by Tim Elfrink
Lindsay was often professionally inseparable from Galea. Both are good-looking, prolific, married to younger athletes—in Lindsay’s case, a skier—and both were often credited with nearly magical healing capabilities. They often traded referrals and ended up having the same patients. They had both treated sprinter Donovan Bailey, and while Galea was dealing with Delgado’s injuries, Lindsay had been in Florida rehabbing Mets speedster Jose Reyes’s hamstring, which was also later treated by Galea.
Lindsay treated sprinter Tim Montgomery during the period in which he was immersed in BALCO’s “Project World Record,” in which Victor Conte’s “supplements” were supposed to turn Montgomery into the fastest man in history. Conte told the New York Daily News that he met Lindsay through Bill Romanowski, the former NFL star and steroid user. “Mark is one of the best at active release techniques, and I referred a few athletes to him, including Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones,” Conte told the newspaper, in the sort of glowing testimonial Lindsay likely preferred not to have broadcasted.
When he first hired Lindsay, Tiger Woods had just enjoyed a career-defining victory. On June 16, 2008, he had spent a day hobbling up hills and using his golf club like a cane in La Jolla, California, at the US Open. This was the year that other golfers were supposed to have a chance, thanks to an injury that—if you believe one of his closest coaches for six years—stemmed from Tiger Woods’s military obsession.
Woods said he had damaged the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee while running on a golf course. But in his own memoir and in an interview for this book, Haney maintains that after the death of his lieutenant colonel father, Woods had progressed from SEALs-themed video games to running in combat boots to making publicized visits with the elite soldiers to going on secret three-day Navy SEALs training excursions that had him parachuting out of planes ten times a day.
The world’s most famous golfer talked seriously about getting a pass on age restrictions to join the world’s most elite military unit. “You’re all of a sudden not going to be Tiger Woods anymore, and you’re going to be a Navy SEAL?” Haney says he asked the golfer incredulously. During a training mission at a Navy “kill house,” Haney says, a soldier accidentally booted Woods in the knee, causing the injury.
Woods’s agent, Mark Steinberg, has said that Haney’s book is “full of guesses and false assumptions” and that “his stories about Tiger’s injuries are simply not true.”
Regardless of the backstory, Woods had undergone anthroscopic surgery just two months before the Open. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t practice his swing. He could barely walk, let alone play golf.
But this was pre–National Enquirer Tiger Woods, when all the world knew of him was a monkish devotion to his sport. He had consistently squelched competition for more than a decade. Unlikely as it was, it was hard not to see his comeback at the Open coming.
Rocco Mediate was one sixteen-foot putt from winning the tournament. He missed it. Woods made his own putt and won it all on the nineteenth hole. He was so hobbled after the victory that he couldn’t walk up a hill to greet fans.
Woods then traveled to Utah for another knee surgery. Afterward, he cast around for a physical therapist who would help him return to golf in record time. “Tiger wanted to recover as fast as he could,” says Haney. “He wanted somebody progressive.” Lindsay was that physician. The details of Woods’s treatment by Lindsay, and ultimately Anthony Galea, are disclosed in records from a later Florida Department of Health investigation, which have not been reported until now.
On September 16, Mark Lindsay traveled to Isleworth, the Florida golf community where Woods lived in a $2.4 million mansion. On a massage table between Woods’ kitchen and his house’s great room, Lindsay performed “manipulations and soft tissue therapy,” according to an invoice, and charged $2,000 a session.
At Lindsay’s referral, Galea joined Woods’s recovery squad in January 2009. According to Haney, the Canadian doctor drove to the Orlando area from Tampa, site of Super Bowl XLIII, where Galea had treated Pittsburgh Steeler wide receiver Hines Ward for a sprained right knee.
Galea came armed with an ultrasound machine and his trusty centrifuge to spin Woods’s blood, Haney says. Chris Hubman, Woods’s chief financial officer, later described to investigators watching Galea set up his platelet-rich plasma injections.
