I have written –repeatedly– that I simply cannot believe that sportswriters like Mike Lupica and Rick Reilly and Tom Verducci only just recently discovered that athletes will use PED’s to improve their performance. I have stated again and again that the real reason –the ONLY reason– we have this “scandal” in baseball, and nowhere else, is because of the recent assault on the venerated baseball record book. I didn’t read this Sports Illustrated article when it came out 40 years ago, because I was only 5 years old, but, it raises the same questions for me again:
How do these sportswriters expect me to believe that they haven’t known what’s been going on in the world of elite athletic competition over these last four decades? How can they ask me to be outraged when most of them have watched this problem develop, and waited over three decades to start sounding the alarm?
Bill Gilbert, a writer I have never heard of, wrote this piece, a damning indictment of the widespread use of all sorts of PED’s. It was published in 1969, the same year we put a man on the moon:
…. after it has been admitted that most citizens dope themselves from time to time, there remain excellent grounds for claiming that in the matter of drug usage, athletes are different from the rest of us. In spite of being—for the most part—young, healthy and active specimens, they take an extraordinary variety and quantity of drugs (see cover). They take them for dubious purposes, they take them in a situation of debatable morality, they take them under conditions that range from dangerously experimental to hazardous to fatal. The use of drugs—legal drugs—by athletes is far from new, but the increase in drug usage in the last 10 years is startling. It could, indeed, menace the tradition and structure of sport itself.
…. “Are anabolic steroids [a male hormone derivative that supposedly makes users bigger and stronger than they could otherwise be] widely used by Olympic weight men?” rhetorically asks Dave Maggard, who finished fifth in the shotput at Mexico and is now the University of California track coach. “Let me put it this way. If they had come into the village the day before competition and said we have just found a new test that will catch anyone who has used steroids, you would have had an awful lot of people dropping out of events because of instant muscle pulls.”
…. There are abundant rumors—the wildest of which circulate within rather than outside the sporting world—about strung-out quarterbacks, hopped-up pitchers, slowed-down middleweights, convulsed half-milers and doped-to-death wrestlers. Nevertheless, it is the question of motive and morality that constitutes the crux of the athletic drug problem. Even if none of the gossip could be reduced to provable fact, there remains ample evidence that drug use constitutes a significant dilemma, not so much for individual athletes as for sport in general. One reason is that the use of drugs in sport leads one directly to more serious and complicated questions. Is athletic integrity (and, conversely, corruption) a matter of public interest? Does it matter, as appreciators of sport have so long and piously claimed it does, that games be played in an atmosphere of virtue; even righteousness? If not, what is the social utility of games—why play them at all? Drug usage, even more than speculation about bribery, college recruiting, spit-balls or TV commercials, raises such sticky questions about the fundamentals of sport that one can understand the instinctive reaction of the athletic Establishments: when it comes to drugs, they ignore, dismiss, deny.
…. Setting aside ethical considerations for the moment, there are obvious reasons why athletes should use so many drugs. The most obvious is that there are more drugs available these days for everyone than ever before. Furthermore, we have all been sold on the efficacy of drugs. We believe that the overflowing pharmacopoeia is one of the unquestioned triumphs of the age. We have been sold on drugs empirically because we have tried them and enjoy the results. We have been sold by countless magazine and newspaper stories about wonder drugs—many of which later turned out to be less than wondrous—by massive pro-drug propaganda campaigns mounted by pharmaceutical manufacturers, by TV actors dressed in doctors’ coats and by real doctors, many of whom are very quick with the prescription pad. Generally, we have accepted rather uncritically the central message of this persuasive pitch—drugs are good for you. These days it is a cultural reflex to reach for a vial, an atomizer, a capsule or a needle if you suffer from fever, chills, aches, pains, nausea, nasal congestion, irritability, the doldrums, sluggishness, body odor, obesity, emaciation, too many kids, not enough kids, nagging backache or tired blood.
It would be surprising if athletes were not influenced by the same trends and tendencies that have the rest of us so high on drugs.
