Countdown To Lockdown (35 page)

I believe we may well be at another crossroads of sorts when it comes to so much of modern-day sports medicine and science. I am not an expert of any sort in this field, and have made the decision not to pore over an endless array of information, looking only for facts that might support one viewpoint or another. Instead, with an eye on the past and some serious questions about the future, I just want to inject a few cc’s of perspective and a couple of earnest questions into the body of this debate.

Have you seen that occasional movie actor who looks better in his fifties than he did thirty years earlier? Maybe even an actor in his early sixties, doing shirtless scenes, with sculpted abs and amazingly little body fat? How exactly did that actor manage to get that way—through diet and exercise alone? Or did he perhaps have a little pharmaceutical advantage?

How about the skinny actor who packs on twenty pounds of muscle for a role? I can think of four or five movies off the top of my head. Big movie roles, too. I seriously doubt that a potentially huge motion picture would be put in a position to live or die based on a single actor’s nutritional program, exercise routine, or genetics—and I am pretty sure that their guy will be allowed to do whatever he needs to do to look as good as possible on the big screen.

I have no real proof, but circumstantial evidence, a little bit of knowledge, and some common sense certainly lead me to believe that some of the key actors in Hollywood are on the gas—or at least some human growth hormone. Why shouldn’t they be? Something that makes them look and feel younger, stronger, healthier, more energetic, more virile? Who wouldn’t want to sign up for that?

I saw a famous singer from the 1980s in a television comeback concert recently. In his prime, this singer appeared gaunt, skinny, almost sickly. Twenty-five years later, in his fifties, at an age where normal human beings—even regularly active ones—start to sag and loosen,
this singer was ripped, pumped, sporting the type of muscularity you just don’t get naturally.

Cast aside the potential health benefits of human growth hormone for just a moment. Some scientists tout HGH as a modern-day fountain of youth, though others say studies are inconclusive. Forget, for now, that HGH could possibly improve the lives of ailing seniors and allow them to live a life with less pain, and possibly even save untold billions of dollars in agonizing (and agonizingly expensive) end-of-life care. Forget also that the use of HGH without proper monitoring has possible side effects (enlarged bone structure, enlarged organs, death) of its own. Just push all that to the side.

Instead, I want to ask about what kind of pressure those athletic actors in their fifties, pumped punk rockers, and even ripped rappers put on guys in our business who are supposed to look better, much better, than the average guy out there.

Like I wrote in the last chapter, our action figures are on the rack right next to Spider-Man’s, and Spidey has packed on some size since the sixties, where he appeared to be a thin high school student with a cool costume instead of a guy whose every muscle fiber twitches beneath the blue and red. Even Bruce Banner is ripped and ruthless these days, making me wonder why that stunning metamorphosis into the Hulk is even necessary. I think Bruce looks quite capable of kicking some butt all on his own.

Where does that leave us wrestling guys? Wrestlers are supposed to look like superheroes. They’re our competition … and
they
don’t get tested.

Not that testing is the only answer, because tests were made to be beaten. And by the looks of a few of the top stars in the business whose physiques didn’t decline a bit, even after the introduction of serious, regular testing (following the death of Eddie Guerrero in 2005), these tests aren’t foolproof. Back in my WCW days, probably 1994, following our first real drug test, Brian Knobbs was told that he’d tested positive for something.

“All right,” the gregarious Knobbs, a notorious party animal, said—probably surprised his urine hadn’t melted the sample cup. “What did you get me for?”

Anabolic steroids, he was told.

“Steroids!” Knobbs yelled, ripping off his shirt, revealing a physique most jellyfish would be ashamed of. “Does it look like I’m on steroids?”

“Obviously, there’s been a mistake,” the lab guy said.

I heard of an older, somewhat bitter wrestler bragging that he had once put a steroid tablet in a younger wrestler’s coffee, causing that wrestler to fail a test many years ago.

