You listen to a dying man. You listen to Lyle Alzado.
Look at me, he says. Steroids did this. He looks like somebody has let all the air out of him. He was a beast. Now he is a carcass.
You look away.
You can see the tragedy here, but not clearly.
Who`s to blame? Alzado himself. Coaches. Doctors. The NFL. Us. What`s to blame? Ambition. Adulation. Greed. Competition.
Does it matter to a dying man?
Alzado says he`s sorry. Sorry for himself, sorry for the next guy. There will be others, he says. Maybe not with brain cancer. But with something.
They are out there now, more specimens, huge and sculpted like Alzado was, a package of perfect health rotting from the inside.
You listen to a dying man.
Steroids are so new, barely a generation old. No one knew for sure what they would do. Cause acne, change your voice, shrink your testicles. Those were the easily seen side effects.
That`s not a bad trade, any one of those or all three, for wealth, for strength, for fame.
Athletes make similar deals all the time. A knee, a working hip, teeth, entire organs, a clear brain, these are traded for sport cheerfully.
Muhammad Ali, slipping ever closer to zombiehood, regrets none of the journey to his present condition. Ali gave away the rest of his life for a glorious first half.
Steroids are just another trade, and less fearsome, because they work. They do everything they are supposed to.
Make you big. Make you mean.
Size and meanness are two of the things required in football, neither of them natural. You are not supposed to weigh 300 pounds. You are not supposed to enjoy inflicting pain.
In a more enlightened age, we had freak shows and prisons for these kinds of people. Now we have Monday Night Football.
Steroids are the perfect football drug. And they weren`t even officially illegal until this year.
Alzado says he mixed and matched and double loaded his doses. Steroids made him All-Pro, put him in Super Bowls, made him a celebrity.
Erase those tapes, please. Run only the recent sadness.
You listen to a dying man.
The NFL tests its players for steroids now. Has been for the last four years. Too late for Alzado, too late for others, too late for those clever enough to get around the tests.
The league`s motive for testing never has been for health; it is for competition.
Whether steroids are harmful or not is secondary to whether they give users an unfair advantage. In the most recent NFL drug-abuse release, the league talks of varying the tests so that players cannot ”bulk up.” It is better to be pleased that testing may prevent a young giant from turning into a middle-aged zucchini.
The league dismisses human growth hormones-also on the Alzado menu-as being ineffective. Human growth hormones are not detectable. But without steroids, says the NFL, human growth hormones just don`t work. It almost chortles that because there are so many counterfeits, athletes who take human growth hormones aren`t getting the real thing, anyhow.
There is a better way to get the message out. The NFL ought to put posters of Alzado, before and after, on every locker-room wall. Then they wouldn`t need any tests.
You see Ben Johnson now, a miniature of himself when he was the world record-holder, the gold medal Olympic disgrace. Off steroids, Johnson is ridiculed for being only one of the dozen or so fastest human beings in the world.
Johnson is the wrong lesson. Johnson proves that steroids work.
Alzado has the answer. Look at me, he says.
Don`t do steroids, says Alzado.
You have to believe a dying man.
