Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  Still, some players were irritated that these physicians had inserted themselves into their billion-dollar sports universe. They should stick to their test tubes and chest X-rays and stop moralizing about what was happening in the clubhouse. Once, when the Associated Press sought player reaction to doctors’ warnings of the effect of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs on the body, Barry Bonds fumed. “Doctors ought to quit worrying about what ballplayers are taking,” he said. “What players take doesn’t matter. It’s nobody else’s business. The doctors should spend their time looking for cures for cancer. It takes more than muscles to hit homers. If all those guys were using stuff, how come - they’re not all hitting homers?”

  GARY WADLER was born in New York City in 1939 and lived his childhood through the prism of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He studied chemistry and pre-med at Brooklyn College and attended medical school at Cornell, then found himself drifting toward studying the impact of drugs on society. Beginning in the late 1960s, when he authored a comprehensive study on how health care professionals could devise strategies for combating drugs in the workplace, Wadler dealt mostly with heroin and marijuana abuse and recalled owing his involvement in sports to a “fortuitous tap.”

  In 1980, Wadler served as the chief doctor for the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens. At the time, tennis was enduring the early years of a drug crisis. Players were realizing that certain drugs enabled them to hit the ball harder and be more athletic. It was changing the balance of the game. In 1986, an official from the Association of Tennis Professionals asked Wadler to give a urine sample. He was dumbfounded, and, after dealing with drug issues for nearly twenty years, more than a bit apprehensive. It was explained to Wadler that the ATP was in the process of implementing a drug policy, and the best way to send a message to the players that the undertaking was legitimate was to test the doctors as well. He agreed, and thus began Gary Wadler’s two-decade crusade against doping in sports. “They sent me into a room, gave me a cup, and told me to go to the bathroom,” Wadler recalled. “Remembering my experience from the 1970s, I asked if anyone was going to accompany me. They said I was going in alone, and that’s when I said, ‘Let me look into what we know about drug testing in sports.’” For the next two years, Wadler studied the complexities of the history of drug testing from a variety of angles. The result was Drugs and the Athlete, a groundbreaking book that would become one of the standards for most drug-testing programs.

  There would be other successes. He would become an adviser to numerous organizations charged with dealing with the issues of drug testing, from White House committees to the International Olympic Committee to the World Anti-Doping Agency to Congress, which led to his first confrontation with a major sports organization, professional wrestling. Wadler’s testimony led to the convictions of two World Wrestling Federation physicians for violating steroid distribution laws.

  A FEW dozen yards from a plaque commemorating the site of the Boston Red Sox’s first World Series championship in 1903 stands a red-brick building, dusty, bypassed, forgotten. In the modern world, buildings are no longer made of brick. One of the oldest buildings on the Northeastern campus, Forsythe Hall, is chalky and stubborn. The thermostat is so temperamental that the Crusader who works on the third floor keeps a window open in the middle of November.

  He is Richard Melloni, a gifted neuroscientist at Northeastern University and a steroid hunter of a different sort. Unlike the other, more prominent Crusaders, who because of their advocacy have become full-time expert witnesses to the steroid drama, commenting for newspapers and television stations, Rich Melloni spends his time in the musty depths of Forsythe. He is not part of the political machinery that spars with amateur and professional sports leagues to take steroid use more seriously. The other Crusaders focus on the physical impact of anabolic steroids, but Rich Melloni does not care about the body, the muscles, and the sinews that keep Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and a host of other sculpted hitters under constant suspicion. Melloni cares about the brain.

  Down the hall from Melloni’s office is Forsythe’s animal facility. In it are hundreds of caged hamsters imported from Syria, their environments mimicking their natural habitats. Most will be injected with high doses of anabolic steroids similar to the amounts taken by a typical steroid user. Melloni studies their reactions with equal amounts of fascination and horror.