And I think you have to question any test that interprets the dreaded poppy seed bagel as a banned narcotic. Don’t laugh—I have a good friend (not a wrestler) who failed a drug test for that very reason.

Some wrestlers have tested positive for things they didn’t even know they’d taken.

I don’t want to diminish the hard work that wrestlers, or other athletes, or even actors and rappers put into their bodies. I know so many guys who work out hard and intelligently, watch everything they eat, and really treat their bodies as their temples. Their dedication is incredible. But there is still a limit to what diet and exercise alone are capable of accomplishing. And if someone looks a little too good to be true, my guess is they probably are.

The documentary
Bigger, Stronger, Faster
showed how remarkably little oversight is given to the nutritional supplement industry. According to the film’s director, Chris Bell, this seems to be largely a financial decision, as the state of Utah (where a disproportionately high percentage of these supplement companies are based) reaps huge tax revenues from the supplement industry. Bell himself documented how easy it is to create, market, and sell a nutritional supplement, getting it from kitchen table to retailers’ shelves with very little trouble.

With so little oversight going into the making and marketing of these nutritional supplements, is it really a surprise that a few of them
may contain unlisted substances, some of which might be banned? I had one WWE wrestler swear to me, with tears in his eyes, that he was taking absolutely nothing but supplements when he failed a test, resulting in a suspension at the worst possible time in his career.

He had no reason to lie—this was several months after the suspension, and I had known the guy for over fifteen years. But his career had yet to recover, and in reality it never quite did. All for buying a nutritional supplement he believed to be good for him.

A December 2007
USA Today
article wrote of a study in which thirteen of fifty-two nutritional supplements purchased at various retailers contained traces of steroids, and six contained traces of stimulants. The article claimed that in another study, conducted by the International Olympic Committee between 2000 and 2002, “18.8% of the 240 supplements purchased in the USA contain steroids.” Obviously, this is a matter of serious concern, and with all due respect to the state of Utah, I think a little oversight may be in order.

But of equal concern to me was the article’s title, “Steroids Found in Supplements,” and what actually does and does not constitute a “steroid.” The “steroid” most often found in the
USA Today
study was actually androstenedione (or andro, as it’s commonly known), a nutritional supplement that may (or may not) boost testosterone levels slightly. Very slightly.

Classifying andro as a steroid, putting it into the classification of “real” steroids, such as deca-durabolin, anadrol, primobolan, Winstrol V, and sustanon, is kind of like lumping the winner of a kindergarten essay contest into a group of Pulitzer prize–winners and calling them all “winning authors.” It’s like calling both a balsawood glider and a Boeing 747 “airplanes” because both of them stay in the air for at least a little while. I asked a few people who know about these things, and they literally laughed when I told them that andro was called a steroid.

But unfortunately, it’s not a joke. Because it’s difficult to discover the truth when those trusted to tell it are either ill-informed or too willing to settle for the convenience of a good sound bite.

I saw an article in a leading sports magazine a few years ago that offered up sobering statistics on the percentage of high school athletes using performance-enhancing substances. Sobering—until finding out that the writer’s definition of “performance-enhancing substances” consisted of anabolic steroids and creatine, a supplement that can be found in
any
health food store. This is kind of like defining lawbreakers as “murderers” and “jaywalkers.”

Writers so often refer to anti-inflammatory medications as painkillers that it’s almost become an accepted part of the vernacular, but anti-inflammatories and painkillers are two markedly different products. One reduces pain by shrinking swelling and inflammation, and the other masks it with a euphoric high. Not exactly the same thing. I try to avoid one of them unless it’s absolutely necessary; the other I have trouble walking without. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of the last celebrity who has been checked into rehab for an addiction to Mobic.

It seems somewhat ironic that so many of the things that are supposed to be good for us are probably not, while it’s quite probable that many things that are banned, or even illegal, have the potential to be very useful.

