Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  He was also pessimistic about baseball, though less so about football. The NFL confronted its steroid question with a testing program that was not particularly dynamic, but compared to baseball, which had none until 2003, it seemed daring. Yesalis was an influential figure, but he often found himself returning to the same thread: Most governing bodies knew about rampant drug use in their sports but did not particularly care to stop it. Sometimes, he grew tired. “I know I’m an old fossil, and I’m sure - they’re tired of listening to me,” Yesalis said. “But I’m part of the old school, and nature will take care of me soon enough; then they can go continue on.” Whenever he could get away, he would take off on his Harley-Davidson, liberated by the road, leaving the hypocrisy in his wake.

  WHILE MELLONI focused on youth and aggression, the other Crusaders fought the internal politics of international competitions such as the Olympics and the Tour de France. They sparred with those sports’ governing bodies over standards of testing and what drugs could have what effects on the body, and pleaded with them to come clean, despite the pains and embarrassment that would result from full disclosure. Although they were not always successful, newly formed organizations, such as the World Anti-Doping Agency and the USADA, made significant headway into cleaning up Olympic sports, and as the millennium arrived, the Crusaders turned - toward professional sports in America, especially big league baseball.

  Baseball wanted nothing to do with the Crusaders. If the players and the owners had been unable to agree on much of anything in thirty-five years of labor conflicts, on this issue they found solidarity. The Crusaders would clash with Donald Fehr, the head of the Players Association, and be rebuffed by Selig, who was not interested in Wadler’s help. Bud Selig would periodically mention Richard Pound, a fierce critic of baseball, as a particular thorn in his side. Pound understood that he was probably not the most popular person with Major League Baseball, but did not care. Anyone who thought he and the other Crusaders were tearing down sports, he believed, didn’t get it. In fact, they had it backward. The goal was to restore the games. “How would you like to take your son to a baseball game, and you’ve got your hot dog and you’ve got your Coke and you say, ‘My boy, someday, if you fill yourself with enough shit and can lie convincingly, you can play in your country’s national game,’” Pound said. “And the big danger is that you may say to yourself that you don’t want your son to have to be a chemical stockpile in order to be good at sports. You might say, ‘Don’t take it up. Let’s go climbing or whitewater rafting.’”

  For Gary Wadler, the issue was integrity. How could you trust a sporting event that was not 100 percent legitimate? It was the reason he plunged himself into the difficult, often thankless job of stamping out corruption in sports. Dogged in his pursuit of proving the existence of steroid use and weeding it out of competition, Wadler proceeded undeterred by the disturbing lack of interest on the part of the public, which appeared ambivalent at best about the dangers involved.

  Wadler liked to call the pro sports landscape “the conspiracy.” For a variety of reasons, he found himself particularly galled by baseball. He did not believe the tired old lines about baseball’s purity, its special place in the American vein. If anything, Wadler found himself to be more skeptical of baseball, with its closed society, antitrust protection, and muscular, condescending denials about the effects of steroids and other supplements on baseball players. It was as if the game’s hierarchy—its owners, its union, and its individual players—thought they were talking to idiots, sycophants hungry for an autograph instead of serious professionals concerned about the complexities of a serious health crisis and armed with a deep understanding of how drugs could alter the body. Baseball had told him it could police itself, thank you very much, and the players ridiculed him, even though he had knowledge that could possibly save their lives.

  Wadler was not surprised by baseball’s reaction. But it was complicit in its silence. Thanks to Steve Wilstein, the clubs knew that McGwire had used androstenedione, yet they chose to do nothing. Wilstein, meanwhile, was vilified by the baseball establishment. Wadler thought Wilstein deserved better than that. To Gary Wadler, the discovery of andro in McGwire’s locker was a seminal moment, the first major step in forcing baseball to come face-to-face with an incendiary element of its culture. “Steve Wilstein was the first one,” Wadler said. “He will be remembered as the guy who blew the lid off this thing. It was a very important moment.”

  To Wadler, there was a larger phenomenon taking place. Not only did baseball suffer from a rampant drug culture, but he was convinced that it existed because baseball had, for years, refused to confront it. Scarred by the strike, baseball, he reasoned, was petrified by the thought of losing the public, and instead of facing up to a potentially damaging situation, the game chose to ride along, embracing the steroid culture for profit.

  Chuck Yesalis agreed. As he saw it, the overarching problem was that the governing bodies were the wrong arbiters, the wrong juries to clean up their sports. At a basic level, they were too conflicted to administer any real kind of policy. They were too invested in the end result. It was only obvious, Yesalis thought, that the leagues, at some level, benefited from steroid use. To Murray Chass, the New York Times reporter, the problem with cleansing the game was the same as it had been during baseball’s cocaine scandal in the eighties. “You basically would have had owners in the position of exposing their own players, and no owner was prepared to do that,” he said. “It was financial suicide.”

