This was a great article about steroids that appeared in SI years ago, by Tommy Chaiken.
This is the html version of the file
http://www.youcanbefit.com/Chaikin.pdf.
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South Carolina
Lineman Tommy Chaikin
used body building drugs for three years. they
drove him to violence, and nearly to suicide.
The Nightmare of Steroids
by Tommy Chaikin with Rick Telander
I was sitting in my room at the roost. the athletic dorm at the University of south Carolina,
with the barrel of a loaded 357 Magnum pressed under my chin. A 357 is a man's gun. and
I knew what it would do to me. My finger twitched on the trigger.
I was in bad shape, very bad shape from the steroids. It had all come down from the
steroids. The crap I'd taken to get big and strong and aggressive so I could play this game
that I love.
I felt as though I were sitting next to my body. Watching myself, and yet I was in my body,
too. I was trying to get up that final bit of courage to end it all. Every nerve inside me was
on fire. My mind was racing I couldn't get a grip on anything. The anxiety attacks I'd been
having for the last five months had become so intense that I couldn't stand them any more.
I'd lost control of everything - it's impossible to describe.
I could hear my teammates outside my room. they were walking back and forth, listening
at the door. They talked in low voices, and they sounded very concerned. Every now and
then someone would try opening the door, but I'd locked it. "Tommy," someone would say
quietly. "you O.K.". "Yeah." "you sure?" "Yeah." I was definitely going crazy, but not in a
wild way. I answered in very calm voice. I knew I was history - it was just a matter of
time. I thought about the explosion and the bullet, about how it could take away this pain.
And then I heard my father's voice. he was banging on the door. "Tommy, open up!" he
said.
It was a Friday morning, the day before our game against Clemson last November, and my
dad and my older brother had arrived from our home in Bethesda Md. There were ahead of
schedule because I'd called my sister Dawn early that week and told her I was sick and
needed help. My father flew down on Wednesday, but he really had no idea what kind of
bad shape I was in . On Thursday night I went to see my girlfriend, and mentally I was
already gone. I'd lost it. I started crying and I hadn't cried since way back when I was a kid.
"please don't think of me as a coward if I do some thing wrong. "I sobbed to her." What are
you talking about?"
I was a 23 year old football player at a big-time school. I weighed 250 pounds, a senior
defensive lineman who could bench-press 500 pounds. I was ready to kill myself, but I
couldn't stand the thought of being seen as a coward. That's all I cared about. Even then I
was a football player, not a coward. Somehow I got back to the roost that night and fell
asleep. I don't know how that happened, since I hadn't been able to sleep a night for
months. But when I woke up Friday morning I felt O.K.. and the first thing I said to myself
was. "I'm going to play against Clemson. I'll play, god damn it" We were 7-2 having a
great season. I wanted to continue to be a part of it. But then I started feeling bad again.
The waves of anxiety rushed over me. I started to tremble, and then I got my gun. And now
my dad was pounding on the door. On reflex, like a pitiful son I hid the gun and let him in .
He looked at me and said "Tommy, let's go home." He took me to the airport and we flew
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to Washington. I tried to compose myself on the flight. It was horrible. I felt I was
suffocating. My mom was waiting at the airport. "We're taking you to the hospital." she
said. All I said was "I hope it isn't the psyche ward, because I'm not going to the psyche
ward." Im in the waiting room at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington. I started to
have spasms.
My body was having a reaction to Stelazine. The drug that a psychiatrist had prescribed to
me a few weeks earlier when I'd first come home from South Carolina to get some
professional help. That was right before our game against North Carolina State. Which we
won. I played well, too. I had six tackles. But off the field I was loosing it. Suicide was
always on my mind. Suicide and football. The fact that I could play at all in my condition
seems unbelievable to me now. The Stelazine was supposed to reduce my anxiety attacks,
but it just seem to intensify them. Finally my psychiatrist arrived at Sibley. He tried to
explain what was happening to me, and I didn't care.
