Inside the Helmet: Hard Knocks, Pulling Together, and Triumph as a Sunday Afternoon Warrior

by Michael Strahan

  I don’t know how these huge celebrities deal with it every hour of their lives. I don’t know if it’s ever worth it to become THAT famous so they’re following your kids. Man, that’s got to be rough.

  During the height of the mudslinging of my divorce, I was jogging to the gym in the city with my buddy. All of a sudden this guy steps from behind a van and snaps pictures. Then I see more cameras, and more and more and more. They’re snapping pictures through the windows, behind cars and even running out in front of us.

  Then they waited outside the gym and started snapping photos through the window while yelling at me about my split-up. One person paid for a day membership to come in and talk about the divorce while I was in the middle of a set. He acted like he was there to work out, but he was really snooping.

  The one good thing about that day? When you have all these cameras taking pictures, it gives you an adrenaline boost. We picked up the pace faster than normal. Shoot, I’m not going to look slow for the cameras. I’ll give one guy credit; while we were running at a really good clip, one photographer was ahead of us running backward with all that equipment and snapping pictures the whole way, and not for a short distance. I don’t know who you are, sir, but you deserve those pictures. Your endurance is phenomenal.

  Now that the paparazzi have entered the picture (pardon the pun), I’ve got to be more careful. I can’t let them take photos of me squeezing a man’s jaw shut at a restaurant, now can I?

  In the grand scheme of it all, I still feel blessed. If I had to do it all over again, I’d sacrifice my privacy for the love and admiration. While it may annoy me sometimes, I’d gladly take a thousand fans barging in on my dinner and a million autograph seekers if it meant just one year in the NFL. I’m sure ten years down the road, I’ll wish I could spill my blood all over again, just to hear those fans scream my name in unison one more time.

  And while it takes a boatload of money and medicine to keep me afloat, there’s one dangerous line I’ll never cross.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Steroids and Other Cheaters’ Delights

  Four games and a lifetime of damage!

  This is the price Chargers pass-rushing linebacker Shawne Merriman paid when he was suspended by the NFL for four weeks after testing positive for a steroid known as nandrolone.

  It’s a shame because I really like him. He busts his butt on the field and of all the pass rushers currently playing, that’s the one guy I’d bet has a legitimate shot at one day breaking my single-season sack record. I’m confident he’ll break it, set a new record, and perhaps then break that one as well. I have no questions about him as an individual, but from now on, since he tested positive for steroids, the rest of the league—and I—will question him as a player.

  In the eyes of the players, the worst crime you could possibly commit in today’s NFL is to get busted for steroids. That makes you a cheater and there’s nothing worse than a cheater. I say if you cheat, you should have your butt kicked out of our league. If you need to cheat, obviously this isn’t the right profession for you. Maybe you should go be a nightclub bouncer. If you cannot play this sport without having to cheat, I don’t want you on my team and I don’t want you in our league.

  We as players are that adamant about the issue. We’d rather you get busted with ten bags of coke and a joint hanging from your lips than get busted for ’roids. You know what our logic is? With street drugs, you’re cheating yourself. With ’roids, you’re cheating yourself and you’re cheating the rest of us.

  Merriman finished 2006 leading the league with seventeen sacks, but we all looked at it as if Jason Taylor really led the league. Every year Merriman leads the league in sacks, we’ll look at his accomplishments with a mental asterisk. I’m not the only one thinking this; it’s the general thought among players inside the league. Other stars like Jason Taylor and Champ Bailey have talked out about it. Guys speak out because we feel gypped.

  From this point on, guys will always look at a player like Shawn as if he has just found another way around the drug tests, to keep himself bigger and stronger than the rest of us. Even if he is clean, we may never believe it. Once you get tagged with steroids, I don’t know how you can do enough to repair the damage to your reputation.

