instead of acting otherwise. Fans write as much in online posts while also voting with their wallets, and the NFL reigns as the culture’s richest and most popular sport. Fans have never even blinked about football brutality, and today the game approaches 2,000 collision deaths since the 1800s, along with tallying thousands more indirect deaths. Fans don’t want morality plays or the oxymoronic promise of “safe football"; they just crave to see some ass-kicking. They want “contact ballet,” athleticism at brink of annihilation, observes professor Michael Oriard, cultural analyst and former NFL player.

Like fans, everyone else around American football must own up to the permanence of muscle drugs and the invalidity of anti-doping schemes underway or proposed. We need new thinking, realism in public debate, leading to less costly directions for turning back drugs and injuries. We need true reform of football hazards like steroids—or we will watch the gathering storm of health liability ravage the game instead.

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

MLB, NFL, WADA and USADA unresponsive to Catlin's invite for open discussion
Sonksen says biomarker test ready to impact rhGH in pro sports--but they're not calling

By Matt Chaney
Posted Tuesday, April 6, 2010

It’s shadow boxing so far, the so-called debate over science of rhGH testing for pro athletes in America, as opponents shout from across the mat.

Staying put in one corner, the anti-doping agencies claim they stand on sound science in their current Olympic blood test for recombinant human growth hormone.

Posturing in the other corner, pro baseball and football claim they demand sound science for serum analysis of athletes.

But real action isn’t happening. Both sides just lob trash talk, through media, over the controversial isoform scan for rhGH.

No one appears ready to enter the ring for public discussion on the science involved—or lacking—with the mysterious WADA system that only recently produced a first announced positive result on an athlete, after 1,500 tests since 2004.

No one wants to budge yet, not WADA and USADA, not management of the NFL and MLB, nor the two player unions.

None has accepted a prime opportunity for open forum, even at the behest of esteemed American testing engineer Dr. Don H. Catlin, president and CEO of the nonprofit Anti-doping Research laboratory in Los Angeles.

“We now have reached a critical juncture,” Catlin wrote in a March 28 statement on the ADR site. “I invite sports organizations and unions, anti-doping agencies and other science experts to set a meeting to discuss the issues related to hGH testing.” A Reuters news report also circulated, outlining Catlin’s proposal.

But a week later, Catlin still hasn’t heard from pro sports or anti-doping agencies. “Not a peep,” he wrote in an email Sunday.

Catlin already knew his idea is a long shot. During a March 19 telephone interview, he acknowledged several barriers to staging open summit on GH testing replete with experts of independent science, beyond those employed in sports and anti-doping who comprised the recent Partnership for Clean Competition conference in New York.

The foremost challenge for any progress is overcoming the varying political agendas of parties involved. “Where’s the impartiality? I don’t see any here,” Catlin charged, labeling the self-hype of PCC members as a research consortium to be “disingenuous.”

WADA and USADA conflict with American athlete unions in particular, having exchanged criticism and insults through news media for years. “The titans in this field don’t sit down; they just throw stones at each other,” said Catlin, who’s worked with the combating groups during his testing career spanning three decades.

Anti-doping officials allege leagues and unions resist blood testing because too many athletes would be caught for using illicit growth hormone, and undoubtedly a problem exists with use and abuse of the drug in sport. Extensive evidence surrounds American football and baseball, including historical allegations, documented users, no prevention, and increasing accessibility and cultural acceptance of rhGH, for people of every age and vocation.

Union representatives counter-attack WADA, declaring the indirect scan for GH isomers is unreliable and lacks scientific validation, given its measly 24-hour detection window and the agency’s suspicious withholding of clinical trial data. Indeed, Catlin qualified the isoform as “simply not a useful test” while beseeching anti-doping officials to release the critical numbers in question.

Catlin contends the WADA-USADA mission for seeing U.S. pro sports adopt rhGH testing cannot advance within the polarized state of anti-doping business. “I don’t see any scientific discussion. There are people in WADA who know a fair amount about it. Who can tell you exactly why it took so long to get the (isoform) ratio figured out. That’s something that the baseball people would like to know.”

Unions are typically cast as resistant villains in disputes over anti-doping, but Catlin doesn’t buy that regarding GH testing. “The unions are decent people; they do actually care about their athletes,” he said. “The unions are very strong, they’re very powerful, but they’re not stupid people. I think they can be reasoned with, but you don’t have a dialogue. Where’s the dialogue? Where’s the discussion? Why are the major players not at the table?”

“I think both sides are at fault,” Catlin concluded. “Both sides don’t want to get too close to this, because they would have to reveal something. And the [isoform] test might not look so well.”

