Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  Dick Pound was at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, and remembered how imposing the East Germans were. “I could stand behind Kornelia Ender and you couldn’t see around her,” he said. “These women were just enormous.” Ender, the legendary swimmer, was the first woman to win four gold medals, all in world record time. Fifteen years later, Ender revealed that the East German government had filled her with drugs as early as thirteen years of age. Ender was not sure at the time, but when she came forward in 1991, she was convinced the drugs were anabolic steroids. Ender was stunned to notice the changes in her body. Months before Montreal, she gained eighteen pounds of muscle. Pound recalled another athlete, a Czech woman sprinter. “They must have given her the keys to the medicine chest. I remember her standing next to Evelyn Ashford, and Evelyn asking her, ‘What event are you running in, sir?’” Pound then shifted to a baritone, mimicking the deep masculinity of the Czech’s voice. “I’m running in yours.”

  The steroidal effects on women were frightening. In thousands of cases, the East German government had injected so much testosterone into its female athletes that some had essentially turned into men. Breast size shrank, facial hair grew, male pattern baldness developed, and the clitoris grew enlarged and deformed. A few, their bodies ravaged by years’ worth of male hormones, would undergo sex-change operations. Many more would be left shattered, suffering from drug-induced mood swings and unpredictable hormonal changes, liver and kidney damage, and the hell of a life ruined.

  The most famous case was that of the shot-putter Heidi Krieger:

  MAGDEBURG, Germany, Jan. 20—Andreas Krieger opened a shopping bag in his living room and spilled out his past: track and field uniforms, a scrapbook and athlete credentials from the former East Germany.

  The photos on the credentials looked familiar, but the face was fuller and softer, the hair covering the ears and draping down the neck. This was Heidi Krieger, the 1986 European women’s shot-put champion, perhaps the most extreme example of the effects of an insidious, state-sponsored system of doping in East Germany.

  The taking of pills and injections of anabolic steroids created virile features and heightened confusion about an already uncertain sexual identity, Krieger said, influencing a decision to have a sex-change operation in 1997 and to become known legally as Andreas.

  “They killed Heidi,” Krieger said.

  IF THERE was one professional organization that seemed to escape the full wrath of the antidoping community, it was the National Football League. It was believed that football, unlike baseball, understood the threat steroids posed not only to its players but to the game’s image. To a certain degree, this attitude represented a popular piece of fiction, for the NFL had allowed a steroid culture to exist for nearly thirty years before adopting an aggressive testing position. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chuck Yesalis researched the NFL and found that football had embraced the steroid model almost as quickly as the weightlifters, beginning when Alan Roy was hired by the San Diego Chargers in 1963 to be the first strength coach in the history of pro football. It was believed that, during training camp, Roy would routinely place steroid pills next to his players’ plates. The pills were believed to be Dianabol, one of the more potent oral steroids. Not only had the coach introduced steroids to his players, but it was thought that players who refused the tablets were fined for insubordination. When Roy moved on, so did the drugs, and by the 1970 AFL-NFL merger, steroids were commonplace throughout the league.

  When it came to football, Pound was convinced that the public maintained a great deal more tolerance toward steroids and other muscle builders than it did regarding their use in the Olympics. It was a fact that did not go unnoticed in baseball; when major league executives felt particularly assaulted, they would invariably ask why football received such a free pass. There tended to be an accepted suspension of disbelief when it came to football. Most people did not believe it to be possible that a person could weigh 270 pounds, hit like a truck, and run like a sprinter without some form of chemical help. The perceived side effects of steroids seemed to coincide with the public’s belief of what football embodied. Steroids may have increased aggression, but football players were supposed to be aggressive, whereas baseball players were not expected to be violent. Football was the sport of obscene muscles, and steroids produced obscene muscles. Football was also what Pound considered a “gladiator sport,” meaning that football, because of its brutality and perceived lack of grace, was not held to the same standard as a skill sport such as baseball, or an Olympic sport in which success was judged by hundredths of a second. Thus the preparation for football was not as scrutinized as it was for Olympic sports, in which world records were at stake. None of this was a satisfactory response to baseball people who constantly felt unfairly targeted.