All of a sudden two guys in white jackets appeared. "We're just going to get you to the top
floor of the hospital one of them said. "You'll be fine." We all got into the elevator, and I
thought: One flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I was in a movie. I was Jack Nicholson. I was
Randle McMurpy. But nothing was funny. I couldn't believe any of this. My mind was on
fire.
We got off on the seventh floor, and there in front of us was a big door with a lock on it. I
freaked. I turned to my dad and screamed. "What the hell are you doing, man . I told you
I'm not going to this place! I'm not crazy! "I don't belong here!"
"Do not touch." I said "I'll walk in myself." I looked straight ahead. They opened the door,
and I walked in. The door closed and my parents and the rest of my life were locked out. In
front of me I saw people milling around. Some of them blank and silent. Suddenly,
everything caved in. This was how far I had fallen. This was how far I'd gone since I'd
enrolled at South Carolina four and a half years earlier to chase the American dream.
I often sit and wonder how it all happened how I let a anabolic steroids lead me into this
mess. I feel there's something in me - a flaw maybe, a personality trait- that brought me
down. Oh, yeah I take responsibility for my actions. I'm head strong, and I've got a temper.
I can't blame others for my mistakes, certainly not for making me take dangerous drugs.
But I still think of myself as someone who started out as just a normal guy, a hard worker,
a studier, a kid who loved sports. And pressures of college football, the attitudes, over-
zealous coaches and our just-take -a-pill society.
As I recover from my steroid use. I find myself sort of acting as my own shrink. I wish I
could have amnesia, to tell you the truth. It's very painful for me to reflect on what
happened. It's like having to watch game films of yourself where you get chop-blocked
over and over. But it's how you learn too.
I had a normal childhood grew up in Bethesda, the youngest of three kids in an upper-
middle-class family. My dad runs his own window-replacement business, and my mom is a
housewife. My dad always wanted us kids to be successful, but he didn't put pressure on us
to excel in sports. All my drive was self-motivated.
I started playing soccer when I was seven, but I got bored with it and picked up tennis a
few years later. I was pretty quick and I worked hard and before long I was ranked fairly
high in local junior tennis. I had always wanted to play football, and in my junior year at
Walt Whitman High, I decided I was going to. But my dad wasn't big on contact sports-
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Mark had blown his knee out playing high school football so it was battle for me to get
permission to play.
Finally my mom signed my release without telling my father, and I joined the team as a
split end.
I wanted to play because all the popular guys played football. And I wanted to excel.
During that first year of high school ball. I was about 6 feet, 185 pounds, and I did all right
as an end. But then our noseguard got hurt, and I switched to that position. I started
spending al lot of time lifting weights, and I came back for my senior season weighting
about 220. My teammates were amazed at how much I'd progressed. But the reason was
simple-I'd worked real hard. I was named all-area, all-county and all metro, and I knew I
wanted to play big-time college ball. But I also knew I was no blue-chipper. Not at my
size.
A few schools recruited me, but the coaches at South Carolina showed the most interest.
They sent up the defensive line coach, Jim Washburn, and he came to see me in the
hospital in the spring of "83", my senior year. I was recovering from having a collapsed
rectum wall repaired, fairly serious work. I was in a lot of pain, but I remember he told me
that my bench press of 350 pounds would make me one of the strongest guys on the S. C.
team. And he said that after the Gamecock's annual spring game, the winners always ate
lobster and the losers got steak. He was a good salesman.
All the time he was talking, he was checking me out, walking up and down the side of the
bed to see how tall I was. I'd said I was 6'2", but I'm more like 6'1". he saw the tattoo of a
star on my arm and the stretch marks around my pecs form lifting, and I guess he liked
those things. Anyway, I wanted to play college ball so bad that I would've played
anywhere at all. I'd never been to Columbia S.C., but I didn't care where the school was.
When they offered me a ride I snapped it up.