Meanwhile, in London, England, GH-testing pioneer Dr. Peter H. Sonksen hasn’t heard from American pro sports about his research team’s long-standing biomarker blood test for rhGH.

“No—never met them,” Sonksen stated of U.S. sport officials, in an email Sunday.

But pro sports know about his team and test, which WADA has inexplicably sidelined for 10 years, according to comments in a March 29 report of The New York Times that failed to mention Sonksen.

In addition, football insiders say the NFL players union is reviewing the biomarker system, after a March 21 report on this blog unleashed harsh criticism of the WADA isoform leveled by Catlin, Sonksen and American doping expert Dr. Charles E. Yesalis.

Sonksen says his testing system—which builds bio-profiles of athletes for “outcome” substances of GH in the bloodstream, such as IGF-1 and collagens—could immediately impact pervasive use of recombinant growth hormone in an American sport like the NFL, with 1,700 athletes among 32 franchises located in major metropolitan areas. He sees the key factor as “the logistics of collecting samples and transporting” to WADA-approved labs, which number two in the United States. Total cost hasn’t been calculated but wouldn’t exceed NFL urine testing for anabolic steroids already in place, according to Sonksen.

“WADA-USADA would have to approve the test, and this would involve training and implementation of the methods in the laboratories. This will take some time,” said Sonksen, who, funded by the anti-doping agencies, continues laboratory work as visiting professor at the University of Southampton Medical School.

Finally, Sonksen believes, the anti-doping politics are aligning for deployment of the peer-reviewed biomarker test, with its reputed detection window of 10 to 14 days—and in time for assisting the beleaguered isoform at the 2012 London Olympics. “The two tests are useful together,” Sonksen said in a March 17 interview by webcam. “The isoform test is only useful for out-of-competition (sampling), and our test works out of competition and in competition.” 

Sonksen has fought WADA and IOC officials for decades, whom he calls “sports politicians… not scientists.” But now he boasts allies for his test and team in administrators of WADA’s British arm. “It’s only recently, I think, since we’ve teamed up with UK Sport—or the UK Anti-Doping fraternity, as they are now—that (WADA wants) to have the test up and running for the London Olympics. There’s more pressure on (WADA) from the political front.”

Michael Stow, UKAD spokesman, confirmed agency confidence in the biomarker system. “UK Anti-Doping (representatives) have been working with the team in Southampton that includes Prof. Sonksen since 2006,” Stow wrote in an email. “We have been working hard and are very keen to see this test accredited for use by anti-doping agencies worldwide.”

Sonksen says his team invites open discussion of their biomarker test with whomever, anytime and anywhere. He personally invites calls and email, including from the NFL, MLB, WADA and USADA, independent scientists, and the American press.

“We’d be quite happy for that,” he said. “We’ve published all our papers in peer-reviewed journals. And I think peer-reviewed medical journals are about as secure science as you can get. … We still have papers to come. We’re still writing them.”

Sonksen, a former rugby player, is a cheery man at age 73. But he remains scornful of many anti-doping officials for their disregard of scientific convention, open critique. “I’m more forthright because I’m older and have been dealing with the politics of the IOC and WADA for nearly 20 years,” he wrote Sunday. “You’ll get a straight answer from any of our team. We all believe in (quote) ‘transparency.’ ”

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

Catlin wants more research data on current ‘isoform’ test

Sonksen criticizes officials, touts his ‘marker’ test for growth hormone

By Matt Chaney

Posted Sunday, March 21, 2010
 

Preeminent anti-doping scientists are citing problems about the Olympic “isoform” test for synthetic human growth hormone, in response to the ongoing campaign of WADA and USADA officials who want pro sports like baseball to adopt their controversial blood scan.

“It is simply not a useful test, no matter how you cut it or spin it,” said American testing engineer Don H. Catlin, M.D., director of the non-profit Anti-Doping Research laboratory, speaking in a telephone interview last week from Los Angeles.

Catlin said he hasn’t seen “any scientific discussion” on the blood scan’s disputed reliability, only “warfare” rhetoric exchanged through media, pitting anti-doping officials against administrators of sports and unions.

In London, England, growth-hormone testing pioneer Peter H. Sonksen, M.D., says WADA officials erred years ago by casting aside his bio-marker scan, going instead with the assay for GH isomers. Sonksen says his bio-marker system can confirm artificial GH in the bloodstream for as long as two weeks, while the isoform’s detection window lasts about 24 hours.

“I don’t know why they chose the isoform,” Sonksen said of anti-doping officials in a webcam interview. “I think they thought this was a more direct test than our marker method. I think that they were, ah, too thick to understand it. They weren’t experts in the field, and they don’t really understand it. The isoform test would be every bit as difficult to defend in court as our method.”

