The Nightmare Of Steroids

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 then 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, "I didn't appreciate that." He put his beer down and came up hard under my chin with his hands, and a slice off my tongue about an inch long 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 got 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 bagful of stuff I'd gotten from my connection to school—bottles of Deca-Durabolin, 100 syringes, some vials of vitamin B-12—and I 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. But some guys used it the night 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 fight on a recruiting trip and bit somebody's ear off.

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 me 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 just say, "Doc, I can't urinate in front of you," and they'd go into a stall where they'd hidden a vial of someone else's urine, and pour that in the cup. Some 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.