Countdown To Lockdown (36 page)

Look, I’m pretty sure Barry Bonds is guilty of using some kind of banned substance, even if it may not have been technically banned while he was using it. He may have been using something other than
those creams, too. Who really knows? But by some estimates, half the league was on some type of gas. Bonds may indeed have been guilty of using performance-enhancing substances, but he’s probably guiltier of being a jerk. If he’d been a heck of a guy, nice to old dogs and children, there’s no way the public would have taken such joy in his downfall. I think people wanted Bonds to fail, personally and professionally. And I think just about everyone, if given the chance, would have used that cream. I think I would have, too. A needle? Get that away from me! A cream? Why not? What could be wrong with a little cream? We’ve got skin cream, pimple cream, suntan cream, moisturizing cream, Mandelay (go ahead, say it a couple times) prolonging cream—performance enhancers, all of them!

It just seems to me that there’s this kind of mob mentality surrounding celebrities and scandals, whether they be substance related or otherwise. Just ask Tiger Woods. The whole thing reminds me of poor Boris Karloff in
Frankenstein
, fending off the torch-wielding townsfolk, all of whom seem hell-bent on vengeance. Careers ended, reputations ruined, legacies stained forever. Roger Clemens went from being one of the great pitchers of all time to being some kind of embarrassment to baseball after it was alleged that he attempted to stay at the top of his game by any means necessary.

I think the subject of human growth hormone takes on an added complexity when looked at through the perspective of a pitcher’s arm. Anyone who knows basic baseball kinesiology will tell you that the act of throwing a baseball is unnatural and damaging over time. Each throw tears tiny muscle fibers, which then need to be repaired through ice, rest, stretching, or any other means available within the rules of the game. But who makes up the rules? And why should one substance—anti-inflammatories (cortisone, Mobic, etc.)—be permissible, while another and possibly better one—HGH—is not?

When I was a kid, basketball Hall of Famer Bill Walton was castigated for refusing to take shots of cortisone for his knees. Cortisone, a potent, injectable anti-inflammatory, was the drug of choice for
getting athletes back in the game when common sense and human pain thresholds should have dictated otherwise. I’ve only had a handful of cortisone injections in my life, with two of them coming in a three-day period in 2004—an absolute no-no in the medical practice, but a no-no that’s undoubtedly done all the time anyway. I didn’t even have a choice in the matter; a well-known sports doctor in Los Angeles just stuck a needle in my knee without my consent.

A guy who willingly took a cortisone shot to step onto the field of play was considered a gutsy competitor, a hero, a team player. But a guy who takes a shot of human growth hormone is an embarrassment, a cheater, a fraud. Where exactly is the differentiation, and who decides where that invisible moral line is drawn?

Back in 1994, right before that initial WCW drug test I wrote of earlier, the wrestlers were given a little lecture about the dangers of steroids, before being given the opportunity to ask questions. The hand of a prominent wrestler shot up. “Whatever happened to being the best you can be?” the wrestler asked.

“Excuse me?” the lecturer said, a little thrown by the tone of the wrestler’s voice.

“I said, ‘Whatever happened to being the best that you could be? ’ I want to perform as well as I possibly can for the fans, and you’re telling me I’m not allowed to do that.”

There was kind of a stunned silence at the time, but the message I took from that experience is that most wrestlers (or football players, or actors, or even rappers) don’t look at the decision to take performance enhancers as a means of cheating, but as a means of fulfilling their potential, which in many cases can be the difference between struggling on the indies and being a national wrestling star, or between languishing in the minor leagues and making millions in “the show.” I’m not agreeing or disagreeing; I’m merely offering up a little food for thought for those members of Congress or the press who think the entire issue comes down to the word
cheater.

In a January 2010
USA Today
article, writer Christine Brennan uses
the word
cheat
(or a derivative of such—
cheater
,
cheating
) no less than five times in regard to Mark McGwire’s teary-eyed steroid confessional. Ms. Brennan is an award-winning journalist, and I personally enjoy her work, but that whole “cheat, cheating, cheater” thing just seems to be a far too simple and incomplete explanation when examining Big Mac’s anabolic admission. The McGwire–Sosa home-run contest in the ’90s put interest back into the game and butts back into the seats after baseball’s strike-shortened season threatened to greatly diminish the American public’s affection for its national pastime, which seemingly created an implied consent, a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for every slugger looking for an advantage in the age of the long ball.

But there have always been cheats, cheating, and cheaters in baseball … and worse. Klan members, gamblers, terrible drunks, and as Zev Chafets wrote in his 2009 book,
Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame
, “a convicted drug dealer, a reformed cokehead who narrowly beat a lifetime suspension from baseball, a celebrated sex addict, an Elders of Zion conspiracy nut, a pitcher who wrote a book about how he cheated his way into the hall, a well-known and highly arrested drunk driver and a couple of nasty beanball artists” have been enshrined.

Speaking of home-run records and the steroid era, many will point to the recent testing in major-league baseball and the subsequent decline in home-run numbers as proof that the numbers put up by Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and others are questionable. Perhaps this is true, and I’m glad that baseball finally decided to deal with what was obviously a growing problem. But more than one major leaguer has pointed out to me that the dramatic drop in homerun production has far more to do with the banning of amphetamines (often called greenies) from the game than the crackdown on steroids. Without benefit of an occasional greenie, players just can’t concentrate for the duration of a long season without taking a day off every
now and then. The number of at-bats just isn’t there to put up those huge power numbers, with or without the gas.