Sonksen receives research funding from the anti-doping agencies, including their parent WADA. Major League Baseball and the Amgen biotechnology firm fund Catlin’s work, among his current grants.

WADA officials administer and market the long-standing GH isoform test, which only recently returned a positive result leading to suspension of an athlete, British rugby player Terry Newton, who did not contest the finding.

That positive result, announced Feb. 22, was the first confirmed among about 1,500 tests conducted since the 2004 Olympics. WADA and USADA hail the development as proof of the isoform method’s validity and reliability.

But Catlin dismissed that claim for the present, maintaining too little is known about the isoform for proper review by independent science. He is confident WADA has conducted clinical trials on subjects, presumably including athletes, but no scientists have the data outside those employed within agency “working groups,” as officials term the closed network.

“I believe they have data,” Catlin said. “I mean, it would be silly not to. But they don’t display it.”

Echoing Catlin, American sport officials argue the WADA test for growth hormone needs scientific airing in public. When MLB and union officials recently reiterated the call, WADA president John Fahey replied “nonsense” to their charge of inappropriateness about the test.

“If I were baseball, I’d want to see the [research] numbers,” Catlin said, “but WADA won’t show the numbers. They recognize, rightfully, that as soon as they do show the numbers, there could be difficulty.”

Sonksen, Catlin and other scientists say WADA practice to limit information on the isoform model dates to its patenting a decade ago by German researcher Christian J. Strasburger, M.D., who became an in-house scientist of the agency. Previous to the test’s launching six years ago, a WADA spokesperson told ABC Science Online that “we won’t comment on specifics and, for obvious deterrence reasons, we won’t give those details even when a test is in place.”

Charles E. Yesalis, Sc.D., historian and researcher on doping, rebuked the WADA blockade on testing information. “I’m just astounded,” said Yesalis, the epidemiologist and Penn State professor emeritus who co-authored the first comprehensive surveys of teen steroid use in the United States.

Yesalis contends sport anti-doping technology must be more precise than many standard medical tests, since a positive finding virtually assures punitive consequence for the athlete. “It’s almost criminal. I mean, if you’re going to ruin somebody’s life, and if you don’t have [credible testing] totally locked up, to me that is immoral and unethical. I’d rather see five million cheaters compete than see scientists bastardizing themselves.

“And this has been going on since that testosterone ratio test,” Yesalis said, noting the epitestosterone-testosterone assay, introduced in 1983, that has been debunked for reliability by recent studies and statistics review--yet remains in use by anti-doping agencies.

Yesalis posed an analogy to illustrate the disregard for scientific convention: “If you and I had a proprietary laboratory, and we did a press conference where we said we just had a major breakthrough in a screening test for cancer. And we just said, ‘Well, you’ve got to trust us.’

“Well, immediately other epidemiologists would ask, ‘What’s your sensitivity and specificity? What’s the percent of positives that are truly positive, and what’s the percent of negatives that are truly negative? And please show us exactly how you do this test so we can replicate it.’

“If you couldn’t answer those questions, you’d be laughed out of the scientific community. I’ve said this for years, about the way they behave [anti-doping officials]. Yeah, they do publish some stuff, but it’s very difficult to understand, historically.”

Among concerns, Catlin says establishing precise baseline for human GH secretion is problematic and unverified by scientific consensus. The concept of isoform testing relies on a consistent GH baseline to pinpoint amounts of the dominant isomer known as 22kDa—or molecular weight in kilodaltons—when it’s suppressed by presence of identical versions that are synthetic or “recombinant” growth hormone. Natural GH pulsates irregularly in the human body while activity, gender, age and ethnicity also spur levels to fluctuate.

And Catlin wants to know more about the test before he would implement the protocol in his own laboratory, particularly for the prospect of defending it in court, including against affluent athletes and unions likely to contest positive findings of recombinant growth hormone.

Sonksen believes the isoform is reliable for readings within 24 hours of rHGH introduction to a body physiology, if a sampling captures enough of the synthetic drug. But he said the specter of court challenge looms, even if the first-case Newton chose to confess his illicit use.

“I think there’s a certain fear amongst the, ah, [WADA] politicians that if it comes to a case in court, they won’t win it,” Sonksen said, adding the isoform has undergone little modification since 2004. “You only have to go to [engineers] Strasburger and [Martin] Bidlingmaier, and see how many papers they’ve published on the subject. Most of them are reruns of their original papers.

“There’s very little new [data], and I think it would be quite easy for a lawyer to drive a cart and horses through it in court.”