So I showed up in Columbia in the fall of 1983 a naive easygoing but ambitious 19 year-
old, ready to make his mark. The first thing I found out was that Washburn had fed me a
line. I wasn't even close to being one of the strongest players on the team. There were a lot
of monstrous guys in the weight room. And I found out later that the spring game winners
didn't get lobster either. They got little steaks, and the losers ate hot dogs. Basically, what I
discovered was that I couldn't trust this man, my position coach.
I also discovered that Columbia was one of the hottest places on earth. For the first few
days of double sessions Washburn ran me and the two other freshman defensive linemen to
death. Then one of the linemen, Ray Bingham went to offense, and the other, Ricky
Daniel's, blew out his knee. That left me and Washburn, one-on-one in the heat until the
upperclassmen reported a few days later.
Washburn never stopped screaming at me. I was dehydrated, my electrolytes were screwed
up, and my legs cramped all night. I actually prayed for a serious injury. One day I was
standing in the middle, and my eyes rolled up and I just keeled over. I'd stopped sweating,
my skin was cold. I was delirious. They packed me in ice and gave me fluids, and the next
day I was back at practice. All this-and I was sure they'd red shirt me anyway. I wouldn't
even play for a year.
So I held a dummy for the scout team and got knocked around all fall. I didn't like it, but it
was no big deal. Already guys asked me if I wanted to take steroids-they called the stuff
"juice"- so I could beef up and fight back.
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They were big guys, on steroids themselves, and they were tying to help me, but I always
said no. I'd smoked pot a couple of times in high school, but I didn't like drugs. And I'd
heard stories about the side effects of steroids, which can include cancer, liver damage,
heart disease and sex problems. No way was I going to mess with something as risky as
steroids. I was going to build myself up naturally.
In fact, I'd decided that I wanted to be a defensive end, and I figured I wouldn't have to
build myself up at all. Over Christmas break I ran and ran and ran, and actually dropped
my weight down to 205. I wanted to be lean and quick as a cat for spring practice. I get
obsessed when I put my mind to something, and I was obsessed with being a fast defensive
end.
That spring I got the crap knocked out of me. I got pushed all over the field. I also got a lot
of muscle pulls in my legs, and Tom Gadd, the defensive coordinator at the time, reacted to
that by saying. "Dianabol abuse! Dianabol abuse!" to me. He was referring to a type of
steroid, but I hadn't taken any yet, so he didn't know what he was talking about. But neither
did I at least as far as being a defensive lineman was concerned. It turned out that being
light and quick meant nothing. I found out the hard way that you've got to big and quick.
It was bad. Real bad. I finally said to myself. I've had enough of this, and I started looking
hard at those guys who were using steroids. They were going out drinking, they seemed to
have normal sex lives, and they were a hell of a lot bigger than I was. Maybe it was time
for me to join the crowd
At that point I was so laid- back that guys on the team were calling me the mild-mannered
man from Maryland. I thought I was fairly intense, but I was nothing compared with some
of the others. In fact, the aggression level and the intensity of the players were the things
that shocked me the most about college ball. There were fights all the time in practice, a lot
of them instigated by coaches. They would always let the fights go, too, let guys beat the
hell out of each other. If you showed a violent nature, regardless of your athletic ability, it
definitely swayed the coaches opinions in your favor.
Coach Gadd was big on drills that promoted fighting. Gadd was a dictatorial type, a little
man with a little mustache, who had never played major collegiate ball. We called him
Little Hitler. One of his favorite drills was called Escape from Saigon. It involved three
blockers, a ball carrier and a defender. The defender would get his helmet knocked off and
the three guys would keep hitting him. He'd be on his knees, dazed, and they'd keep hitting
him with their helmets. A lot of guys took a beating in that drill. Gadd did it to get our
aggression level up. We did it because if you didn't you were a pussy, and if you were a
pussy, you didn't play. You always hit the guy when he was down. Definitely. Your
instinct as a human being was to have compassion. But Then you just said, "Oh well, this
is football." You suppressed your humanity to succeed.