…. An example of how athletic pressure, ambition or maybe just ignorance at a sub-medical level can result in what charitably can be called dubious drug practices occurred a few years ago at the training camp of the San Diego Chargers. The story was told by Dave Kocourek, now an offensive end for the Oakland Raiders, but then a member of the Charger team.
“I guess this anabolic steroid business must have started on the Chargers around 1963 or right in there somewhere. One guy I can remember who got involved was Howard Kindig. He came to us as a highly touted center and linebacker from Los Angeles State. He was long and lean and very quick, and they wanted to put weight on him, so in addition to using the weight program run by our weight coach, Alvin Roy, they started pumping him full of Dianabol [a popular anabolic steroid], and sure enough he gained about 30 pounds.
It’s a six page article, one that you must read. I tried not to cut and paste too much, but, it’s that noteworthy.
Now the cat is out of the bag. Forget about Barry Bonds, how about Tom Verducci? All of a sudden Verducci’s expose, written five years ago, is dated, decades behind the real story. He blew the whistle? Really? Here’s what Gilbert wrote FORTY YEARS AGO!!!!
…. “A few pills—I take all kinds—and the pain’s gone,” says Dennis McLain of the Detroit Tigers. McLain also takes shots, or at least took a shot of cortisone and Xylocaine (anti-inflammant and painkiller) in his throwing shoulder prior to the sixth game of the 1968 World Series—the only game he won in three tries. In the same Series, which at times seemed to be a matchup between Detroit and St. Louis druggists, Cardinal Bob Gibson was gobbling muscle-relaxing pills, trying chemically to keep his arm loose. The Tigers’ Series hero, Mickey Lolich, was on antibiotics.
Bob Gibson? He’s one of the heroes these guys keep going on and on about. He’s one of those guys who would never, ever have used steroids, right, Lupica?
…. “We occasionally use Dexamyl and Dexedrine [amphetamines]…. We also use barbiturates, Seconal, Tuinal, Nembutal…. We also use some anti-depressants, Triavil, Tofranil, Valium…. But I don’t think the use of drugs is as prevalent in the Midwest as it is on the East and West coasts,” said Dr. I. C. Middleman, who, until his death last September, was team surgeon for the St. Louis baseball Cardinals.
Team surgeon? TEAM SURGEON!!!! How could that be? How could it be that the teams knew anything about this? The owners are paragons of virtue, men of impeccable character, who want nothing more than for the players to be healthy, happy and living on the same block as their sons and daughters, right?
How could a five-thousand word article, published in Sports Illustrated –which, in 1969, was THE preeminent publication on sports in America– not have been noticed?
Of course it was noticed. It was noticed to the point where the use of drugs continued, flourished and was an acknowledged part of the world of sports worldwide. And no one wrote about it, no one talked about it, no one did an Outside the Lines special report, no one did anything.
And in that type of environment, eventually, the drugs were gonna work. We have an NFL right now that has running backs as big as offensive linemen from championship teams of just a decade or so ago. We have baseball players bigger than offensive linemen as well. We have huge, super-fast, athletes everywhere you look, because the training programs, coupled with the tremendous advances in sports medicine, legal and otherwise, work. And one reason we know that they work is that athletes will do anything, will take any risk to win. The mantra, win at all costs, isn’t a slogan for a sports drink. It is the water these men and women swim in:
…. The whole matter has been succinctly summarized by Hal Connolly, a veteran of four U.S. Olympic teams.
“My experience,” says Connolly, “tells me that an athlete will use any aid to improve his performance short of killing himself.”
But before you start worrying about saving the children — please God, somebody save the children– let’s get something straight here. There is some good in all this.
You wanna know how? Think of sports as the NASA of the human body. We all know about the major advances in the space program that have influenced our daily lives. There are major advances being made in health improvements for normal, non-athletes that have come from sports, including advances in weight training, surgical techniques, and yes, drug treatments. The sports world has been one giant chemical experiment for the last four decades –at least– and anyone who has been to a sports medicine treatment facility, or a gym, or a GNC, can see the results.
