The Nightmare Of Steroids

We never used the same needle twice, I can tell you that. We tried to be careful how we injected each other, too, but sometimes you'd hit the sciatic nerve or something, and the guy's legs would buckle. I mean, none of us were doctors or anything. But we were needle-happy. We would have injected ourselves with anything, if we thought it would make us big.

A lot of times, if we were really getting bigger, we'd increase our dosage to gain bulk even faster—just fill the syringe to the end. We'd occasionally read the paperwork that came with the bottles, trying to figure out what a dosage should be for someone with anemia or a guy whose body can't produce enough testosterone, which is what the stuff is usually used for. Then we'd take 2, 3, 4, 10, 20 times that amount. Sometimes we'd take our needles and pull half a cc from one bottle and half from another, just mix them up. The more the better.

By the fall of '87, my senior season, there was one guy who was taking so many tabs of a steroid called Anadrol that he developed liver problems. At one point during the summer of '85, there were guys so heavily on steroids that they couldn't make it once around the track without getting back cramps from being so bloated. This alarmed Keith Kephart, our strength coach, so he took all the linemen in a room and said, "I want to know who's on Anadrol. I'm hearing horror stories. This is the strongest stuff around. It can be lethal. Now, who's using?"

A lot of guys raised their hands, but I didn't because I was on other steroids. Kephart wanted guys to cut back on their intake. I don't remember him telling us to stop, but he did say, "If you want counseling, come to me." I really think he cared, but he didn't think he could change us.

It was common knowledge that we were using the stuff. I had bottles of juice all over the place. We threw the used syringes into the waste cans in our rooms. I mean, we even had syringes sticking in the walls. Coaches would walk in and see the stuff, but nobody gave a damn. One of the coaches came in for a room check once, saw a vial with a skull and crossbones on the label and said, "I used to use Dianabol myself. What's this stuff?" We laughed and said, "It's a great new product from Germany. Look at the instructions. They're in German." He just laughed.

Players would stop by my room, as if it were a store, and ask if they could get some steroids. One time, even Todd Ellis, our quarterback, asked George Hyder about steroids. He wondered how much they cost, what the effects were and how long it would take to get them. I wondered what steroids could do for a quarterback. Build up arm strength, I guessed. Anyway, George told Todd he didn't have any. I didn't offer any myself, and I never saw Todd take any. But there was just this sort of no-big-deal attitude about it all.

The spring of '84, I bulked up some more, and people were in awe of my strength. I was benching close to 500 pounds, squatting more than 600. I could do 30 one-armed presses with a 100-pound dumbbell. I weighed about 260, and I looked like a steroid user. I took all kinds of stuff, including Equipoise, a horse steroid designed to make thoroughbreds leaner and more muscular. It was tough on me—I got colitis and was bleeding rectally—so I switched to other stuff. Guys started calling me Quasibloato and the Experiment, because they thought I'd take anything.

My aggression level was so high that I got into an argument with the team trainer at one point during spring practice and went to my locker, put my hand through the metal mesh and ripped the door off its hinges. Then I went back to the Roost and took a baseball bat and demolished my refrigerator, smashed it to pieces, and then ripped the phone off the wall. My nerves were on edge like they'd never been before. At practice one day I got into a fight with Shed Diggs, a linebacker, because he cut in front of me in line for a drill. I threw him down, pulled his helmet up far enough so I could get my fist in there and smashed him in the eye. As he got up, bleeding and humiliated, I felt sympathy for him. But then the steroids kicked in and I said to myself, "All right! You're a tough guy!"

I went home for spring break, and my mom took one look at me and said, "My God! What have you done to yourself?" I tried to deny everything, but my dad looked in my bag and found two vials of testosterone. He got very upset. He called our family doctor and had him try to convince me to get off steroids. My dad tried to talk me into quitting football and told me that he'd pay for my schooling. My sister called me constantly, trying to get me off the stuff. But I wouldn't listen. "I'm sorry," I said to my parents, "but it's a decision I've made, and I'll try not to abuse the steroids."

I don't know if you can call steroids addictive, but there's a vicious cycle involved with using them. The growth of the muscles enhances the aggression and other psychological changes caused by the drug, and those changes, in turn, make you want to get bigger and take more steroids. Plus, there is a terrible letdown when you come off them. I would be very high and then there'd be this extreme depression. And after each cycle, the comedown itself would get worse, plus, I'd get sick. I got walking pneumonia, bronchitis, exhaustion to the point where I had to sleep 12 to 14 hours at a time. Steroids were definitely wrecking my body.