  Unlike baseball, in which few players chose to publicly confront the steroid issue that existed in their clubhouses, football players were surprisingly candid about life inside the locker room. What was especially interesting about the football dynamic was the number of high-profile players who divulged that the steroid problem in football was a grave one. Gene Upshaw, the Hall of Fame offensive lineman for the Oakland Raiders who would later become the executive director of football’s players association, knew that steroids were the by-product of larger cultural forces in the NFL. “Teams can draft a kid who looks like he can be a player, but when they get the player at minicamp, they see that he’s smaller and not as strong as they thought,” Upshaw told the New York Times in 1991. “They tell him that he’s got to be bigger and stronger before he reports to training camp, and he’s got eight weeks to do it. There’s only so much steak, potatoes, and milk shakes you can eat in eight weeks. If the player is up against a time frame, he’ll do what he has to do to get the results.” Joe Klecko, the great nose tackle for the New York Jets, admitted using steroids in order to grow “bear strong” for the league-sponsored “NFL Strongest Man” competition. Klecko said he thought 65 to 70 percent of players used steroids at late as 1987. Buffalo’s Fred Smerlas estimated that 40 percent of players were users.

  When the league began testing in 1986, it found that 30 percent of its players were using anabolic steroids. The testing program was hailed as an important step, but the tragic death of Lyle Alzado five years later shocked the sport. Celebrated throughout his career for his sheer brawn and general nastiness, Alzado was what a defensive football player was supposed to be: an imposing and intimidating presence on the field. An all-pro lineman with the Denver Broncos and world champion with the Los Angeles Raiders, he looked the part of the Raider renegade, part badassed football player and part Hell’s Angel. But by 1991, six years after his retirement, an inoperable brain tumor he was convinced was the result of his steroid use had left him weak and scared. Before his death later that year, Alzado gave a detailed and disturbing interview to Sports Illustrated in which he concluded that football’s culture condoned steroid use and had for years. Alzado estimated that 75 percent of the players he played against used some form of performance enhancement.

  Forrest Tennant, a physician who once served as the NFL’s drug czar, took Alzado at his word, and was convinced that even the random punitive testing the league had implemented in 1989 was not going to be enough to overhaul a culture. “With the levels of anabolic steroids that some of these guys are taking,” Tennant said, “I do not see how some of these fellows will not develop cancer. Alzado is not the first steroids-user to develop cancer. He’s the first famous person. He is a signal. He’s going to be the first in a long line of these people with cancer.”

  What changed the attitude toward the NFL wasn’t the league’s swift response to drugs, but the manner in which it finally chose to confront cleaning up the game. That, and the shrewd decision by the league and its players especially to cultivate some of the Crusaders, protected the NFL from the heavy criticism reserved for baseball. Whereas baseball appeared to be outright hostile to the antidoping forces, football opened its doors
. Chuck Yesalis served as a consultant to the NFLPA and assisted the players during their movement toward testing policies. Yet a fundamental and critical problem existed in the administration of the drug tests that would hound football: The stars never got caught.

  To Chuck Yesalis, there was at the end of the steroid story an interesting and unflattering irony. While the Crusaders fought to clean up sports, it was the medical experts athletes had entrusted their bodies to who had initiated the use of steroids by athletes. During the scandals, it would be the coaches and doctors who had supplied the steroids, but the athletes who took the fall. In baseball over the years, trainers helped players use steroids, just as in football. “Not only did the medical community develop these drugs, but it played a role early on in ‘selling’ this potential fountain of youth. It was a physician and some officials and supporters of the U.S. weightlifting team who initiated use of the drugs in this country. It was government scientists and sport federation officials who institutionalized use in Eastern Bloc countries. It was physicians and/or coaching staffs at the professional, collegiate, or high-school levels in a number of instances who provided, facilitated or encouraged the use of steroids. It was physicians who, until at least the late 1980s, served as the primary source of these drugs for over one-third of the steroid users in this country. It was a number of sports federations that for decades covered up this problem, conveniently looking the other way, or instituted drug-testing programs that were designed to fail. It was (and is) our society that emphasizes and rewards speed, strength, size, aggression, and winning.”

