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

Book excerpt posted January 4, 2010

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

The Spectacle

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

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

I was shocked, nauseous instantly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus, why did I play football?

*       *       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Football fans did anticipate the violence but wanted positive meanings attached to the bloody acts, and football writers obliged the masses willingly, loving the game as fans themselves. They sought to rationalize the carnage too, and developed popular themes to serve the purpose. In media stories, football really was not violent in the depraved sense; rather, it was Necessary Roughness for a boy or young man, a strenuous physical activity that built character, even if it tore apart his body. A coach was not a tyrant, not a sadist; rather, he represented Coaching Genius, a moral leader who taught and motivated young men to perform and achieve as a team—a widely popular storyline for industrializing America. In addition, a football player was not a thug; he was Gladiator Hero, exhibiting positive qualities every young male should emulate. Fans, moreover, needed to feel good in their role, so the media portrayed football as Social Event for Americans, a must-see, wholesome, patriotic happening—not a public bloodletting.
*       *       *       *       *       *       *
In just four months, six former NFL players died in their 40s of natural causes, from Christmas 2004 through mid-April 2005: Reggie White, Charles Martin, Reggie Roby, Todd Bell, David Little, and Sam Mills. Ailments included heart disease and cancer. Doping expert Steve Courson, a former NFL lineman, had his suspicions in considering the dead as a group, particularly because all had played as large specimens for their frames. The giantism of modern football concerned him foremost, body with excessive mass ranging to 150 percent above recommended weight on the Body Mass Index scale.

  Regardless how added weight was acquired, and whether it be fat or muscle, Courson was sure health consequences and even death were becoming manifest in some players, retired and active. "What I fear about the NFL, the bodies are just going to implode," he said. "Especially now that we're on the doorstep of genetic engineering. We're walking into a very scary bio-technical world." The modern game's terrible contact injuries had to be expected, Courson said. "The size and speed denominators are just getting nuts. Modern training combined with the advances in pharmacology, you're creating missiles and weapons of a different dimension."
            Courson predicted a collision death for contemporary pro football, and exactly one week later it happened, claiming a 26-year-old player in the Arena Football League.

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

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

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

“I just wish this was a bad dream,” said Avengers receiver Tony Locke. “I want it to be over.”

References
Arena Death. (2005, April 11). Football player dies during Arena game. Kansas City Star, p. C2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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