They were an intense, and lucrative, rehab crew toiling full-time on Woods’s knee—the Canadian physicians plus other trainers, who had the golfer going through two excruciating two-and-a-half-hour workouts per day. Periodically, Galea scanned Woods’s knee with his ultrasound, and the myriad coaches and trainers gathered around to view the ACL gap closing like it was a fetus growing.
Woods paid Galea $3,500 a session, plus first-class expenses. The Canadians stayed at Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill Club & Lodge, a hotel on a nearby golf course. Lindsay’s treatment lasted through October 2009, for a total of forty-nine trips to Florida. The total cost to the golfer for Lindsay’s care was $118,979.87. Galea stopped earlier, in August 3, 2009, racking up a bill of $76,012.70 for fourteen visits to Woods’s mansion.
By then, Woods was well into an emphatic return to golf. After eight months sidelined, he had returned in February 2009 and proceeded to win six tournaments that year. “There were some people who thought his career was over,” says Haney. “For him to come back like that was remarkable. It was unbelievable.”
But the wheels were about to fall off several wagons. Lindsay and Galea had both been breaking the law by even treating Woods in Florida, and would face possible felony charges. That November, the many extramarital affairs of Woods, father of two, were exposed, ending his marriage to Swedish model Elin Nordegren—and derailing his career. Authorities raided Galea’s medical office after an underling was caught unlawfully bringing HGH over the border.
And ultimately, all eyes fell on Alex Rodriguez and his own secret treatment at the hands of the Canadian doctor.
Though all of Galea’s dealings with American athletic patients were scrutinized in hindsight, his attorney says that the doctor gave Tiger Woods no banned substances. “All that treatment was PRP, or some other innocuous treatment,” says Canadian attorney Brian Greenspan, referring to the blood-spinning program. “Never performance enhancement.”
Haney says he never had any indication Galea even discussed growth hormone—which is banned by the PGA—with Woods. But, the swing coach points out, he also had no idea that Woods was cheating on his wife. “Who knows?” Haney says when asked if Galea might have given Woods HGH. “That seems to be a part of Galea’s program, but who knows?”
Tiger Woods has steadfastly denied that Galea gave him HGH or any other banned substance. “I’ve never taken any illegal drug in my life,” he has said.
• • •
In the month of spring training following Rodriguez’s Sucart-blaming press conference, he was saddled with a tightness in his right thigh. It was a lingering, unresolved issue from the previous season, so in March 2009 the Yankees sent him to be examined by Dr. Marc Philippon, a thigh specialist in Vail, Colorado.
Dr. Philippon was a close associate with both Lindsay and Galea. In fact, later in 2009, Philippon wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, supporting Galea’s application for a visa to legally work in the United States and professing that the doctor “possesses and demonstrates a command of tissue regeneration that is unparalleled in the medical field.”
After examining Rodriguez’s thigh, Philippon diagnosed a torn labrum. He performed surgery and then recommended that the Yankees have Lindsay monitor his rehabilitation.
Both Philippon and the New York Yankees later claimed that they didn’t find out until the next year that Rodriguez was also quietly treated by Dr. Anthony Galea.
It was common for his athlete clients to keep Galea’s treatments from their employers, his attorneys wrote. “Agents for professional players began calling Dr. Galea to assess and treat the athletes’ injury without disc
losing the problem to the team,” reads a federal court filing, “out of concern that the injury might affect the player’s status or contract negotiations, especially in difficult cases where the customary treatments did not have a history of complete success.”
As he claims with Woods and all of Galea’s American pro sports patients, attorney Greenspan says that the doctor’s treatment of Rodriguez consisted only of platelet-rich plasma injections and other allowed procedures.
But Major League Baseball officials—convinced that banned substances like HGH were involved—eventually resorted to desperate measures in their attempts to find out more about Galea’s treatment of Rodriguez.
Expected to return in mid-May 2009, Rodriguez was instead back in pinstripes a week early. He slammed a three-run homer on the first pitch he saw.
Four months later, in September 2009, a woman named Mary Anne Catalano tried to pass the Peace Bridge port of entry into the United States. The bridge connects Ontario, Canada, to Buffalo, New York.