  For baseball, the possibilities were potentially disastrous. Would Giants’ owner Peter Magowan, swimming in debt and needing to pay off the team’s new $255-million ballpark, really turn on Barry Bonds, the club’s best draw, and send him to the public guillotine? Would the Oakland A’s, who had been losers for three-quarters of a decade, sabotage their run at a pennant by announcing that they suspected their MVP candidate and team leader, Jason Giambi, of steroid use? Would the Cardinals have risked ruining one of the greatest moments in baseball history by calling Mark McGwire a cheater? Would the game really expose the feel-good sensation of Sosa-McGwire as a sham? How much more willing to do those things were they in the wake of the strike that had already broken the game’s back, siphoning millions from their pockets? To Yesalis the questions weren’t even worth asking. The safer choice was to ride the wave and hope the problem disappeared.

  The press may have focused on the athlete because it was easier for the public to digest, but the bottom line was that baseball’s owners were just as guilty. “I think they and other sport federations are being less than honest about it,” Yesalis says. “We talk about the brilliance of these businessmen who own these clubs, and the brilliance of the manager, especially when they win the division or the World Series. But we’re supposed to believe they’re so stupid and naïve that they don’t see the dramatic change in their ballplayers, that they don’t have the most basic understanding of what can be achieved naturally that you can learn in a physiology primer or talking to any strength coach willing to be honest? Look, we know none of this pertains. They are very bright men. They know what’s going on, and they choose to turn their heads the other way because it helps them make a lot of money. And the employees, it helps them keep their jobs. That applies to Division I college football and the NFL and the IOC and whomever. It’s just not rocket science.”

  For Gary Wadler, if the game’s leadership really did need more proof that drugs had changed the game, there was no better place to look than on the field of play. There, he thought, was the source of baseball’s ultimate indictment. It was the smoking gun everyone in baseball said did not exist.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I still keep up my search for the illusive Fountains, though others may believe me to be foolish. But I must go on, and keep up the search, for I believe that these marvelous Fountains do exist. My hair is now gray and my body weakens, so I must go on searching, for what do I have to lose? —Spanish conquistador Ponce de León, circa
1520

  For a man in the grip of mortality, the promise of eternal life was intoxicating. The allure of reversing the inevitable aging process left the dreamer with a thirst for cool and magical springs spouting from the earth, preserving what time mercilessly erodes. When Ponce de León landed in St. Augustine in 1513 and claimed Florida for Spain, that promise existed only in song and in myth, but he would spend the rest of his life chasing after the dream that maybe there really was a fountain of youth.

  In the centuries since, this quest has driven the men of science and medicine. In the new millennium, as modern medicine pushed beyond the limits of sophistication, producing new ethical questions about how science could aid and alter the body’s regenerative processes, one doctor asked, “If you are against antiaging medicine, then what are you for—death?”

  Scientists had known for centuries that the male source of vitality, what made a man masculine, existed in the testes. They knew this through the brutality of castration, both of animals for the purpose of domestication and, in the early civilizations of Babylon and India, of human beings as suitable punishment for the crimes of adultery and rape. In 1200 BCE, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Hebrews, and the Chinese used castration in war as a means to subdue their conquered foes. In Europe, sex offenders were routinely castrated until the early part of the twentieth century. Even today, in some parts of the United States, castration as punishment for sex crimes remains at issue. What happened to the castrated was revealing and unequivocal and gave science its first clues into the roots of human potency. Castrated men lost their strength to such a degree that performing even the simplest tasks was impossible. Even the strongest men wilted away. In the early days of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Christian Church required castration for choirboys, finding it to be an effective tool to retain their soprano voices. What the early scientists didn’t know was how to replenish a man’s source of strength after it had been taken, either by the punishments of castration or by the aging process.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the German scientist Arnold Berthold, who was also a zoo curator, discovered a severe loss of sexual and physical energy among castrated roosters. He also noticed that after castration, a rooster’s comb diminished. Berthold found that by injecting testes extracts into the abdomen of these castrated roosters, he could restore their vitality. It was an important moment, for the conventional wisdom in nineteenth-century medicine suggested that the brain was the only organ that could affect behavior. Yet here was evidence that an organ without an immediate link to the brain was having an effect. The castrated rooster experiments represented the first medical investigation into the connection between hormones and the central nervous system.

  Several decades later, Charles E. Brown-Séquard, the renowned French physiologist and the founder of endocrinology, took a bizarre leap. At age seventy-two, Brown-Séquard concocted a formula composed of dog and guinea pig testes and injected himself with it. The good doctor turned reckless experimenter reported a finding that would begin to change history:

  The day after the first subcutaneous injection, and still more after the two succeeding ones, a radical change took place in me. . . . I had regained at least all the strength I possessed a good many years ago. . . . My limbs, tested with a dynamometer, for a week before my trial and during the month following the first injection, showed a decided gain of strength.