Should baseball put an asterisk next to the name of every player who set some type of record while performing on amphetamines? I guess they could, but that’s an awful lot of asterisks denoting the “greenie era” in major-league baseball.

Look, I want to reiterate that I’m not pro-steroid. Definitely not! But so much of the talk regarding performance-enhancing substances seems to be ill-informed, or illogical, or coming from people who have no idea what it’s like to compete for a job that is so highly competitive; a job where the tiniest edge can be the difference between success and failure, wealth and poverty.

A recent episode of HBO’s
Real Sports
left me wondering if the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s stringent testing might not be a bigger problem than the cheating it aims to curtail. I watched the episode open-jawed as it showed top finishers at the Houston marathon immediately corralled after their 26.2-mile run and given a chaperone who would stay with the athlete, always within easy viewing distance, until the first postrace urine could be produced for testing. There was no time to relax, to savor the moment, rejoice at a job well done—just the constant ingesting of liquids (under personal surveillance) until that elusive urine could be coaxed out.

This, apparently, is the price one must pay to compete at the top level in today’s “cheat, cheating, cheater” world. A world where the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency requires athletes to inform them of their whereabouts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Where athletes must consent to testing on demand, any time, any place. You pee … I see.

When HBO journalist Jon Frankel noted that only 87 of 32,000 tests during the past four years had come back positive, roughly one quarter of one percent (25 percent of those for what HBO noted was the “decidedly non-performance-enhancing drug marijuana”), the USADA noted the testing’s “deterrence factor”—one of those
completely unprovable theories, kind of like that pro wrestler who performs to an utter symphony of silence and then comes back bragging about how he had the “silent heat” out there.

As I watched, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was Big Brother run amok. The very idea that a desire to compete requires the mandatory relinquishing of the most basic human right to privacy is absurd. We did win the Cold War, right? So why did this HBO program make me feel like I was looking at some repressive midseventies Soviet policy?

I remember those great post–Super Bowl moments where the winning team’s most valuable player would be asked the big question as he jogged off the field triumphantly: “You just won the Super Bowl. What are you going to do now?” The answer used to be so easy: “I’m going to Disneyland.” What might next year bring? A chaperone? A piss bottle? A cloud of suspicion eventually raining on every parade? That “guilty until proven innocent” forcing down of liquids until that postvictory whiz? Yes! “Now that I’ve been stripped of my dignity and my rights, I’m going to Disneyland!”

If only we could monitor our politicians with such zeal. But I’m sure they’d pass a law against that.

Look, I know all of this must seem like an awful lot to digest. Basically, these are thoughts I have been gathering in my head for several years, and this book just seemed to be the most likely place to throw them all out in a public forum. I know many will interpret this chapter as being either pro-steroid or anti-testing; in fact, it is neither. I believe that testing has been beneficial in many ways, in wrestling and in other sports, especially in regard to prescription medication, which continues to be the biggest problem the wrestling business faces—as well as a huge problem with society in general. But I am just hesitant to fully embrace a testing system that has so many flaws and that exists in an environment where one is always guilty until proven innocent, and where the court of public opinion is deaf to anything but the blanket apology.

Unfortunately, I am not hopeful when it comes to solving the problems involved in this very complicated issue. Not as long as testing seems to catch largely the less informed and/or less well compensated. Not as long as many journalists either don’t know, refuse to learn, or choose to mislead a public that celebrates both the rise and the fall of the athlete. Not as long as congressional members resort to moral grandstanding, unable, I believe, to place themselves in the shoes of a desperately poor prospect from the Dominican Republic, for whom the slightest edge might mean the difference, literally, between rags and riches. Not as long as those caught continue to supply the blanket apology, the “young and foolish” confession (with or without tears) that seems to be part of the mandatory forgiveness process. Not as long as the supplement industry goes largely unscrutinized and so many people make so much money marketing products that don’t seem to work. Not as long as a desire to compete at the highest level means reducing our right to privacy and dignity to its lowest level.

No, I think this substance problem is going to be with us for a long time.

April 15, 2009

Long Island, New York

11:42 p.m.

I may not be able to salvage this match, but at least I’ve got some tights. Yes, after a long search that included three sporting goods stores, a dance supply store, and a Sears, I finally tracked down the classic Cactus tights I’d promised (sans the Cactus lettering) at a Target … in the ladies’ section. So if you do happen to see
Lockdown
and like it,
you can sleep better at night knowing the Hardcore Legend doesn’t need to go into his biggest match in years with any fancy, expensive, custom-made stuff. No, the Hardcore Legend will do just fine in a pair of women’s triple-X activity leggings for the grand total of seven dollars.

I saw Lindsay Lohan’s face peeking out at me from the checkout counter magazine rack, on a copy of
Us Weekly
, underneath the words “I Am So Alone.” Poor kid. Honestly, I mean it. I remember meeting Lindsay when she really
was
just a kid, twelve or thirteen—backstage at an Aaron Carter show. The night A.C. called me out onstage and had me dance in front of seven thousand onlookers (while wearing a hugely oversized purple foam cowboy hat), in what was surely not a comfortable moment for anyone involved.