The bespectacled Catalano looks more like a librarian than a smuggler. She was driving a 2009 Nissan Rogue leased by Galea Investments Inc. Catalano was Galea’s executive assistant.
Catalano told a border patrol officer that she was headed to the Buffalo airport. From there, she would fly to Washington, DC, to meet her boss, Galea, at a medical conference. She disclosed that she was traveling with medical equipment, which was needed for demonstration purposes.
The officer dug through her medical bag and found more than one hundred syringes, needles, the spinning centrifuge, and twenty-six ampules of medication and substances including one bottle each of Nutropin—a brand of HGH—and Actovegin, the calf’s-blood substance not approved for use in the United States.
Special investigators from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived at the bridge. Catalano briefly maintained her story. Then she asked the investigators if she could tell them the truth.
Catalano “told investigators that the reason for which [she] and Dr. Galea had come to the United States on that day and on numerous other occasions before then was for Dr. Galea to provide medical treatments to professional athletes in the United States,” according to a federal indictment.
The reason she was meeting Galea in DC, she now admitted, was to give him the drugs needed to treat a professional athlete at a hotel there. That athlete’s name is sealed in federal records, but the New York Times later reported he was a Washington Redskins football player. As was their routine, Galea gave Catalano a checklist of drugs to take over the Peace Bridge while the doctor flew from Toronto.
Catalano added that “Dr. Galea understood that treating these patients inside the United States was not lawful.”
Galea had two primary treatments, she told investigators, according to court documents. One was the platelet-rich plasma injection. The second was an injection, into a muscle tear, of a drug cocktail including the growth hormone Nutropin. As with all growth hormones, the use of Nutropin is banned in major American sports.
In an interview for this book, Galea’s Canadian attorney, Greenspan, denied Catalano’s claim that the doctor treated pro athletes with HGH. “She was placed in a rather intimidating situation and questioned in a rather intimidating fashion,” says Greenspan. “He’s a healer, not a cheater.”
But Catalano told investigators that she had unlawfully transported drugs over other borders for Galea. Because Actovegin couldn’t be purchased in Canada or the United States, in 2007 Galea sent her to Germany to purchase a supply. The doctor instructed her not to declare the drug upon reentry to Canada. If she was ever stopped crossing a border, Galea had told her to use the medical conference cover story.
Galea had decided it was too risky for him to cross the border with drugs himself in February 2009, Catalano said. One month after starting his treatments of Tiger Woods, he was stopped by border inspectors who warned him he could not bring medical supplies into the United States. Galea told the officials “that he was a sports doctor giving a medical lecture in Florida and had medical equipment” for that purpose, according to customs records.
Catalano—who had worked for Galea since 1998, when she was fifteen—turned her work BlackBerry phone over to investigators, and when she next met with officials for ICE, FBI, and the Food and Drug Administration, she came armed with work calendars and a spreadsheet she created. “What’s a nice girl like Mary Anne Catalano doing in a joint like this?” her attorney later cracked in court. (Galea has publicly stated that the HGH that Catalano had when she was arrested at the border was only for his own use. “I only brought enough for her to do two injections into me because I was away for two nights,” Galea said in March 2010. “They made it look like I had 100 vials. I had one little vial and two doses were for me and you think that someone along the line would ask ‘Well how much is there?’”)
Using customs records, Catalano’s materials, and interviews with clients, federal investigators re-created Galea’s 2009 calendar. They began to put together the picture of a year in which the doctor crisscrossed the country with his illicit medical kit, traveling to Washington, DC; Orlandol; Tampa; Boston; San Francisco; San Diego; Cleveland; and New York City, according to federal records.
As the feds put together the case, Alex Rodriguez was enjoying a resurgent 2009. His season had started out rocky, to say the least. He had been hit by Selena Roberts’s twin punches of the exposé concerning the failed 2003 test and an unauthorized biography that accused Rodriguez of doping in high school; gotten his broke cousin banned from MLB; and lost nearly the first quarter of the regular season to knee trouble.