We all want to be better, and we all will do most anything to achieve that end. There’s nothing new about that. It’s part and parcel of being an American, and America’s influence is global. In the world of competitive sports, the end almost always justifies the means. Using PED’s is just one of the ways athletes place themselves in harm’s way. One of my favorite players just passed away. Brad Van Pelt was THE linebacker for the NY Giants when Bill Parcells and George Young drafted Lawrence Taylor. He died in his sleep at the age of 57, a familiar story for the families of retired football players. Retire athletes die younger, have many more physical problems, and generally live in a world of constant pain once their playing days are over.
To say that they shouldn’t use PED’s because it could harm them is disingenuous at best.
BEING AN ELITE ATHLETE IS TO PUT YOUR HEALTH AT RISK EVERY SINGLE DAY.
We live in a culture that has embraced the pharmacological fix. That our athletes do shouldn’t be thought of as wrong; it should be expected.
To clarify this part to indicate where my remark starts:
However, after it has been admitted that most citizens dope themselves from time to time, there remain excellent grounds for claiming that in the matter of drug usage, athletes are different from the rest of us.
What? “Most” citizens dope themselves from time to time? That would require something in the way of at least a survey. And if that were true, why would we think athletes are any different than us?
Decades ago a survey of Olympic athletes asked if they could take a substance that would guarantee them a gold medal but would also ensure they would be dead by age 30, about 80 percent said they’d take that drug. So if Gilbert’s right about most citizens doping themselves, that survey of athletes proved they are not different from the rest of us.
If anyone ever felt as if he were yelling into a closet, it would have been Associated Press sports writer Steve Wilstein, who while standing in the space all reporters occupy when speaking to an athlete spied androstenedione in Mark McGwire’s locker and wrote about it.
Baseball fans worldwide ripped the guy because they didn’t want to hear it. Wilstein was treated as if he had stuck his hand down ol’ double-M’s pants and twanged his weiner. Fans – certainly some of them who have posted here – just didn’t want to know the truth. Let’s put the blame where it belongs – on the fans. Fans never want to admit that they are part of the problem.
Amphetimines? Jim Bouton covered that well enough in “Ball Four” to get a call from Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who demanded that Bouton say he made it up. Where was the fan outrage when that best-selling book was written?
As for Gilbert’s article, weak, weak stuff that clearly fails to connect much of anything to baseball, let alone steroids.
All the Olympic stuff was fairly well known back then, and he doesn’t even touch on vampires on wheels – cyclists who blood doped.
It’s a piece that’s easy to pick apart. More supposition and innuendo than anything. It might have been in SI, but SI did a lot of weak crap back in the ’60s and ’70s that was more air than substance.
However, after it has been admitted that most citizens dope themselves from time to time, there remain excellent grounds for claiming that in the matter of drug usage, athletes are different from the rest of us.
What? “Most” citizens dope themselves from time to time? That would require something in the way of at least a survey. And if that were true, why would we think athletes are any different than us?
Decades ago a survey of Olympic athletes asked if they could take a substance that would guarantee them a gold medal but would also ensure they would be dead by age 30, about 80 percent said they’d take that drug. So if Gilbert’s right about most citizens doping themselves, that survey of athletes proved they are not different from the rest of us.
The Tigers’ Series hero, Mickey Lolich, was on antibiotics.
Wow. I can’t believe Lolich didn’t end up in prison for that.
?”Give me two sleeping pills,” said Los Angeles Laker star Jerry West
Unlike Marilyn Monroe, who asked for a handful. Sleeping pills. Gilbert doesn’t even say if they were over the counter.
Jean-Louis Quadri, 18, a soccer player, … 23-year-old Yves Mottin … two French cyclists…Olympic Games…Canadian national cycling team
Not only do these have nothing to do with baseball or American sports writers, none of this stuff was surprising among international elite athletes at the time.
DMSO
A substance that has been mostly available in the past four decades. I knew a doctor who gave some to a journalist for an elbow problem. It’s hardly insidious, and has been around for a century.
Bobby Baun, then of the Toronto Maple Leafs, was hit on the leg by the puck and carried from the rink on a stretcher. In the training room he received an injection of Novocain. His leg was taped, he returned to play, and he scored the winning goal in overtime. The next day it was determined Baun had a cracked right fibula….Numbing a broken leg and sending the patient out to play hockey is not a treatment any physician would follow with a nonathlete.
