Making fun of Browns

[Vambo]

(05-01-2019, 05:18 PM)JS-Steelerfan Wrote:  Nothing about this situation even resembles a documented side effect of steroids.  

Steroidgate (1970-2007) to top home ⇐awards


TEAM: The Pittsburgh Steelers


SEVERITY:.

SUMMARY: Richard Rydze, a Pittsburgh Steelers team doctor from 1985 to 2007, was indicted in 2012 for his long history of purchasing and illegally prescribing anabolic steroids, human growth hormones and painkillers. The physician was also charged with health care fraud for falsely diagnosing more than 90 patients with pituitary dwarfism so they could receive human growth hormones and drugs meant to counteract the side-effects of steroid use.

Rydze was also on the customer list of an Orlando, FL, pharmacy that was raided in February 2007 as part of an interstate steroids ring. Rydze was questioned then about buying $150,000 worth of testosterone and human growth hormone on his credit card in 2006, but was not charged in that investigation.

The Steelers dropped Rydze from their roster of doctors in June 2007.

In the decade prior to Rydze's tenure, many Steelers also admitted to using steroids to gain an advantage. Former Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw admitted in 2008 that he used steroids during his playing career. Bradshaw said on Dan Patrick's radio show: “We did steroids to get away the aches and the speed of healing. My use of steroids from a doctor was to speed up injury, and thought nothing of it. It was to speed up the healing process, that was it. It wasn't to get bigger and stronger and faster.”
Former Saints coach Jim Haslett accused the '70s Steelers of being "the ones who kind of started" steroid use in the NFL.
Said Haslett: "It started, really, in Pittsburgh. They got an advantage on a lot of football teams. They were so much stronger (in the) '70s, late '70s, early '80s.

Former Vikings and Giants quarterback Fran Tarkenton corroborated Haslett's story in a June 2009 interview, saying: "We’re playing the Steelers in the Super Bowl in ’75 or ’76 … we’re on the field warming up, and I see these Steeler offensive linemen with their sleeves rolled up, and they've got these bulging muscles. Later, we found out it that … these guys were juiced … all of them."

VICTIM: The entire league


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In the Aftermath of Steroids


Take it away,Steve Courson: "Preparing for the Bucs' April minicamp, I began my mostserious cycle yet: a weekly regimen of 4 cc testosterone cypionate, 4 ccWinstrol V, 4 cc Deca-Durabolin, and 4 cc liquid Diana-bol. I knew that it wasa lot, but it seemed worth the risk.... My intention was to enter the '85season at 285 pounds-able to bench press more than 600 pounds, squat about 850,and dead lift about 900."

That unfitnessregimen is recounted in Courson's new book, False Glory (Longmeadow Press,$19.95). Courson, who used muscle-enhancing anabolic-androgenic steroidsthroughout his eight-year career as an offensive lineman for the PittsburghSteelers and Tampa Bay I Buccaneers after discovering them while playing atSouth Carolina, writes that by 1985 he had built himself into a bizarrelyshaped "chemically augmented athlete." He had a 38½-inch waist, a58-inch chest, 20½-inch biceps and a neck just a wisp short of being 23 inchesaround. He was one of those NFL linemen who keep their bulging arms exposed incold weather, a guy who looked as if he had swallowed an airhose after settingthe gauge at 100 pounds per square inch. He had two Super Bowl rings and hadbeen named an alternate to the 1982 Pro Bowl.

But then he gotsick. In 1985 his resting pulse was measured at more than 150 beats per minute,his electrocardiogram showed signs of atrial fibrillation, and his steroid usewas out of control. Still, he played on. And cycled on.

Even after TampaBay released him in '86, Courson kept guzzling the steroids. Fully juiced, hebenched 605 pounds in a powerlifting meet in 1988. "By the day of thecontest," he writes, "I was at the end of a sixteen-week cycle, havingingested or injected substantial doses of Dianabol, Anavar (both orals),Deca-Durabolin, testosterone enanthate, and testosterone propionate (oil-basedinjectables) before capping it off with some human chorionicgonadotropin."


Less than threemonths later he landed in intensive care at a Pittsburgh hospital, diagnosedwith dilated cardiomyopathy, an enlarged heart that lacked the ability to pumpnormally because of lost muscle fibers. What irony—at age 33 the strongman wasdying because of a flabby muscle. He needed a new heart. Now, three yearslater, he still does, and he waits for the phone call that may not come soonenough, the one that tells him a donor has been found.

This book isCourson's reflection on a sporting life gone awry, a heartfelt, if you will,attempt by a former prince of machismo to figure out why he did so many crazythings to play the game of football. Of course, Courson now has the time formusings on his former steroid use, binge drinking and tunnel vision. He is weakand can exercise only cautiously. He does not have his college degree and haslost much of his career earnings in bad business deals. He has been through thefire, gotten burned and wants to tell us that the flames are hot.

Can we learnanything from this? Maybe, maybe not. The sad truth is we've heard it allbefore. Football is brutal. It consumes its players, who are puppets todictatorial coaches (in Courson's case, the Steelers' icily distant ChuckNoll), and it leads players to pursue unethical and self-destructive behaviorin an attempt to delay that moment when the coach tells them that it's time toget on with the rest of their lives.

Courson gobbledsteroids and kept almost 300 pounds on his . 6'1" frame so that he could ;continue, as he says, "to perform in a sport that I would have played fornothing." He knew the drug-taking was wrong and unhealthy, but everyoneelse was doing it, he claims, so why not? "Without naming names,"writes Courson, "I can state unequivocally that during my time inPittsburgh 75 percent of the Steeler offensive line took anabolic-androgenicsteroids at one time or another.

"There's no glory dying for a sport."