  BORN IN the Cape Cod border town of Wareham, Massachusetts, Rich Melloni was a classic New Englander. Like most New England boys coming of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he idolized Bobby Orr, the Boston Bruins star who was considered one of the all-time greats of the National Hockey League. Melloni and his two brothers would spend two weeks a year in Montreal at the National Hockey School where young Rich would learn hockey from some of the great Montreal Canadiens, such as the Hall of Fame forward Yvon Cournoyer. As a teenager, Melloni was accepted by the University of New Hampshire, but instead of a hockey scholarship, they offered him one for football. Football was nice, but it - wasn’t hockey. Besides, football hadn’t been kind to him. In high school, Melloni broke his nose seven times playing football, and underwent three surgeries. Although he had verbal scholarship offers to play hockey at two other schools, UNH took hold of him for both its charm and its biochemistry program. Thus, instead of finding another school that would accept him as a hockey player, Melloni chose UNH and turned down the football scholarship with the intention of walking on to the hockey team.

  For a time, college did not go well. He struggled with hockey and with class, winding up on academic probation as a freshman. When he was cut from the hockey team weeks later, he still had, as a backup, the standing offer to join the football team as a tight end. He considered the opportunity, went home, and explained to his parents that he was flunking out of school, but accepting a football scholarship would allow him to attend UNH for free.

  Realizing he would not have a pro football career, Melloni quit sports after his sophomore year and gave himself over to biochemistry, but because of his six-foot-four-inch, 240-pound frame and flirtation with hockey and football, he was accepted into the jock culture. What he saw there made a lifelong impression. Steroid use was rampant in the dormitory that housed student athletes. The football players had a connection. There was a doctor in Massachusetts who wrote steroid prescriptions to the athletes for a fee. The drill was always the same, Melloni recalled. Each player would tell the doctor the same story to obtain steroids: “Doctor, I’m coming off a neck injury and have to strengthen those muscles so I won’t get hurt again.” The doctor would write out a prescription for anabolic steroids with one hand, and accept a $50 cash kickback with the other. Years later, the doctor would serve a prison sentence for writing phony prescriptions.

  With steroids so easily available, many athletes were reckless. They would take anabolic steroid pills of different form and potency, and swallow them by the handful, not unlike a fistful of jellybeans. Others injected anabolic steroids while simultaneously gulping steroid pills. The goal, to grow bigger and stronger and meaner, was to be accomplished at any cost. It was during these years that Rich Melloni knew that he would spend his life understanding the scope of these drugs.

  He went on to earn a master’s in psychology and neuroscience at the University of Hartford, and a Ph.D. in biomedical science with a specialty in cell and molecular biology from the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. If Gary Wadler’s tap on the shoulder came in the form of becoming a part of the tennis world, it was Craig Ferris, the director of the university’s behavioral neuroscience program, who opened the door to becoming a Crusader for Rich Melloni. Ferris offered Melloni a chance to study aggression. Up until the mid-1990s, aggression, especially aggression attributed to steroid use, had been studied only anecdotally. For Melloni, the studies reminded him of college. “All those memories came back. I’m thinking, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ I’m reading the anecdotal reports of ’roid rage. I’m looking at the youth use statistics of anabolic ster
oids, and I’m remembering the behavior of my college friends and acquaintances, so much aggression. I thought it was a no-brainer to investigate the association.”

  As he ventured deeper into the field, Rich Melloni found himself transfixed. Steroids were serious, powerful substances whose dangers, for some reason, did not resonate with either the general public or, to a large degree, the government agencies that funded scientific research. As vital as he believed his research to be, he was on an island, lonely and underappreciated. Along with Ann Clark and Leslie Henderson at Dartmouth and Marilyn McGinnis at the University of Texas, Melloni would become one of only four scientists who were federally funded by the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of anabolic steroid use on the brain.

  Melloni focused on children. If Barry Bonds believed the Crusaders needed to stay out of his business, Melloni thought players should realize that every time they made an individual choice to use drugs, there was a child somewhere who was doing the same, in part because the child idolized that player. This fact alone, he reasoned, should have motivated the sports leagues to confront steroid use.