In another drill one of my friends, George Hyder, was going one -on-one with a player
who was very passive, and George ripped the guy's helmet off and smashed him in the face
with it, chipping some of his teeth. It was uncalled for, but the coaches didn't mind they
liked it.
Joe Morrison, our head coach, might have been the one guy who didn't like it. In fact, he
was against fighting. But he thought we were pussies if we couldn't handle the August
heat. One practice it was close to 120 degrees on the field and unbelievably humid, and
guys were passing out left and right. Players were ripping off all their pads and running to
get in the little bit of shade under this old dead tree. Morrison went nuts. He said we were
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mentally weak for letting the heat get to us. "If I had a chain saw, I'd cut that damn tree
down!" he yelled.
He would just stand there in the heat in black pants, a black vinyl wind breaker and a
baseball cap, smoking cigarettes like crazy, and he'd never sweat a head. He was
unbelievable. He had heart problems in the spring of '85, after my first varsity season, but
he still smoked like a chimney all during practices and games. Looking back, I think his
smoking habit was kind of a poor example for us, as far as drugs are concerned.
As a team, we must have run and hit in practice more than any other team in college
football. Gadd was a Lombardi disciple. We had what he called Packer Days, even in the
100 degree heat, when we'd do conditioning drills that seemed like they'd never end. Guys
would just drop from exhaustion. Washburn liked contact drills, including one where two
linemen would grab each other's shoulder pads and butt heads until one of them dropped.
Washburn would watch us and yell encouragement. He loved it.
He was a pretty big guy-6'3", 245 pounds-with red hair. He'd played offensive linemen at a
small college, and he used to tell us. " I would've loved to play defense, but I wasn't good
enough". So our drills were a reflection of what the couldn't do himself.
Washburn was hung up on being macho, and he'd say bizarre things to us about manhood
and being tough and big and mean. "Ever think about just ripping someone's head off?"
he'd ask us. And, I swear, he was serious.
The coaches definitely had the ability to draw out the viciousness in players. On defense,
for instance, most of the guys were black. My sophomore year, there were only two or
three white starters-and before we'd go up against the offensive line. Washburn would get
the black guys together and say racial things, guys knew he was just trying to get them
riled, but they also knew there were some offensive linemen who were very Southern and
antiblack.
Anyway, the coaches wanted us to be as aggressive as possible, and it didn't matter where
that aggression came from. That's the thing about football-once you whip up anger, you
can twist it channel it, aim it, just like a water hose. Coaches got me to respond by going
after my ego, my pride. If they said I was a bum, I had to prove I wasn't.
So that spring of my freshman year I decided I was going to take steroids to get big and
aggressive. I finally broke down. There was no one thing, really, that led to the decision. It
was a combination of things. Gadd always preached about the big, violent guys he'd seen
in the Western Athletic Conference when he coached at the University of Utah. He made
those guys sound like animals, killers, and it made us feel we didn't measure up.
That affected me. I took it as a challenge to my manhood, and I'm sure that's exactly how
Gadd wanted me to take it. Then, too I saw how well the guys already on steroids were
doing-maybe 30 of them at that time. I was young and felt nothing bad could happen to
me, combined with the fact that I was part of a drug-oriented society. In addition to all of
that, I felt I had the coaches encouragement. I'm told that Washburn says he opposes
steroid use, but he told me, "Do what you have to do, take what you have to take.
Another thing that had gotten to me was trying to compete with black guys. I hadn't played
against many blacks, and they intimidated me with their strength and speed. I'd say that all
but a couple of the guys on my team who used steroids were white, and the reason they did
was to keep up with other guys on steroids and with black athletes. There's no question in
my mind that there's a difference in black and white body types. I don't know why, but I
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could see the difference in the locker room. and I knew it when I played against blacks. so
a lot of white guys take steroids to even things out.