  Brown-Séquard would live only a few more years, but he had done it. The mad-scientist bit had worked. He shot himself up with dog secretion and found what Ponce de Léon only imagined. He had discovered the fountain of youth. The weak could be strong again. For nearly thirty-five years, doctors made a fortune selling various concoctions purporting to restore vitality.

  It turned out that Brown-Séquard was on the right track, but not quite there. Animal testicular extracts, it was discovered, did not actually produce the kind of body rejuvenation Brown-Séquard had hoped and reported, and the fountain of youth had slipped once again through man’s hungry fingertips.

  What confounded scientists was how these various extracts, once injected into the body, produced increased vitality. With further experimentation it became clear that once injected these extracts migrated through the bloodstream into the muscle tissue. Scientists knew that the source of vitality did not exist independently within the bloodstream, however, and because the Brown-Séquard experiment was not completely successful, they could not assume that the extract itself was the source of vitality. By the late 1920s, scientists had deduced the key substance that migrated into the muscles would appear in the urine after clearing the kidneys. Upon analyzing the urine, they discovered that the substance, hormone, was multiplied through the body’s metabolism into a large number of active compounds called androgens that existed in the male urine. In the mid-1930s, scientists in Amsterdam discovered that a compound found in bull testes exactly matched the androgens in human urine. The male sex hormone had been located.

  Having named the hormone “testosterone,” scientists soon discovered that, when administered to castrated dogs and later eunuchoid men, it produced new tissue, especially muscle tissue, throughout the body. They later found out that testosterone was one of many hormones, and that there existed inside the body a family of substances that shared chemical characteristics similar to those of testosterone. This family of substances was called steroids. Within fifteen years of its discovery, testosterone and other steroids could be synthetically reproduced. The experiments continued into the 1950s, as synthetic steroids were soon developed; these were called androgenic-anabolic steroids, or in common parlance, anabolic steroids.

  IF THERE was one thing that galled the Crusaders about baseball, it was its ingrained arrogance. Baseball may have been under the influence of a steroid culture fewer than twenty years, far less than some Olympic sports or football, but so much information existed about the dangers of drug use from the life lessons of other sports that it was impossible for baseball to be so unaware. Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, recalled an exchange with a particularly aggressive baseball executive. The executive, Pound remembered, had grown tired of the constant sniping at baseball by Crusaders such as himself and especially Gary Wadler, and chose to call Pound on the troubles of Olympic sports. The point was that baseball was hardly alone in dealing with these complex issues. “He asked me if we had uniform agreement on all issues,” Pound said. “I said that we - didn’t, but that I expected we would have agreements with the IOC in the very near future. His attitude was, ‘Well, in that case, why don’t you clean up your own house before you have anything to say about ours.’”

  To Pound, that was exactly the point. Over the past three decades, the Olympics had been attempting to deal with the drug problem, while baseball had spent most of the poststrike era either glowering at anyone who suggested its players used drugs or reveling in newfound profits from yet another juiced home run. The Olympics might not have moved fast enough for all tastes, but it no longer denied that a problem existed. To Pound, it was the equivalent of the police and crime. There were thousands of police officers, and yet crime was still rampant. The point was in the response, the effort to enforce order.

  The Olympics had been so ravaged by drugs over the previous half century that no sport had officials who were more equipped to deal with the complexity of this sophisticated and dangerous issue. As early as the 1950s, Russian weightlifters had been using anabolic steroids in training to such a degree that, during the 1960s, the Americans followed suit just to compete. The Olympics had suffered through the same Darwinian conflict baseball would in the 1990s: The athletes who were clean not only knew they were going to have to compete against players who were using performance-enhancing drugs, but also realized that if they didn’t start using themselves, they might be out of a career.

  In a 1971 interview with the Los Angeles Times, American weightlifter Ken Patera summed up his anticipated match with Russian super-heavyweight Vasily Alexeyev in the 1972 Munich games
thus: “Last year, the only difference between me and him was I couldn’t afford his drug bill. Now I can. When I hit Munich, I’ll weigh in at about 340 or maybe 350. Then we’ll see which are better, his steroids or mine.”

  But it was the East German Olympians who revealed just how prevalent and powerful steroids were. Despite possessing the population of the Greater New York metropolitan area, East Germany was determined to compete with the United States and the Soviet Union as an athletic superpower. In that spirit, East German coaches had injected steroids into as many as ten thousand of their athletes, many of them young girls who had not even reached puberty. It was in East German labs that androstenedione was developed for the sole purpose of providing athletes a boost through chemistry. The goal, ultimately, was power, and at an unfathomably high cost in human lives, not to mention ethical standards and credibility, the East Germans succeeded. From 1973 to 1988, East Germany won forty-four of eighty-eight women’s world swimming championships.