Problems In A Turned-on World

"They were also passing out the stuff to the rest of us. They called it just 'pink pills.' We started taking it as a matter of course, but I wasn't too keen on the idea because I've never been much for this sort of thing—even the weight program. But, since I was the player representative, one day I asked Alvin and Sid Gillman, our coach, if the team physician had okayed these pills. They gave me sort of a vague answer. I don't remember what the answer was, but I do remember that it didn't satisfy me. As it happened, I lived next door to a physician and I asked him about anabolic steroids.

"The doctor told me, 'Listen, Dave, I don't think these things were intended for people who do the kind of work you people do. I think they were made for Milquetoast-type guys, people who sit in chairs all day long and never get a chance to build any healthy muscular tissue.'

"I told the other guys this and a lot of them quit taking them. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't ever any great big deal, or any cause for rebellion or mutiny. But a lot of the fellows just started throwing them away."

Kindig says he was still a student at Los Angeles State when the Chargers gave him Dianabol. He took the pills until his own doctor advised him that they might be dangerous.

"I didn't take them regularly," says Kindig, "but some other Chargers were taking them; Earl Faison and Ron Mix, I remember."

The hassle in the Chargers' camp might be viewed as an example of innocent athletes resisting the advances of higher-up drug pushers, but such situations are rare. Generally, as Dr. Dooley says, modern athletes know a lot about drugs, or at least have a lot of opinions about them, and are willing to experiment with drugs about which no one knows very much. There are probably as many cases of athletes demanding drugs from trainers and physicians as physicians and trainers ordering athletes to take them.

The whole matter has been succinctly summarized by Hal Connolly, a veteran of four U.S. Olympic teams.

"My experience," says Connolly, "tells me that an athlete will use any aid to improve his performance short of killing himself."

Information about new drugs for athletics, new athletic uses for old drugs and where to get and how to use exotic pills and shots, flows into the sports world from above, from medical meetings and publications, as a result of shop-talk between coaches, trainers and physicians and because drug men are actively pushing their preparations. However, it also wells up from below, because there is an athletic communications network of sorts that connects the locker rooms of the world.

While no sport has a monopoly on drug use or curiosity about drugs, in this country weight lifters and trackmen seem to be natural, eager couriers for information about get big, well, fast or mean pills and shots. There are several reasons for this. Trackmen and weight lifters compete in individual sports. They are among the most introspective of athletes, figuratively spending a lot of time watching their navels and literally watching their weight, muscle tone, respiration, pulse, bruises, strains, aches and psyches. Therefore, they tend to be especially susceptible to any suggestion that there may be some secret aid—animal, vegetable or mineral—that will jazz up their vital functions. In addition, they are cosmopolitan, competing all over the world, and thus able to trade more inside dope, so to speak, than stay-at-home football and baseball players can.