I made my decision, and the funny thing is, I felt good about it. I was looking forward to
the adventure of it and the chance to perform at my best. The thing people often don't
understand is that college athletes feel tremendous pressure to succeed. some guys have
parents who are pushing them real hard. Other guys are just very competitive and have
great pride. Nobody wants to sit on the bench and be a failure.
After I'd made my decision, getting the stuff was no big deal. I had spent a lot of time back
home at a gym where serious lifters worked out, and I think by now everybody knows that
the majority of bodybuilders and power lifter use steroids. I had a friend there, and I knew
he could get me what I wanted or tell me where to get it. He got me some steroids, and I
told him I also wanted HGH, human growth hormone. He told me where I could get it.
I knew HGH was expensive, but I'd read in a muscle magazine that it was safer than
steroids, and I wanted to believe that. I also knew that HGH could cause agromeglia. The
side effects are enlargement of the brow, hands and feet that's sometimes called
"Frankenstein's syndrome"- but that you'd have to take megadoses for it to happen. some
body builders take $10,000 worth of HGH per cycle-that's a body building term for series
of drugs in varying doses-but I only got $800 worth, enough for 10 injections over eight
weeks. Tunnel vision had set in. My attitude was: Just give me what it takes to get big.
Still, I was pretty scared because I'd heard all the horror stories about the drugs. My
supplier told me that if I didn't get too Crazy with this stuff, If I didn't abuse it, I'd be okay.
Then we went down into his basement at home, and he gave me my first injection, in the
top of my butt. I went right to the weight room and had a great workout. I was pumped but
, of course it was all psychological.
I had a lot of injections that summer, and after a while the spots I had to hit on my rear end
got so callused from shots that at times I couldn't even get a needle in. You don't inject
steroids into a vein. It's not like heroin or something. You shoot it deep into a muscle and it
gradually disperses through the body from there . It's very hard to shoot yourself up in the
butt, and sometimes when I did, I hit spots that hurt so bad I could barely sit down the next
day. Other times I'd shoot myself in the quad, the front of my thigh. It's dangerous because
you have to go in an inch or so, and you can cause nerve damage if you're not careful. But
if nobody's around to inject you, you have to do it.
You can take most steroids in pill form, too: but you have to take them every day, and
certain pills can be harder on the liver. With shots you don't need to do it as often-12 times
a month, in my case - and the drug stays in your system longer. At first I was very worried
about needles, but after a while my concern went away-mainly because my body was
changing so fast.
People who say steroids don't work don't know what there're talking about. You've got to
experience it to know what I mean. Your muscles swell: they retain water and they just
grow. You can work out much harder than before, and your muscles don't get as sore.
You're more motivated in the weight room and you've got more energy because of the
psychological effects of the drug.
I went from 210 pounds to a lean 235 in eight weeks. My bench press went from the upper
300's to 420, and my squat from 400 to 520. I watched my diet and I was really cut-big
arms, chest and legs, great definition. I went back to Columbia in the summer of 84, before
my first varsity season, for the Iron Cocks meet, a lifting competition for football players.
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A bunch of guys who were already on steroids saw me and said, "Aha, so you bent to the
pressure."
I SAID, "Yeah, I've begun the chemical warfare." and we laughed. Washburn saw me and
said, "You look great!" He must have known I was using juice.
Besides the muscle growth, there were other things happening to me. I got real bad acne on
my back, my hair started to come out. I was having trouble sleeping, and my testicles
began to shrink- all the side effects you hear about. But my mind was set. I didn't care
about that other stuff.
In fact my sex drive during the cycles was phenomenal, especially when I was charged up
from all the testosterone I was taking. I also had this strange, edgy feeling-I could drink all
night, sleep two hours and go work out. In certain ways I was becoming like an animal.
And I was developing an aggressiveness that was scary. That summer I was working as a
bouncer at this bar in D.C. and one night a Marine bumped into a girl I was dancing with.
