A School Day of Reckoning Over Steroids?, By: Fay Vincent

September 17, 2006

It was a long time ago, but the memories of those first days of football practice linger with me the way the taste of sweet little cakes did with Proust. For me, the smell of freshly cut grass does it. I am immediately drawn back to a time some 50 years ago when I would stretch out on the field at my little New England college doing what we called "grass drills."

Next to us was a river, and beyond, a display of autumn foliage so stunning that it became a major distraction for young players trying to focus on the guttural directions of their coaches.

I remember looking at that scene and having a distinctly religious experience. I knew God was somewhere in those hills. And then I was back on the grass pushing my 18-year-old frame against a classmate and trying to learn how to block and tackle.

For a lineman, there was only so much to the skill part of football. The bulk of it was a function of size, which I had, and strength, which I had in some lesser measure. For I was a 6-foot-2 tackle weighing 230 pounds, which in those days meant I was considered a big guy.

Not anymore. The other day I went down to my old college field to watch the current generation begin to get ready for their season, and the size of the kids was astonishing. Not only were they enormous, they were also exceptionally muscular. As they stood there with shirts off, I could see the effects of all their weight training -- even on the smaller backs and receivers. Some of the linemen were obviously pushing 300 pounds -- and it wasn't fat.

My immediate thought was how fortunate I was to have played when I did. For while I may envy today's players their youth, I have to wonder about their size. Is it all diet, exercise, training? Or is some of it attributable to chemicals?

Another former player at my college, who went on to a distinguished career in medicine, marvels at the size of even Division III players. (That's the NCAA division where they don't give athletic scholarships.) He told me he was certain some of these kids were taking supplements to reach the sizes they did at such young ages. "You cannot get that big eating your Wheaties" is how he put it.

It got me thinking of the possible consequences of what has been going on the past few years with young athletes in virtually all sports. If, as seems likely, many of this generation have been taking such things as steroids and human growth hormones, they have been doing so with the benign neglect of their coaches and school officials. It is inconceivable that the people who are around these kids a lot don't know, or at least suspect, that something is going on.

And yet we are doing little to educate young athletes to the risks of using such chemicals. Perhaps some of us believe we're excused because we have no hard data on the long-term medical consequences of taking whatever these kids have been taking. But I wonder about the risks for the schools.

Let us shift forward several decades. Now the players are returning to their old fields, as I did to mine, to sit in the shadows of advancing age and watch others sweat in the grass. I wonder whether they'll feel as warm and fuzzy about their colleges and their experiences on the field as I do. Or will some be coping with serious medical ailments and disabilities -- problems they now attribute to the failure of others to have warned them against using chemicals that inflated their bodies but also injured them and distorted their genes?

Will our universities and colleges be like the tobacco companies, forced to argue in court that these kids knew, or should have known, that the substances they were using weren't good for their health? I wonder whether the schools will be faced with lawsuits based on the mounting numbers of former athletes who might allege that they were victims of neglectful abuse by their onetime educational mentors.

And I wonder whether those former athletes taking their alma maters to court might not have a pretty good case.