Sonksen does believe WADA would win a court test of the isoform method. But he contends the agency should strengthen its testing by finally implementing his serum-marker detection for growth hormone, which over time builds a profile of an athlete’s natural levels in “outcome” substances like insulin growth factor-1 and collagens. He says his test in complement with Strasburger’s isoform model would produce effective prevention against GH doping by athletes.

WADA has considered Sonksen’s HGH test before, but put it aside for every Olympics since the 2000 Sydney Games, perplexing him and more experts worldwide, such as Catlin. They say the marker method has credible peer review in scientific publication.

Sonksen and WADA have often battled in public over their differences.

Catlin intoned: “I’m a great fan of [marker testing]. It should be done. But, again, there’s all the publicity that goes around this. Now, Peter Sonksen has said some pretty tough things to WADA, but I think he’s rightfully saying them because the [isoform] test alone doesn’t work. It’s political. This whole thing’s political.”

Sonksen is optimistic his test will be adopted for the 2012 London Olympics on his home turf, and he claims backing by U.K. Anti-Doping officials. But he’s wary of the WADA administration.

“Yes, they’re politicians, aren’t they,” he surmised. “They’re sports politicians, not scientists, although they’ve got scientific training. Their interest is in the politics of sport.”

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

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."

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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.

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 21^st 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.

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, especially for the 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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LeBlanc, C. (2005, November 3). Are steroids muscling their way into youth sports? Columbia State [Online].

Lesnick, G. (2004, September 8). Steroid problem not just for the pros anymore. KRT Campus [Online].

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Lipsyte, R. (2008, March 13). Telephone interview with author.

Lombardi, J. (2006, January 26). School nurses urged to look for signs of substance abuse. White Plains Journal News [Online].

Lyon, A. (2006, February 9). Tucson teens juicing with ’roids. KVOA TV [Online].

Lyons, B.J. (2007, February 28). A Web of easy steroids. Albany Times Union [Online].

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Mannie, K. (2005, April 25). Time to strike out the steroid mess. NCAA News Online [Online].

Marinello, S. (2007, March 14). A steroid scandal hits a suburban New Jersey high school. Blogcritics.org [Online].

Marinello, S. (2008, October 26). The NFL’s drug problem rears its ugly head, again. Blogcritics.org [Online].

Martin, B. (2004, July 13). Bill Martin, athletic director, University of Michigan. The abuse of anabolic steroids and their precursors by adolescent and amateur athletes. Caucus on International Narcotics Control, U.S. Senate. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Martinez, A. (2007, April 13). Roid rage: Anger over doping spurs Legislature to push for more drug testing. McAllen Monitor [Online].

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Mavreles, T. (2005, August 22). Donna football sparks talk of steroid use from outsiders. McAllen Monitor [Online].

McCloskey, J. (2005, July 2). Here, there, everywhere? Not in my school … Houston Chronicle [Online].

McMahon, C. (2008, November 6). Newmarket teen charged three times in three months on host of charges. Foster’s Daily Democrat [Online].

Meggyesy, D. (2008, June 7). Telephone interview with author.

Mero, T. (2005, October 15). Survey shows widespread use of supplements among local football players. Lodi News-Sentinel [Online].

Mesce, D. (1990, September 7). Adolescents risking harm to build muscles with steroids. The Associated Press [Online].

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Meyer, E., & Wallace, J. (2005, September 3). Wadsworth steroid scare still puzzle. Akron Beacon Journal [Online].

Mix, R. (2008, June 10). Telephone interview with author.

Saunders, M. (2002, July 26). Fatalities in heat on rise: Supplements could be cause of deaths. Cleveland Plain Dealer, p. D1.

Shipley, A. (2005, November 30). Steroids detected in dietary tablets. Washington Post, p. E1.

Stilger, V.G., & Yesalis, C.E. (1999, April). Abstract: Anabolic-androgenic steroid use among high school football players. Journal of Community Health, p. 131.

Straub, B. (2006, January 31). Number of 300-pounders increasing on prep teams. Scripps Howard News Service [Online].

Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection, U.S. House of Representatives. (2008, February 27). Drugs in sports: Compromising the health of athletes and undermining the integrity of competition. Webcast [Online]. 

Sumers, B. (2007, August 7). High schools try to tackle the heat. St. Louis Post-Dispatch [Online].

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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.

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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.

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 had 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, who 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.” Meggyesy said a retired player had a monetary interest for denying doping, such as healthcare and disability coverage, 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.”

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

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Zeigler, M. (2008, March 7). Cheaters can prosper on drugs at NFL tryout. San Diego Union-Tribune [Online].

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Zirin, D. (2007, June 27). High impact: What football owes its players. The Nation [Online].

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.

Doping Corner

St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Hyatt Regency Hotel

2^nd 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.

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.”

References