Words were exchanged, then I followed him to where he was sitting and said. "Didn't
appreciate that" he put his beer down and came up hard under my chin with his hands, and
a slice of my tongue about an inch went flying out of my mouth. I didn't even notice it. I
saw red. I felt an aggression I'd never felt before. I hit him so hard that he went right to the
floor. He was semiconscious, and I had him in a headlock and started hitting him in the
ribs and kneeing him in the back. I wanted to hurt him real bad. I could literally feel the
hair standing up on the back of my neck, like I was a wolf or something. If I hadn't been on
steroids. I would've walked away in the first place. But I had that cocky attitude. I wanted
to try out my new size. I was beginning to feel like a killer. It was like football: a test of
manhood between two people - you or me, all the way.
Back at school that fall, when I took the football physical, a doctor said "Have you ever
had high blood pressure and a heart murmur?" I said no. He said. "Well, you do now." I
brushed it off. No big deal. I never heard a word about it from the coaches. Nobody
seemed to care. I certainly didn't. A lot of guys were using more steroids than I was, and
they were fine. Besides. I was in great shape. I ran the mile in 5:45, faster than a lot of
linebackers.
I brought a bag full of stuff I'd gotten from my connection to school-bottles of Deca-
Durabolin,100 syringes, some vials of vitamin b-12 and started selling it to teammates. We
thought the B-12 would help us get through two-a-days. We wanted it for the energy, the
placebo effect, whatever. Our team doctor, Paul Akers, injected B-12 into anybody who
wanted it before games. And our orthopedic surgeon, Robert Peele, would shoot up guys
who had injured ankles or whatever with Xylocaine, a local anesthetic. So what we were
doing wasn't much different from what the doctors were doing; it was all done to enhance
our performance.
Back in the spring I'd used some other drugs, too. I snorted cocaine with a couple of other
players one night, but it was a bad experience for me. Coke was sort of circulating through
the team then. I'd say about a third of the players had used it occasionally. Before games,
and a few drank before we played. That's just how it was.
Then one night some of the guys on the team took microdots of LSD. That was interesting
but intense. I don't know how anybody could take it very often. But some of my teammates
had done it a lot. My buddy George Hyder said he had taken acid about 300 times. He
could ingest anything. He was a very hyper person, and other guys on the team were, too.
The word was that one of them got into a fit on a recruiting trip and bit somebody's ear off.
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These guys were my friends, and they were remarkably aggressive. I admired them
because they had a mean streak I didn't have. They got on steroids about the same time I
did, which heightened their aggression. One of my teammates hit a guy in a bar one time,
and after the guy fell to the floor with his jaw collapsed and some teeth knocked out, the
player kicked him in the head. Blood was everywhere. I'd say steroids had something to do
with it.
I really feel that under certain conditions some of the guys who were on steroids would
have been perfectly willing to beat someone to death. One time during the middle of a
cycle George and another guy punched out the windshield of George's car, an old Toyota
Tercel, and head-butted the windshields of some others. Then they came and got me and
said, "Let's go kill somebody." I knew this was trouble, but I went anyway, for the hell of
it. We drove for a while in George's Toyota, then they got out and started head-butting
cars, breaking some more windshields. If anybody looked at them funny, they'd intimidate
the guy until he ran away.
During two-a-days in August. I started a new cycle, taking Deca-Durabolin to help keep
pumped up. The coaches liked my new size and aggressiveness, and they moved me up to
second-string defensive end, where I knew I'd play a lot. This was in 1984, and we didn't
have to take drug tests yet, so there was nothing to worry about. Even after the NCAA
instituted tests in 86, they were a sham. A lot of guys would pour salt or vinegar into the
cup, which was supposed to mask any traces of drugs. Even when guys tested positive,
nothing happened to them.
The trouble for some of us was that we couldn't sleep - that's one of the things steroids did
to me so we drank a lot a night because there wasn't anything better to do. I could drink a
dozen beers and maybe eight or nine shots of vodka or bourbon in a few hours, easy. And
because of the steroids and the booze, I'd get into fights.
