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All this to-do about anabolic steroids, and so little being said about how they work.
Allow me.
They reduce the bulk in a user’s stool, and through exercise, he or she is able to
convert the matter retained in the system into muscle.
Yuck. Ugly, isn’t it?
I learned a thing or two about steroids in the mid-1960s, when I was tagging around
after what I for years referred to on these pages as "my little team," the
Chargers.
They would seem intent on taking that appellation to another level, as in gone, right
out of San Diego, which has given them succor and, yes, the community’s love.
But that is another story and one that doesn’t have the immediacy of this business
concerning steroids.
It came up through a disclosure in Sports Illustrated by Ken Caminiti, a former
baseball player, that he used steroids during his career. Further, Caminiti contended that
50 percent of the players in baseball are involved with steroids, although Caminiti later
cried that the 50 percent figure had not been his, but the publication’s, for which
he had been a source.
But let me go back to the ’60s, when the American Football League was young, and
so was I as the journalistic companion of the Chargers, among the first professional
football teams to appoint a strength coach. In ’63, Sid Gillman selected the late
Alvin Roy, a Louisianan who was a student of Russian training methods, to make sure the
San Diego athletes’ biceps bulged appropriately.
In ’63, history’s lesson is that the Chargers won the AFL championship. They
have not won another league championship.
Roy, an amiable individual, was the first fellow I heard utter those defining words
concerning the football experience: "Many come but few are chosen." His thinking
may have been that the few’s chances would be improved by them being chemically
enhanced, because steroids became part of the fare for the San Diego athletes.
Gillman would stand up at dinner time and announce, "Everybody take your pink
pills." Taking them would only make them stronger, Sir Sidney would tell them.
The players took them.
Being young at this time — we’re talking, remember, about the mid-’60s
— I had the thinking that I would do some weightlifting. I wanted to do a story on
how hoisting a few weights (small ones, of course) would make me feel. It made me feel as
if I would be better served to stick to tennis.
At Gillman’s suggestion, I had not gotten into those pink pills.
At first, the San Diego players had no objection to ingesting steroids. They probably
didn’t know what they were. The word, though, started to get around: that while a
person could become bigger and stronger through swallowing steroids, their use could
diminish a man’s sexual prowess.
Football players are very protective of their libidos. Soon enough, fewer players were
reaching for the pink pills.
Using steroids, I should point out, is not illegal, nor am I aware that the AFL in the
’60s had any prohibition against them. In ’73, when then-NFL commissioner Pete
Rozelle detailed what he termed "additional steps to supplement a program on drug
misuse," there was no mention of steroids. Amphetamines were Rozelle’s leading
concern.
Subsequently, the NFL would adopt measures aimed at checking the use of steroids. In
any sort of sporting endeavor, they represent an abomination. For one contestant to be
going around swollen by artificial means while another is not distorts the game, any game.
Why baseball cannot accept this defies understanding, yet baseball’s players’
union, which is all-powerful, refuses to permit its legions to submit to testing for
steroids on the basis that for the players to do so would be an abrogation of their
personal liberties. Pish and posh. If a guy can’t perform on hay and oats, he
shouldn’t be performing. And the public has to know that those aren’t a bunch of
juiced-up freaks out there.
Football is the game that can be most altered by steroids’ abuses. In football, it
is man against man. Strength is paramount. In baseball, it is man against baseball. Those
people are not physically engaging one another as football players do. Yet if Sports
Illustrated’s account concerning the degree of steroid use in baseball is accurate,
steroid use in baseball is sweeping.
Happily, steroid use is understood to have pretty much been wiped out in the NFL
through the league’s testing policies. There is a lesson there for baseball.
Jerry Magee has covered pro football for the San Diego Union-Tribune since 1961 and for
PFW since its inception in 1967. |