  “For me, kids emulate their heroes. For me, it’s all about them. They won’t emulate the community heroes, or their academic heroes, or their parents,” Melloni said one day in his office. “That’s why athletes matter. . . . I couldn’t care less how many balls a guy can hit over the fence. If Barry Bonds and these other athletes don’t want the responsibility that comes with being someone other people want to emulate, then he should work at Wal-Mart. There, they do whatever they want and no one will care. Otherwise, he should stay away from children. He should stay away from my children.”

  MELLONI TRACKS the effects of steroids on the hamster brain because, for his purposes, he says, people are nothing but hamsters, anyway. “Now, a hamster is not a human, yes,” Melloni says one day in his sweltering office, roughly snapping apart a plastic model of the human brain that sits on a table, revealing its different layers. “But your hypothalamus, the human hypothalamus, looks remarkably similar to a hamster hypothalamus. If I were to stick two slides up on the board and said, ‘Pick the human,’ and we looked at the brain systems we’re interested in, you couldn’t do it. You could not tell the difference between a hamster and human hypothalamus. The hypothalamus controls the water balance in a human just like it does in a rodent. It’s a very old part of the brain. Those things make me believe strongly that the effects that we see in our animals are likely happening in youth that take these substances.

  “What separates you from a monkey is your cortex, not your hypothalamus. What separates you from a lizard is your cortex, not your hypothalamus. We’re not talking about the cortex here,” Melloni says, pointing to the cortex, the rounded, heavy top section of the brain. “What we’ve developed as humans is this wonderfully huge cortex in our skulls. It’s folded because it’s growing so much it has to fold itself in order to fit in our heads. It controls your learning, your recognition, your thought, and your cognition. The part we deal with, the hypothalamus, is essentially no different from a canine or a monkey or an alligator. . . . It’s a very reflexive part of the brain that controls your very rudimentary sets of behaviors. It’s also very responsive to stress. So when you start adding stresses, you take someone and put them in a high-stress situation with this drug-altered system, you’re going to get an extremely heightened response. I believe that’s what we see in cases of ’roid rage.”

  In the lab, the hamsters are cheerful. They are cute little creatures with snubbed noses, the kind of pets any seven-year-old would love. But there are no treadmills or Habitrails in the animal facility at Forsythe. Each hamster is given a number and studied through a series of controlled tests. Hamsters are individual animals. They don’t live or travel in packs, like some other mammals. In their natural environments, hamsters live on small parcels, usually ten by ten square feet. Within their area, hamsters are territorial, but not particularly hostile to other hamsters. Melloni engages in a study called a Resident Intruder Paradigm. In the study, the hamsters trespass into the living spaces of their neighbors, and like children at day care, engage in basic contact. They sniff, they circle, they engage in investigative behavior. Some engage in the pitter-patter of play fighting, as a group of kittens would.

  Melloni retries the same experiment, this time with hamsters injected with a heavy, human-level dose of anabolic steroids. The results are chilling. Within ten minutes, the steroid-injected hamsters become violent, vicious. They are not cute and cuddly anymore. They attack one another. The experiment is repeated, and the results are the same. Like children, hamsters have to be taught how to fight. It is a learned behavior. In Melloni’s lab, the steroid-treated hamsters completely bypass the ritualistic feeling out and move immediately toward rage. The steroids have turned a perky little rodent into an aggressive fighting animal. “The steroids circumvent the learning process of aggression,” he says. “It changes the brain into an aggressive brain.”

  IF GARY Wadler was the Optimistic Crusader, and Rich Melloni the Children’s Crusader, then Chuck Yesalis was the Angry Crusader. Depending on one’s point of view, Yesalis, an epidemiologist at Penn State University and high-profile steroid hunter, was either the best or the worst of the bunch. He did not believe there existed sufficient desire to get rid of drugs in sports, especially the pro leagues. He did not believe the large majority of reporters, especially those who covered pro teams, possessed the courage to write what they obviously knew about the real environment of the sports they covered. And he did not relent.