Over the years, in pursuit of a way to lose weight, or to feel more energized, I have probably taken all kinds of things that weren’t actually good for me. Chances are, if a supplement has been marketed as a fat burner or metabolic optimizer, or something of that nature, I’ve probably given it (or a product closely related to it) a try over the years—all with no noticeable results. Some of the stuff loaded with ephedrine (before it was banned, following a couple of high-profile deaths) was probably downright awful for me, but if it held forth even the slightest potential of “firing up my fat furnace” or something equally dramatic, you could probably count me in.

I thought Kevin Trudeau just might have the answer in his
The Weight Loss Cure They Don’t Want You to Know About.
Sure, I’d found some of Trudeau’s claims to be a little questionable in the past,
and following all his advice would seem to place incredible strain on both one’s time and one’s finances, but much of what he’d written in previous books made sense. I thought it was quite possible that he may actually have stumbled upon the weight loss cure
they
didn’t want us to know about.

Dozens of pages in, Trudeau still hadn’t revealed the secret. But he’d made it very clear that he had it, and it worked! Finally, after a seemingly endless array of literary foreplay, I turned the page to discover Trudeau’s glorious climactic discovery: human chorionic gonadotropin.

Yes! So all I need is a little bit of that hCG stuff, an extract from the urine of pregnant women, and I’ll be cured. Unfortunately, Trudeau then explains that “in America hCG is one of the only pharmaceutical compounds that the FDA has specifically said should not be used in the treatment of obesity!” Despite that fact, Trudeau suggests that “in America you have a constitutional right to do what you feel is best for your own body.” So, if I can travel overseas and find a doctor to prescribe it for me or happen to find a doctor here who shares Mr. Trudeau’s interpretation of our constitutional rights, human chorionic gonadotropin might still be the cure for me after all!

A few days after reading Trudeau’s book, I saw that a raid of the Orlando-based Signature Pharmacy had snagged a handful of WWE wrestlers who were attempting to purchase banned performance-enhancing substances over the Internet. Among those banned substances? Human chorionic gonadotropin, apparently a cure they
really
don’t want you to know about. I don’t think
they
wanted baseball slugger Manny Ramirez to know about it, either; a positive test for hCG resulted in a fifty-game suspension.

I really wonder what would happen if the cure Trudeau wrote of were to become legal in the United States. The hormone hCG is just a derivative of the urine of pregnant women. How bad could it be for you? Could it be any worse than those proprietary blends of heart-racing stimulants sold in nutritional stores? Could this cure, as the
book claimed, really reset the brain’s hypothalamus, eliminating the insatiable cravings that have plagued me for as long as I can remember? If it could, there would likely not be as much of a need or desire for those stimulants/supplements—which would prevent a lot of people in the weight-loss industry from making large amounts of money.

Sometimes, I’m not really sure if substances are banned because they are bad for us, or if taking them constitutes “cheating.” As politicians have so often told us, cheating is bad … unless it’s on their wives, on their taxes, or in the form of bribes, hiding cash in a freezer, suppressing voters, miscounting votes, attempting to romance a would-be suitor in a Minneapolis toilet stall, and so forth and so on.

I believe that much of this has to do with the sanctity of the major-league home-run record.

Sure, it seemed odd a few years back when guys who had shown little home-run power in their careers were suddenly hitting forty or more in a single season. Then there was Barry Bonds, who, even before packing on thick slabs of muscle, was one of the greatest players in the game. But this new, massive Bonds made breaking the single-season home-run record look ridiculously easy. I mean, Barry Bonds hit seventy-three homers in 2001, and possibly could have hit a few dozen more if he hadn’t been walked 177 times that year, most of them at least semi-intentionally.

Maybe the guy was a cheater. Clearly, he was also something of a jerk: rude to reporters, aloof to his teammates, even a little intimidating to the Hardcore Legend when I met him in the Giants clubhouse a few years ago. As it turned out, Bonds was reportedly rubbing some kind of cream into his body, some kind of new, undetectable performance enhancer that was no doubt the sole reason he was able to see and detect a pitch so quickly, get his wrists around so fast, and drive a ball so far, so often.