Who edited this piece for SI? A cracked fibula becomes a broken leg? What was it? Cracked or broken? And there is no shortage of stories of NFL players finishing games on broken legs. Buster Keaton once broke his neck doing a stunt and finished filming that day. I finished playing a pickup game of basketball once with a broken finger.
There are abundant rumors—the wildest of which circulate within rather than outside the sporting world—about … hopped-up pitchers,
If this is supposed to build a case in general, and particularly one about baseball, in the minds of readers here, it fails. “Abundant rumors” is lame innuendo, and then Gilbert doesn’t even bother to give us some good rumors.
the use of drugs in sport leads one directly to more serious and complicated questions. Is athletic integrity (and, conversely, corruption) a matter of public interest?
Of course not. If it had been, people would not have tried to crucify Steve Wilstein. People who read Jim Bouton’s book would have cared enough to make a stink about it.
says Kerlan “Situations arise where there are valid medical reasons for prescribing drugs for athletes.
And in fact there are at least a couple of anecdotes in Gilbert’s story that could fall into that category, but he blurs it for the reader.
in this country weight lifters and trackmen seem to be natural… began giving these drugs to weight lifters at the York (Pa.) Barbell Club
Again, great. And again, that hasn’t got anything to do with pro sports in general or baseball in particular. It would not be of interest to sports writers. Sports writers don’t care about some barbell club.
Plenty of stuff out there from the ’60s on this topic. It’s not that this was not a subject that was written about back then, it’s just that, as was the case with Wilstein, people didn’t want to hear it.
[...] Baseball Matters has an amazing post about a 40-year-old Sports Illustrated article about drug use in baseball — and what it says [...]
I don’t know how it got lost, but I tried posting a comment this weekend and it didn’t seem to work. Anyhow…
Great work, John. I’m glad someone took the time to find this and bring it to light. I knew there had to be at least one piece like this from 30 or 40 years ago, so thanks for finding it. And now that Gammons has brought it up on his blog, maybe some more mainstream people will talk about this. It’s pretty ridiculous that we’re all acting like this is brand new stuff.
Earlier in the comments, Keith mentions a couple of other articles to look at. I went looking for them, and posted them on my blog: Bil Gilbert’s “Something Extra On the Ball“, from June 30, 1969, and Terry Todd’s “The Steroid Predicament” from August 1, 1983.
Thanks again for finding this. Good stuff.
Uh oh, John … not that I have to give you permission, but you might want to take out a few f-bombs in my above diatribes … seeing as how the Gammons plug is likely to send over not a few people who hit the fainting couch when their February SI with the nipples comes in the mail.
LOLOLOLOL
John,
Peter Gammons reads and is now quoting you. Congradulations!
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=gammons_peter
And speaking of liars, liars, pants on fire, since Bud Selig is so anxious to distance himself all time from anything and everything to do with the great big nothing in the first place that is “steroids; I thought I would add in these little morsels.
We are all familiar with Selig’s fake indignation and hurt feelings whenver somebody accuses him of ignoring personal knowledge of anything to do with peds. If you’re not, let me refresh your memory from a quote of his last week in an interview with New York’s Newsday.
“I don’t want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn’t care about it,” Selig said. “That annoys the you-know-what out of me. You bet I’m sensitive to the criticism. The reason I’m so frustrated is, if you look at our whole body of work, I think we’ve come farther than anyone ever dreamed possible.”
No. No blind eye here. No deaf ear here either. He’s sooooooo sensititive to the criticism of some that he knew but did nothing. He was not the commissioner then. Nice bit of Clintonesque/Nixonian weasal-wording there Bud. But he was the owner of the Brewers and as John has pointed out in the past, he was busy running the club into the ground with a chintzy payroll, while collecting millions in revenue sharing. Well, here is what former Reds and Marlins testified to:
“Here’s the thing that really bothers me,” Starr said. “They sit there, meaning the commissioner’s office, Bud Selig and that group, and the players’ association, Don Fehr and that group . . . they sit there and say, ‘Well, now that we know that this happened we’re going to do something about it.’