  MOST PEOPLE assumed that football players were inherently aggressive. They were aggressive because the game required aggression and because such an aggressive game attracted naturally aggressive people. It was the same assumption people made about weightlifters or wrestlers or any of a number of other types of athletes. They were aggressive because their profession demanded it. It was also assumed the high-pressure environments in which these athletes performed increased their tendency toward aggression the same way that intense social or economic pressure or stress increases aggression in nonathletes. Whether these athletes were steroids users, they thought, was unrelated to the fact that they were aggressive because of their nature, profession, and environment.

  This was an assumption Rich Melloni was unwilling to accept. Melloni had long studied the concept of steroid-induced aggression, an animal equivalent of ’roid rage. In 1995, while at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, he set up a series of tests designed to figure out if it was actually the drugs themselves that caused aggression in the absence of social stimuli. Would an accountant on steroids adopt the aggressive tendencies of a linebacker on fourth and goal? If so, would discontinuing use return the user to a less-aggressive state? Since they were not subject to socioeconomic or other external pressures, participants in inherently aggressive social activities, or selected for their natural tendencies toward aggression, Melloni turned to his Syrian hamsters.

  “It was a simple question,” said Melloni, “if these things make you aggressive, does that happen because it changes the brain development? That’s when we got into looking at the circuits of the brain that are involved in aggression control. We asked the questions directly: We know from a number of studies that selected areas of the brain are involved in aggression, in controlling aggression, stimulating or inhibiting aggression, and we found that anabolic steroid exposure during adolescence turns up the circuits responsible for stimulating aggression. It superactivates them.

  “Think of any control mechanism. You have a stimulator and something trying to hold it back,” he said. “Think of a gas and a brake. With anabolic steroids, the system of the brake is automatically decreased, so you’re stepping on the gas and taking off the brake at the same time. We think it has more than twice the effect, so these animals aren’t a little bit aggressive, they are very aggressive. You have an overactive system involved in stimulating aggression and an underactive system involved in suppressing aggression.”

  Melloni’s research found another sobering discovery. Taking the animals off the steroids made them less aggressive over time, “but what never recovers in our models is this reduction of the brake. The brake mechanism is a molecule called serotonin. It’s implicated in depression, sleep dysfunction, all kinds of higher-order psychiatric problems. That system never comes back to normal in the extended periods we studied, say two and half months, which is approximately eight to ten years in a human. One of the things we track with anabolic steroids is an increased probability for depression later on. You reduce that serotonin system forever, and now that person is more prone to diseases characterized by low serotonin. So when someone tells you that these things don’t cause negative effects on the body and brain, they aren’t educated with the current scientific research. Without question, without hesitation, without reserve, anabolic steroid use causes dramatic changes in brain development and those changes can be long lasting, and they correlate well with changes in behavior. There’s no doubt to that data,” he said.

  What drew Rich Melloni’s anger was the direct link he saw between the straw arguments being put forth in professional sports, especially baseball, and the alarming instances of physical and emotional violence taking place among young adults due to steroid use. “You’re sending out people who are very damaged into the world,” he said. Melloni pointed to a handful of disturbing high-profile cases across the country that buttressed his point concerning what steroids could do to teenagers. There was the story of Taylor Hooton, a seventeen-year-old high-school baseball player from Plano, Texas, who used steroids, grew deeply depressed, and ultimately hung himself. Rob Garibaldi, a baseball player at the University of Southern California, suffered from depression his family attributed to steroid use. Garibaldi went undrafted, fell deeper into depression, and fatally shot himself in 2002.