But there’s no salve like winning. Upon his return from injury in the second week of May, Rodriguez had no trouble finding his explosive power swing. During a homestand from May 16 to May 23, Rodriguez clobbered six home runs in eight games, including four games in a row. Two days after that stretch ended, he went 5-for-5 with four RBIs in an away game against the Texas Rangers. On the final game of the season, Rodriguez hit two home runs and racked up seven RBIs, landing him at exactly thirty home runs and one hundred RBIs despite playing only 124 games. It was a record twelfth straight time he hit both plateaus.
And for once, the thirty-four-year-old Rodriguez’s bat didn’t fail him in the postseason. His two home runs and six RBIs powered his team to a three-game sweep of the Minnesota Twins in the division series, where the Yankees had made three consecutive quick exits in postseasons previous. He homered in three straight games in a championship series victory against the Los Angeles Angels, including an eleventh-inning shot that saved Game Two for the Yankees. And he knocked in six runs in six games as the Yankees defeated the Phillies in the World Series, bringing a banner to the Bronx for the first time since 2000 and giving Rodriguez the first—and, thus far, only—championship ring of his career. With a .365 average, Rodriguez was given the Babe Ruth Award as the best postseason player.
The year that began with him crying in front of Peter Gammons ended with Rodriguez on a parade float in Manhattan’s Financial District. “I wish we could come out and play again tomorrow for no reason,” Rodriguez said of his teammates after that title win. “That’s how much we love each other.”
But it wouldn’t be A-Rod and the Yanks if the romance didn’t quickly get ugly.
On October 15, during the series against the Angels, Canadian cops had raided Galea’s Institute of Sports Medicine. They had seized, along with a cache of Actovegin, an “NFL file folder” and a “professional players’ journal.”
The public was slowly learning details of the elite athletes caught up in the investigation. As the feds had in the BALCO case, investigators were piecing together the scope of Galea’s treatments through interviews with his athlete clients. The information that those athletes divulged was protected through the federal sealing of records. The only danger they faced of prosecution and being exposed was if they lied.
Investigators gradually put together his American client list, and Galea ul
timately admitted to treating approximately fifteen pro athletes in the country. The names of some of the athletes were mentioned in court or through law-enforcement leaks, including NFL players Jamal Lewis and Takeo Spikes, Jose Reyes and his then–Mets teammate Carlos Beltran, and Tiger Woods.
In December 2009, the Yankees front office was concerned by Galea’s association with Mark Lindsay, who the team knew had treated Rodriguez. The team asked Rodriguez’s reps if he had also been treated by Galea.
According to the team, despite the fact that he had been treated by Galea, their newly heroic third baseman said he had not.
Three months later—just as 2010 spring training rolled around for the defending World Champs, jostling A-Rod’s annual controversy egg timer—the team learned that was not true. Rodriguez told reporters that federal investigators were to interview him about Galea. This time, the Yankees weren’t going to blindly defend Rodriguez. “The Yankees never authorized Dr. Tony Galea to treat Alex Rodriguez, nor do we have any knowledge of any such treatment,” the team said in a statement.
Like Galea’s other American patients, Rodriguez was interviewed as part of the grand jury inquiry into the doctor. The interview took place in Tampa in the last days of 2010 spring training. That testimony, along with other records in the case divulging the details of Galea’s treatments, has been sealed.
Galea was indicted in Buffalo federal court in May 2010 on charges of smuggling misbranded and unapproved drugs into the United States, conspiracy, fraud, and making false statements to officers of the Department of Homeland Security.
Without naming the athletes, the indictment recounted his treatment of two active NFL players. One said that Galea treated him once a week or more during the football season, injecting his knees, administering IV drips, and giving the player B12 shots to the arm. The other, who paid Galea around $50,000 over the span of two years, copped to “various treatments” but denied “that he knowingly received HGH and states that he carefully avoided using banned substances.” The indictment also detailed Galea’s regular delivery of $1,200 “kits” of HGH to a retired NFL player.