Five nights before our first game of the season, against The Citade, I was in a bar, and I got
into an argument with this guy. I told him if he wanted to fight, to come out into the alley,
which he did, and when he pulled his arm from behind his back, he was holding a 12 inch
deer knife. He swung at me and I blocked it. Then he swung lower, and I couldn't tell if he
got me or not. Just then one of my teammates, Woody Myers, came into the alley, and the
guy tried to stab him. Woody and I jumped behind a car, but when I looked over my
shoulder, I saw that the whole back of my shirt was soaked with blood. I put my finger in a
hole under my right arm. The guy ran away and, before too long, the paramedics came.
They were shocked at how high my blood pressure was, particularly after I'd lost so much
blood. They asked if I was on steroids, and I said yes. At the hospital I told the doctor to
stitch me up tight because I had a game that week.
The coaches were very upset when they found out what had happened, but they told me not
to discuss it with anybody, "it's not what we want to talk to the press about," Morrison
said. So nobody found out, and I played against The Citadel, my first college game, with a
stab wound under my pads.
After a few games our nosetackle got hurt, and I moved from defensive end to nose and
played a lot. I did pretty well, but I was still going against guys who weighted 280 or 290
pounds. I ordered some rhesus monkey hormones from back home-two bottles, 20
injections, for $800-and it came Federal Express. It was supposed to be great stuff, able to
build muscle without a lot of the water retention steroids cause. but I didn't get any size off
of it, so I think it was fake.
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I was getting steroids for a lot of guys now through my source. he had a close friend who
was a doctor, and he could get anything we wanted. I'd sell the stuff, but I didn't make a
profit from it. I knew it was wrong, but I rationalized that they wanted the steroids and I
could get high quality juice instead of the junk some guys were getting from Mexico and
other places, stuff with no labels or anything on it.
By my junior year I'd say about 50 guys out of the 100 on the team were using steroids-
almost all the offensive linemen and a lot of other players. And I'm convinced that we
weren't much different from other major college teams. Believe me, players can tell. I'd say
the majority of recent All-American offensive linemen have used steroids. You can tell
what steroid users look like-pink and puffy skin, swollen faces and necks, but very tight
skin wherever there's muscle. I'd play against these guys and they would be huffing and
puffing, and we'd look at each other and one of us would say, "How's that blood pressure?"
and there's eye contact that says . "Yeah, I know, It's rough out here playing on drugs."
Before the North Corolina State game in "84", I tore ligaments in my right big toe in a
pileup in practice. We were undefeated at the time, 7-0 and Washburn said he needed me. I
couldn't push off on the foot and it hurt tremendously, but I wanted to play. So the day of
the game I went into the back room with Dr. Peele and Morrison. Morrison told somebody
to lock the door because he didn't want the referees walking in on this. Washburn held my
hand while Dr. Peele injected my toe joint with Xylocaine. When he was done I couldn't
feel my foot at all. It wasn't till the painkiller wore off during the bus ride home that I was
in agony. I liked being on the edge: most athletes do. We're thrill seekers. Athletics itself is
a high. Football players will do wild things because it keeps them on the edge. At South
Carolina, when we had time off, some of us would take our guns and go out and shoot-at
anything-to keep from getting bored. Taking steroids was just another way of living on the
edge. And it became a big social thing. Seven or eight of us heavy users would get in a
dorm room together and start shooting each other up. Guys would show up with their
bottles, and there'd be a lot of chatter: I'll shoot you, you shoot me. We all enjoyed it. I had
boxes of syringes that I got from certain pharmacies in Columbia for 20 bucks for 100.
We'd say it was for B-12 shots, but those needles are shorter and you need an inch or so to
do steroids intramuscularly. They would give us the longer needles as long as we signed
"B-12" in the book.
[contd]
