Pssst....they're using steroids in the NFL, By: Dave Kindred
September 19, 2006, The Sporting News
Horrific stories of steroids abuse in sports have been written for 20 years. One in Kentucky came with the epilogue of a football player in a wheelchair, his legs straight out, encased in plaster up to the thighs. "Car backing out of a driveway," the player said unconvincingly. More likely, someone didn't like it that he'd talked to me about drugs.
The scariest thing about all the steroids stories is not that thugs might break a teammate's legs with baseball bats to protect themselves from the law. It's that the public doesn't much care what drugs go into an athlete's body.
The latest evidence of indifference comes out of the Carolinas, where a doctor and eight NFL players have provided the most damning evidence yet as to steroids' omnipresence in pro sports. Legal and medical records used in prosecution of the doctor showed some steroids prescriptions in high doses were refillable as many as 15 times. An international doping expert, Dr. Gary Wadler, called the records "as good of a snapshot of the real world of what goes on in that culture as anything that has ever been made public." And y'know what?
America yawned. Katie Couric put up a photograph of somebody's baby (talk about yawners) when she might have shown us copies of the steroids prescriptions written for Super Bowl players.
Never mind that The Charlotte Observer's Charles Chandler put together a detailed, documented, undeniable story. Never mind that the investigation of the rogue doctor showed steroids use by seven Panthers between 2002 and 2004, including three of the five starting offensive linemen in the Super Bowl after the 2003 season. Never mind that six of those Panthers were prescribed or reported using human growth hormone, which the Observer called pro sports' "performance-enhancing drug of choice" because neither the NFL nor Major League Baseball do the tests necessary to detect the drug.
What matters, it seems, is only that pro football be played on schedule in giant arenas for our entertainment. That is the clear message from a fan base that has shown by its ticket-buying habits that reports of performance-enhancing drugs don't keep them away from games.
Not yet, anyway. Maybe fans would be concerned if they heard more from NFL veterans. Two now echo the mathematical quotations of baseball's steroids confessors, Ken Caminiti and Jose Canseco. Redskins offensive lineman Jon Jansen told Bob Costas of HBO that "maybe 15, 20 per cent" of NFL players use performance-enhancing drugs; he also said that because HGH is undetectable, drug use is "on the rise now." A former Jansen teammate, Dana Stubblefield, told Costas that 30 per cent of players use HGH. And a Honolulu physician, Dr. Teresa Denney, told HBO she had prescribed HGH and testosterone to NFL players whom she never met.
As sorry as all that is, the sorrier truth is that Chandler's explosive story amounted to little more than a whisper on the wind.
Every columnist with a bully pulpit needed to stand and shout. Only a handful did. Bryan Burwell in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that the NFL no longer can call the Panthers case an aberration: "... to continue to foist that alibi on the public proves it's either full of naive fools or terrible liars."
Phil Sheridan in The Philadelphia Inquirer: "Do you now have to wonder just how dirty the NFL is if a single doctor supplied steroids and human growth hormone to more than (nine) per cent of a team's 53-man roster?"
Jason Whitlock in The Kansas City Star said the Observer story "should clear up any misconception that football has a better handle on drug use than baseball, cycling, track and field, basketball, hockey or any other sport."
In Baltimore, The Sun's Rick Maese said NFL arrogance on drugs has run its course: "No one outside the league offices seriously thinks that Carolina is a renegade operation that encourages cheaters while 31 other teams are busy fitting players for angel wings."
For the Charlotte reporter, the story moved out of the NFL and into everyday life when he heard a mother of a college football player testify at a congressional hearing. "She told how her son used and misused steroids. Eventually, he put a gun to his head and killed himself."
Chandler said: "We have got to care about this."
I care. Do you?