  Players aren’t very forgiving. Here’s why: If one guy juices, then how do we all keep up? Does that mean in order to keep pace with the Joneses, we’ve got to juice, too? The guys blocking Merriman suddenly feel like they need artificial help to protect their jobs. Where does that leave us—Merriman’s fellow defensive ends and pass rushers? Do we need to juice up to keep up not only with Merriman but with all the other blockers who want to keep up as well? This vicious cycle is exactly why the NFL cracks down harder on steroid cheaters than they do on cokeheads.

  One of the biggest misconceptions about the NFL is that steroids are commonplace in every locker room. Nothing could be further from the truth. I can honestly say that in my fourteen years in the NFL, I have never seen a guy do steroids or even have a guy admit to me that he juices. Not a single one! I know sportswriters who love to glorify that we’re all a bunch of juiceheads, but I’ve honestly never seen it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a vial of the stuff in my life.

  The NFL averages merely two to three failed pee tests a year for steroids, and that doesn’t include the guys that test positive for the weight-loss crap. It’s not because we all know how to beat the system; it really is not as prevalent as fans think it is. The hardcore stuff that guys took in the 1970s and 1980s and early part of the 1990s has run its course. The level of steroids in our locker rooms has decreased over the years.

  Of all the guys I’ve ever played with, I was sure about one guy because he got busted for distributing the stuff. That was my rookie year and he was a former high-round pick and honestly, he had the worst body on the team. His body was so bad that every time he walked around with his shirt off, our former running back Dave Meggett would let out, “Ewwwww.”

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so naive to believe that our locker rooms are completely clean. Steroid use is not done publicly and isn’t discussed. We have our own suspicions about guys, but in all honesty, I don’t think there’s much of a problem inside our locker rooms anymore. You don’t need to do it anymore because of how sophisticated the supplements have become. Steroid use is nowhere near where it was when I came into the league. You’d see guys coming out of the draft and they already looked like grown-ass, chemically enhanced men. Today many more guys come in with baby fat and bodies that don’t suggest anything illegal. We’ve replaced steroid bodies with creatine bodies. Tons of guys are on creatine and other supplements.

  Early in my career you could tell who was using stuff, but as the supplements business grew, more sophisticated guys stopped using illegal stuff. Why in the heck would you risk your reputation and four games of salary when you can achieve nearly the same results with an aggressive supplements program? Think about it: Is it worth a four-game suspension’s worth of pay and a permanent asterisk on your name in exchange for a few percentage points more of muscle mass than what supplements can provide you?

  The risk isn’t worth it anymore because there are now risk-free rewards. They’re risk-free as long as you use the supplements authorized by the NFL. But even with safe stuff we still run into problems with the “supps.”

  One of the biggest problems we face as players is that as responsible as we are for what goes into our bodies, we’re getting absolutely zero help from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Why would the government refuse to regulate what companies put into their supplements? It’s big business, but also a dangerous business. There’s nothing to stop a company from putting steroids into their products and have some guys in our league test positive as a result.

  One of my former Giants teammates, running back Mike Cloud, fell victim to this problem. He drank a basic chocolate protein shake that you’d find at any nutrition or vitamin store. It was the same protein shake many hi
gh school kids love to drink as they build their bodies through their formative years. (As a parent, you should be petrified about what is really going into your sons’ and daughters’ bodies.)

  Much to his shock, Mike tested positive for nandrolone, the same stuff as Shawne Merriman. He brought the powder to the NFL to have them test it to see if, in fact, it was tainted. Sure enough, that chocolate powder came back with a positive test for nandrolone, and even with this evidence, the NFL still suspended him. Zero tolerance policy!

  The NFL tells us at the start of the league year that each player is responsible for what goes into his body. We are provided with a list of league-cleared supplement products. If we choose to go outside the supplements that are okayed by the NFL, then we’re basically left to hope and pray that nobody in the supplement’s lab tainted the product. Not only was Cloud still suspended the four weeks, it happened when he was a free agent so he had to inform every single team interested in him that he was hit with a four-game steroid suspension. It absolutely destroyed the marketability he may have had.