  If there were other members of the antidoping community who believed constant pressure by the top executives in each league would eventually elicit change, Yesalis was not one of them. “As far as I’m concerned they’ve been simply dragged kicking and screaming from Ben Johnson on. That’s why Ben Johnson was so important,” Yesalis said. “It started the dominoes falling when a reporter asked that if the drug testing was so good, then how did Johnson pass those previous nineteen drug tests? And you can say the same today. Look at all the drug tests Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Kelli White, Michelle Collins, and all the people of their ilk passed successfully. If it was so damned good, in those out-of-competition, no-forewarning tests, how come all those - people passed for so long?”

  He was convinced that in its current form, drug testing was a fraud, a facade that gave the appearance of action. If he believed this about the drug-testing policies of the IOC and NFL, the two bodies that were routinely given high marks for their vigilance, it was not hard to see why baseball fueled his anger.

  CHARLES YESALIS grew up in Jackson, Michigan, about eighty miles west of Detroit. In the 1950s, his father, Charles Senior, who was an amateur boxer and played basketball at Illinois, would take him on the long drive to Briggs Stadium whenever the Yankees were in town to play the Tigers. Young Charles immediately fell in love with Mickey Mantle. “Now there was a guy,” Yesalis would say. “Two bad wheels, an alcoholic, and he never touched a steroid. So when it comes to baseball, yes, I do get irritated.”

  Yesalis earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology and a master’s in public health from the University of Michigan. He received his doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University and was a protégé of Dr. Charles Kochakian, the legendary chemist who coined the term “anabolic-androgenic steroids.” Like Gary Wadler, Yesalis found a sports world horribly undereducated about drugs. “I was really taken aback that there was little to no knowledge of the long-term health effects and of how many people were using these drugs. It was all anecdotal,” Yesalis recalled. “I had a different skill set and started looking into it.”

  In 1993, he published the groundbreaking book Anabolic Steroids in Sport and Exercise, which tracked steroids from their creation to their use in sports to the risks involved. Years earlier, he had met Steve Courson, the former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman who in 1985 did the unthinkable and admitted to steroid use while still in the NFL. In Courson, Yesalis found the
most principled athlete he would ever meet and the two would grow to be great friends. Courson collaborated with Yesalis on book projects and explained in lectures how steroids worked and what they could do. Yesalis documented numerous cases in which children as young as ten years old had experimented with anabolic steroids. To Yesalis there - could be no denying the link between baseball players as role models and a serious health crisis. Despite his pessimism about getting results, Yesalis continued because he believed the country was being threatened by steroids, especially given the environment of hero worship of athletes.

  Like Gary Wadler, Yesalis publicly called out the hypocrisy of the various elements of the sports machine. To the dismay of executives in the four major pro sports, he spent nearly as much time on television and in the newspapers as he did at Penn State. Yesalis would always say that he had grown bored with the incessant interviews about steroids, not because there wasn’t enough to discuss, but because the press seemed to lack the stamina and the desire to keep the important story about drug use in the public eye. It was as if the media believed interviewing a doctor was enough. That irritated Yesalis, who knew that it was the reporters who had the best access to each sport. They were in the clubhouse every day. They saw the players up close, and because of the brutal travel and longish hours, talked to them sometimes more than they did their own families. Yet it was the sports media that seemed most afraid of approaching the steroid question. If the press had a difficult time maintaining a consistent drumbeat regarding the drug issue, Yesalis would be a constant spokesman.

  Athletes might have lumped all of the Crusaders under the same umbrella, but not all of them got on so well. Yesalis was bitterly critical of Dick Pound, the World Anti-Doping chief who for two decades headed the International Olympic Committee. Unlike some of his fellow Crusaders, Yesalis did not believe the International Olympic Committee went far enough in its attempt to stop blood doping in the Olympics. “Look, I’ve never had a seat at the table,” he said. “And Dick Pound? Talk about an example of a guy who for, what, two decades sold the Olympic Games, and he’s supposedly this bright guy and he didn’t know what was going on? And now, all of a sudden because he’s director of WADA, he acts like he knows what’s going on. He didn’t know what was going on the previous twenty years? That’s embarrassing. I mean, Jesus God, a blind squirrel could have found that nut. No, I’m persona non grata with that crowd, and proud of it.”