  DESPITE MELLONI’S devastating evidence, the spurious debate continued. If Gary Wadler likened eradicating steroid use to fighting a war, the various straw arguments about their effects represented the barbed wire lining different fronts. Wadler and Yesalis were insulted by how many baseball players tried to suggest that steroids couldn’t help their performance. Baseball required hand-eye coordination, they’d say. No syringe - could give a player that. Hitting a baseball was the hardest thing to do in sports. If there was a pill that could turn a bum into a baseball player, went the argument, everyone could play big league ball. This was nonsense, for the assumption of talent was a given. Hitting the ball wasn’t the issue. The issue was hitting the ball better. Steroids could make the strong stronger and the fast faster, but they couldn’t make a bad hitter a good one.

  Steroids were, in many ways, perfect for baseball. Anabolic steroids enhanced quickness, which was crucial to a baseball player’s swing or ability to steal a base. They built muscle mass, even without exercising, giving players unprecedented power and increased aggression. In the short term, they reduced body fat and allowed athletes to heal faster from injury. Recovery speed in a sport like baseball with so many games and so few days off was especially advantageous.

  But those advantages had their costs. If the drugs allowed a player to return faster from injury, steroids also made tendons more brittle and susceptible to tearing. Players on steroids may have healed quicker, but they were also at greater risk of further, often more serious injury. Anabolic steroids also produced high levels of acne on the back and trunk and increased hair loss. But these short-term side effects were insignificant compared to the long-term risks.

  There was in the medical community no consensus about the degree to which anabolic steroids could destroy a player’s body. Doctors were certain that steroids were dangerous, but even as late as the 1990s there was no demonstrable proof of immediate and direct side effects. It wasn’t like smoking and lung cancer or alcohol and cirrhosis. While the doctors knew the long-term potential for danger, they could not say with certainty that steroids were going to cause sp
ecific maladies. It was the Lyle Alzado situation all over again. There was consensus that the steroids he abused were not good for him, but opponents would always demand medical proof steroids were the cause of his fatal brain cancer. It was proof no one could produce.

  To Rich Melloni, politics were getting in the way of medical facts. The entire conversation was nonsense. People wanted to believe pieces of the argument that supported their various viewpoints. It was true that the effects of steroids were not as easily determinable as, say, drinking a bottle of poison, but steroids did produce harmful effects in the body.

  Despite the disagreement, virtually all doctors, Crusaders or not, - could agree that anabolic steroids were lethal to the human system. They were certain that some of the more powerful steroids, such as Deca-durabolin, Winstrol, and stanozolol, were major threats to the heart, the liver, and the kidneys. Deca-durabolin, for example, was a particularly nasty steroid that had been in use among weightlifters since the 1960s. Users of the powerful yet lethal drug were highly susceptible to kidney malfunction and liver and pituitary tumors. To Robert Cantu, the noted Boston neurosurgeon who specialized in catastrophic sports injury, athletes were involved in a high-stakes poker game, in which the odds were against them and the risks were chilling. While most people knew that steroids could cause sterility, Cantu believed it to be less known that the drugs could affect the reproductive systems of a user’s children and grandchildren. That athletes were now willing to risk the future health of their unborn children for a big payday raised the stakes even further.

  Increased production and the resulting million-dollar contracts were the primary reasons that anabolic steroids became attractive to big league players, but another factor in their use was the fact that, since baseball had no testing policy in place, they could be used without fear of getting caught. To Rich Melloni, not even having to worry about facing a drug test opened up a world of possibilities to baseball players. In Olympic competition, the older, harder stuff—known as molecule-17 steroids in medical circles—had virtually disappeared in favor of more sophisticated compounds that were more difficult to detect. By the time the nineties rolled around, only a person convinced there was no chance of getting caught would have even attempted to use those older drugs. Yet they were so common in baseball that there came to be an underground conventional wisdom about what drugs produced certain body types. A player who looked puffy and bloated was likely using Deca-durabolin or nandrolone. A player who sought more definition and less bulk used Winstrol. Chuck Yesalis had heard these stories of amateur expertise before and did not believe them.