  Merriman claimed he was a victim of the same thing but couldn’t prove it the way Cloud could. But if he is innocent and got implicated by a tainted bottle, it’s a shame, because nobody believed him.

  The other problem? Out of one hundred bottles of a certain supplements product, ninety could be completely clean but ten are dirty and would provide a dirty test. We have the responsibility of bringing a supplement to the team to have it tested by the league to make sure it’s clean before we use it. The problem here is that one of the bottles we bring in could be fine but then the fifth bottle be tainted. Sorry, Player X, four game checks and a tainted rep for you!

  Your only hope is to have that bottle tested by the NFL and hope they show leniency with their zero tolerance policy. At the same time you have to hope the test that came back dirty wasn’t taken when you were at the end of the bottle. If you threw it out and no longer have even a semblance of proof that you were bamboozled, it’s four game checks and a bad rep for the rest of your career.

  The NFL does not joke around when it comes to this testing. They can’t, because every single guy who tests positive has an excuse. Nobody in the NFL ever said, “Damn, you caught me. I thought I was going to get away with it.”

  One guy claimed his pee test was tainted and demanded that the NFL pay for a DNA test to clear his name. After much squabbling, they conducted the DNA test. Not only was the sample his, it was dirty with ’roids! Everyone has an excuse.

  That’s why the league makes the testing process as thorough and utterly degrading as possible. The process, first off, is completely random and a total surprise when you come to work. We’ll have two “pee men,” as we affectionately call them, waiting for us by the door as we arrive at work. There is no heads-up, no warning. All you get is, “You’re up today.”

  You must pee before practice. You can’t go out to the field unless you’ve taken the test, so most guys go to meetings and drink tons of water so they can pee enough for the pee men. When you’re ready, you have to go to another locker room. For us it’s the locker room that the referee and officials use on Sundays.

  When we get in there, we’ve got to take our shirts off and drop our pants down to our ankles. We get a complete strip search because of Onterrio Smith, that dumb ass running back for the Vikings, who was busted with an artificial penis known as the Whizzinator. It’s a fake ding-dong with a freeze-dried sample. Just add water and, presto, you have a clean test.

  So thanks to Mr. Dumb Ass Whizzinator, we’re given the Rahway Prison treatment. Not only do you strip, but the pee man or both of them have to watch you pee to make sure it’s really your schlong. Gee, thanks so much, Onterrio.

  After that, we pour the sample into two compartments in a cup and seal it with a sticker with a serial number on it. But you also have to have some left over for the pee man to test on the spot with a little stick. I think he’s checking to make sure it’s actually a man’s urine. In the past, one guy supposedly tested positive for being a female and another guy’s piss turned out to be a sports drink.

  If Capitol Hill knew how deep the NFL got with their testing on steroids, we’d never get lumped in with baseball in those steroid hearings. Baseball looked like it was trying to hide their problem. The NFL chose to weed out their problem and give guys an alternative. The NFL wants to bust guys. They were trying to lower the boom and this year the NFL will go even further by using a more advanced test and administering more random tests. So for the guys who are hiding it, they’ll start catching even more cheaters.

  Even with this testing, I think the only ones getting past it are the ones who have incredibly advanced knowledge of how to cheat. There are masking agents but some of those get tested as well. Even if a guy’s pee is too diluted by water, they start to get leery of you.

  We’ll never catch everyone. Some jerks will always find a way to cheat. The steroid makers are three years ahead of the steroid chasers. There are makeshift laboratories throughout the country where they make new steroids that cannot be detected.

  The only way to test for any given steroid is to have the drug in the first place. If the authorities don’t know a new steroid is being produced and don’t have its exact chemical makeup, they can’t find an accurate way to test for it. There will always be new things that allow guys to cheat. It’s an epidemic in America.