“I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners group and the players’ association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, ‘Look, we need to do something about this. We’ve got a problem here if we don’t do something about it.’ That was in 1988.”
Heres the link for that too: The orginal FloridaToday report has been taken down since this first came out in 2007.
http://sportsonmymind.com/2007/12/18/the-mitchell-investigation-aftermath-its-time-to-get-religion/#more-1326
And just for the record, we all know who the President of the Texas Rangers was at that time, right?
Bottom of paragraph 5 above should read as follows.
…former Reds and Marlins trainer Larry Starr testified to.
Finally. The link that connects all of these chains of fools together. LOL that it was Sports Illustrated writers from 40 years ago that showed Verducci for the fraud and liar that John has said he was all along.
—————————————————————-
And how prescient and correct was Barry Bonds at his press conference when the jackals were trying unsuccesfully to get him to capitulate to their shrieking innuendos and accusation:
“We just need to go out there and do our jobs, just as you professionals do your job. All you guys lied. All of y’all and the story or whatever have lied. Should you have asterisk behind your name? All of you lied. All of you have said something wrong. All of you have dirt. All of you. When your closet’s clean, then come clean somebody else’s. But clean yours first, okay.”
Here’s the link to the whole press conference in 2005.
http://barrybonds.mlb.com/players/bonds_barry/news/pressconf0222.html
Just excellent work John. To those of us who want the whole truth that only context and exhaustive and relentless skepticism can bring, we say thanks!
I remember why I keep coming to this blog. Thanks for the great find John and your continually unique voice.
I especially love this part:
“However, the excessive and secretive use of drugs is likely to become a major athletic scandal, one that will shake public confidence in many sports just as the gambling scandal tarnished the reputation of basketball.”
… 40 years later, and basketball just had a gambling scandal and MSM are up in arms about the excessive and secretive use of drugs…but nobody in the journalism world could have possibly seen this coming, right?
I will also point out that most of these sports ‘reporters’ – Reilly, Costas, Lupica, Verducci – are Boomer dipshits who love being gently stroked across the ass with the giant pink feather of nostalgia while being spoon-fed saccharine remembrances of youth. These are precisely the same oh-so-earnest, hushed and smarm-saturated voices who provide the ridiculous dialogue for TV sports documentaries about the 1950s Yankees and such … juvenile splooge-fests for douchebag rummies like Mickey Mantle.
These documentaries — we’ve all seen ‘em, even got choked up over ‘em — are delivered, in baldly inappropriate fashion, via means-tested production methods designed to make one emote and not think, such as the ubiquitous use of boring, dreamy musical scores that are occasionally punctuated with triumphalist fanfares to cynical, resonating effect — the result being the complete and flatly false re-imagining of some all-too-human slugger as a paragon of youthful dynamism and innocent goodness. Which is ultimately how Reilly, Costas, et. al. enable each others’ deepest need, by means of a relentless exchange of self-reinforcing lies — to never admit that they’ve been played for suckers all along, that a world that they were too fucking stupid to get in the first place has passed them by. And worse, that all that awaits them in the aftermath of their increasingly feeble attempts to fend off the messiness of reality that the rest of us confronted and learned how to live with long ago, is old age and the reaper, who’s likely bulking up on ‘roids himself in anticipation of the extra effort it’s going to take to drag these whiny, scared, tantrum-throwing boy-men off this old mortal coil.
Ultimately, these finger-wagging scolds belong on a Victorian-era Lady’s Temperance Society steering committee, where they could look down their noses at any and all people and developments of interest to their heart’s content, and without us having to listen to their drivel, rather than on our sports pages and TV sets.
FUCKERS.
Excellent find. But John, you need to start including Bob Costas in your lineup of sanctimonious little shits who blubber on about PED use as if it’s happening in a vacuum, destroying the ‘integrity’ of a game that lionized labor-raping fucks like Charlie Comiskey and ‘OMG! Our baseball heroes TRICKED us all this time!!!1!’
