The Nightmare Of Steroids

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 college ball. We called him Little Hitler. One of his favorite drills was called Escape from Saigon. It involved three blockers, a ballcarrier and a defender. The defender would try to get to the runner, who was darting around while the blockers beat the hell out of the defender. Sometimes 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 sticking 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° 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 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 windbreaker and a baseball cap, smoking cigarettes like crazy, and he'd never sweat a bead. 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° 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 lineman 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 he 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, "Those honkies are calling you niggers." Of course, the black 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 strong 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. There was also the fact that 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."