  The only thing that could stop it is for us to start self-policing. There’s too much money to be made today for guys ever to do that. People outside of football would probably do much dumber things than steroids if someone promised them a $20 million windfall. Much, much worse things.

  I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to catch HGH, or human growth hormone. There is a test that exists but it has very low accuracy. Plus, it comes from a blood test and the lab is in Europe. You can’t suspend a guy for HGH based on a blood test sent across the Atlantic.

  HGH is all the rage—not just in the NFL but across America. You can kind of tell some guys who are overdoing HGH because they may go home for an off-season and come back huge…all over. Not only have they leaned up while their muscle mass has exploded, but their skulls have clearly grown as well. I was told about one star who came back one off-season and his helmet size increased by three sizes!

  The problem here is that when guys get that big that quickly, they often start pulling or popping muscles. Maybe you can get that big for the beach but not for suddenly racing your body down the field play after play after play.

  I’ve also heard that some doctors will go to a team hotel on the road at times, go from room to room and shoot players. I’m not one of those players so I cannot say who or how or how often or how many guys. I don’t even know if there are guys on my team who do this. I did, however, hear about the practice.

  There is another guy who was brought into the team hotel to shoot injured guys with some miraculous mineral compound. I have no idea what it was but I know that guys like this are, at times, set up through a player’s agent or directly by the player.

  I love that the NFL goes after the cheaters as hard as they do. Even if the guy is playing right next to me, if he’s cheating, he should be weeded out. It is a little crazy that steroids piss me off more than when guys do other stupid stuff off the field. A guy associated with a heinous crime won’t be ostracized as badly as a ’roider!

  Marijuana is probably the choice drug of most players. We get tested once for marijuana and when we’re clean, we don’t get tested again for a year, so guys smoke to their heart’s delight. As long as he doesn’t get caught, we really don’t care if a guy is smoking, just as we don’t care about his drinking a few beers. I have personally never even tried a joint in my life, wouldn’t even know how to smoke the thing.

  I’ve played with guys who smoked weed on a very regular basis. Some every single day. We all know the weedheads, but we can care less about it. Juice? That, we care about. The big difference between the two—weed guys
don’t bother hiding from anyone other than the league. Juice, they try to hide from the league as well as their teammates.

  If there’s a way to cheat, some guys will simply find the path. They’ll push anywhere they can to get an edge over the rest of us. But the one thing we’re cool with, the only way for any of these guys to really clear their names is to admit it. Just come clean and own up to it; deal with the immediate consequences and move on.

  When the New York Yankees slugger Jason Giambi in effect admitted steroid use, he went into a slump and got absolutely destroyed for a while. But he admitted his wrongdoing, fought his way out of the slump and eventually all was forgiven. He owned up to doing something stupid, plain and simple. Barry Bonds should have taken the approach of Giambi, because people want to forgive you if you are truthful about it. When a guy lies and won’t admit it, you got a problem. Think about it: When somebody has a drug problem, you want to help them. You root for a man to recover. But for those who refuse to admit a problem and just ruin themselves, you shake your head and move on.

  We as players want to help guys if they want help. If they don’t bother, then we have enough other people who want our help and we move on.

  But I honestly do not know who needs to step forward. Can we guess sometimes? Sure, and nowadays a locker room is so open, guys will blurt out, “You’re on that stuff, huh?” Or “When you start hitting the needle, bro?” Still, nobody ever admits it outright and I think with the science of all the specialists and supplements, many of the guys we suspect aren’t even on it.

  Whenever a guy shows up much bigger after an off-season of working out, we half jokingly accuse him of hitting the needle. One year Tiki came back from an off-season of working out with Ronde and some people started privately questioning if he was hitting the needle. Did I think he was? Hell, no, he’s too clean for that. Ronde got huge, too, but go watch those two work out at their gym in Jersey and it immediately becomes clear why they grew so much.