ABSOLUTE TOTAL FUCKING GRANDSTANDING ASSWIPES, THE LOT OF THEM.
My buddy asked me last night what I think about the A-Rod situation. Didn’t have to think about for even a second. I DON’T CARE. It is not surprising or meaningful in the slightest. I simply assume that all pro athletes use PEDs of some kind. I assume that every finalist in the Olympics 100m final for the past 30-40 years, men and women, were juicing. I assume every Tour de France stage winner in the past 30-40 years was juicing.
And how crazy is this – I still like sports. Well, not the Tour de France all that much, but still.
amazing article – “gee, how far we’ve come”. More intelligent than all the current things I’ve read put together.
All that keeps popping into my head is “Ball Four”. One of the most popular baseball books ever written, in practically every library in America, I read it first as a young teenager. Completely open about the use of “greenies” – millions have read that book.
How can any of this be a surprise to anyone? How can the media assume that we’re so stupid as to “surprise” us? Why does it surprise people?
Madness. And now we get to hear about Barry Bonds’ testicles. One can’t get more absurd than that.
nice
That was awesome. Great find.
It’s really said that what passes for “journalism” today in the sports world is incessant moralizing and waxing nostalgic from your soapbox. Thanks for posting.
Great find my friend. I like your writing and appreciate your views on baseball and the Giants. Okay, you know that, right? I’ve been “here” for years now. But, it’s still funny to me that what you’ve been finding and describing shouldn’t even be anything special. It should be so commonly known–come on, “we” KNOW this stuff don’t “we”?–that you’re just posting this and that to provide context and so nuance. Instead, so many have their heads so stuck up their own asses (err…the sand) that what you (and many of us) have been discussing for years now is taken as an “apology” or as “fringe” or “wrong”…just deeply funny to me.
Have a nice weekend.
Kent,
Yeah, well, you’ve been here for years. For so much of that time, I’ve often felt like I was screaming in a closet. Thank God for you and Mia and the rest of my regulars, who’ve helped me realize that I’m not crazy.
Thanks for that.
[...] Only Baseball Matters wrote an interesting post today on â¦. History lessonHere’s a quick excerptI have written –repeatedly– that I simply cannot believe that sportswriters like Mike Lupica and Rick Reilly and Tom Verducci only just recently discovered that athletes will use PED’s to improve their performance. I have stated again and again that the real reason –the ONLY reason– we have this “scandal” in baseball, and nowhere else, is because of the recent assault on the venerated baseball record book. I didn’t read this Sports Illustrated article when it came out 40 years ago, because I [...]
[...] Only Baseball Matters wrote an interesting post today on â¦. History lessonHere’s a quick excerptI have written –repeatedly– that I simply cannot believe that sportswriters like Mike Lupica and Rick Reilly and Tom Verducci only just recently discovered that athletes will use PED’s to improve their performance. I have stated again and again that the real reason –the ONLY reason– we have this “scandal” in baseball, and nowhere else, is because of the recent assault on the venerated baseball record book. I didn’t read this Sports Illustrated article when it came out 40 years ago, because I [...]
You’re not even including Gilberts follow up article on June 30th which includes quotes from Jim Brosnan’s book, Pennant Race, along with interviews with many physicians from other sports. Or how about Terry Todd’s SI article from 1983 on steroid use. Amphetamine use was rampant in baseball in the 60′s – 70′s, all used to give players an edge. I really find it sad that so called “journalists” like Reilly, Lupica, & Verducci don’t even bother to put their writing in any kind of context with what has happened in the past. Either they are just lazy or are not including anything on purpose which isn’t up to the standards of what is supposed to be good journalism. Just about the only sports reporter who has mentioned that atheletes have alway sought an edge over the competition is Frank Deford. Doing it isn’t right and if you are caught you should be punished, but this holier-than-thou howling is ridiculous.
I’ve included it now. Read my next piece –if you already haven’t.
Thanks for the tip. I’m trying to find as much by Glibert as possible. Since my email is broken right now, if you find more, send me the links through my backtalk. I’ll keep front-paging them.