I wrote this to a friend on 1/7/05. Now with the Major League Baseball hearings shocking and disillusioning the public, it has gained a new dimension of topicality.


Dear Bonnie, (name changed, has teenage sons who play sports)

The fact is that steroid use is so pervasive in many professional sports that it’s the oddball athlete that doesn’t take them. This is the sad truth that the public relations personnel for professional sports leagues like the NFL, try to downplay or conceal to avoid impairing corporate advertising revenues. As author of Natural Hormonal Enhancement (and someone who has never at any time taken steroids), I’m violently opposed to anabolic steroids for performance purposes because they represent an ungodly bastardization of the human endocrine system and are dangerous (and admittedly I resent how they miniaturize the achievements of athletes and bodybuilders who play fair). Some people take steroids and survive intact; others pay an extremely high price. Because of the growing necessity of steroid (and exogenous growth hormone) use to compete successfully at the highest level of athletic competition, studies showing steroid use among teenagers is on the rise, and because sometimes you can preach to teenagers until they’re blue in the face without stimulating compliance - here’s a story you can file-away, and maybe share with a young athlete for their benefit someday.

Lyle Alzado, who played for the 1984 Super Bowl Champion Raiders in addition to the Broncos and Browns, was one of the NFL’s best defensive lineman (playing both tackle and end at an All-Pro level). He was the only person from Yankton College to be drafted into the NFL. He bench-pressed more than 500 pounds, exceptional strength even for an NFL lineman. And his 4.75/40y-speed made him one of the more fleet-a-foot pass rushers in football. As an amateur boxer, he won 27 fights and once boxed Muhammad Ali in an exhibition match. In March 1991, at the marriage to his fourth wife, Kathy, he couldn’t walk a straight line. A month later he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Alzado then admitted to taking steroids and growth hormone for most of his career beginning in 1969. Alzado attributed his sickness to his anabolic drug use, although causal relationships for individual cases of cancer are nearly impossible to prove with certainty. After receiving chemotherapy treatment and contracting pneumonia, Lyle Alzado died on May 14, 1992 at his home in Portland, Oregon, at 42 years of age. Among his final words were these: “Now look at me. . .I’m sick and I’m scared. My hair’s gone, I wobble when I walk and have to hold onto someone for support, and I have trouble remembering things. My last wish? That no one else ever dies this way.” He also said, “If you’re on steroids or human growth hormone, stop. I should have.”