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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
Juiced athletes just
trying to be their bestSTEROIDS work. My goodness, they work, I've seen it with my own eyes.
They're in the news again, these days, with buzzwords like "investigation" and "grand jury" and "lifetime ban" and "Barry Bonds."
As always, even as it looks bad and worse, everyone insists he or she is clean. Even as this cloud hangs over them, they all protest innocence. Why would someone risk reputation and career for some juice-induced boost?
Because it gets results.
I can still remember sitting on a dorm-room bed, holding a bottle (with a top you could stick a needle through) that read something to the effect of "for Equine use only."
"This is for horses," I told the guy the bottle belonged to.
(I didn't say they were good steroids.)
But they worked. He must have gained 25 pounds between January and May. He was a monster. You could almost watch him grow.
He ate everything. He worked out like a fiend. He would do lunges -- taking a long step and lunging forward until the other knee touches the floor, then rising up again (try it) -- one leg after the other. With plates stacked at the ends of the bar on his shoulders he would duck-walk the length of the weight room this way. And back. And again. And again.
That's where the guilt goes. To these guys juicing isn't cheating. It's working harder than they ever have. It's seeing hard work pay off like never before.
Then there was a middle linebacker, one of the best football players I've ever seen in person. Incredibly fast, hit like a truck, 225 pounds and lean. And yes, he was juicing. He had all the little injuries, an elbow that never quite healed.
He did something that hadn't been seen since Nagurski -- he knocked out the opposing quarterback three times in a game (the only thing more incredible was that the guy came back twice).
For the Friday walk-through, he would bring his girlfriend to watch him practice. Every Friday, it was a different girl.
No, we had never seen anything like this guy.
There were probably four or five guys in those years who turned to steroids, gambled with their bodies and drugs. And this was on some small college NAIA team with a losing record, not some big-time program. Not to mention not an arena in which champions would make millions, set records, become legends. Not like the guys on the suspects list, who have real incentive, whose names don't surprise.
These were just guys who wanted to be as good as they could be, which is something drilled into every athlete by every coach.
They didn't all become great -- in fact most didn't. They were bigger, stronger, lifted harder. It's not a talent drug.
My friend with the horse bottle never became great. He was in an intramural boxing tournament at the height of his juice use and we thought he would kill the guy. But his kidneys cramped up, and he got beat up, and the next year he was off the stuff.
Years later, we saw the great linebacker and he looked like a different person, skinny as a rail. Now that I think about it, like a young Barry Bonds.
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Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com