Tony Mandarich Is Very, Very Sorry
Tony Mandarich and I are in a crowded weight room in Scottsdale, Ariz., barbells clanging, people grunting, mirrors reflecting. You'll excuse me if I feel severe déjà vu. Two decades ago, in the spring of 1989, we were in a gym like this one—same sounds, same vibes—doing essentially the same thing: He was lifting, I was watching and writing and occasionally doing a little lifting of my own.
That first time was at the Powerhouse Gym in East Lansing, near the Michigan State campus. Mandarich was a ripped 6'6", 315-pound senior All-America offensive tackle, the only college player ever to be named to John Madden's All-Madden team.
I was benching a gentleman's 175; he was benching 540. He would soon be the second pick of the 1989 NFL draft, taken by the Green Bay Packers just after the Dallas Cowboys chose Troy Aikman, but before Barry Sanders went to the Detroit Lions, Derrick Thomas to the Kansas City Chiefs and Deion Sanders to the Atlanta Falcons. Those four are, or will be, in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Mandarich is attempting to emerge from the hall of shame.
"Why can't Ido what Arnold did?" he asked me back in the day, do-rag on his head, Appetite for Destruction by Guns n' Roses blasting from his car speakers. "Bodybuilding. Movies. All of it. I want to be Cyborg III."
Now, having agreed to meet me again, two decades later, he says quietly, "Unbelievable the way time has gone by." He pauses. "I'm sorry, Rick. The phrase I was wrong was not in my vocabulary back then. But I was wrong. I conned you. I lied to you about not using steroids. I was a jackass. I don't want to be like that anymore."
What had come out of our session in 1989 was my April 24 cover story for Sports Illustrated entitled The Incredible Bulk, with SI's editors declaring Mandarich the best offensive line prospect ever. In Gregory Heisler's cover shot, Mandarich posed bare-chested against the setting sun, a sun that was, in retrospect, going down symbolically on an age of innocence.
Mandarich, a chemical monster with 22-inch biceps, was not only taking steroids but also injecting other workout freaks around the gym, who called him the Doctor. He lifted weights almost nonstop, recovering swiftly from workouts because of the juice, and he developed ingenious if not comical ways to beat the amateurish college drug tests he was obliged to take.
Mandarich's NFL career would be a dud; he played three seasons for the Packers and, after a four-year layoff, three seasons with the Indianapolis Colts, starting a total of 63 games. Along the way he did two things: He quit using steroids because he feared getting caught by the NFL's testing, and he flowered into an alcoholic and a painkiller junkie. The renunciation of steroids cost him his beef. The addictions cost him his dignity.
Now clean, sober and juiceless, he tells the whole story in a new book, My Dirty Little Secrets—Steroids, Alcohol & God: The Tony Mandarich Story, to be released this month by Modern History Press. "At the age of 42 I have developed a conscience," he writes.
That's nice. But he lied to me. Lied to everybody. He gamed the system to his advantage. I knew he was using steroids (he now admits he also used human growth hormone), but all I could do was hint at my suspicions. I used the word drugs in the first sentence of that story, even if only referring to the large quantities of caffeine Mandarich downed before lifting. I called him "the man from tomorrow" and an "offensive-tackle creature."
He had never flunked a drug test, I heard over and over. He was defended by his parents; his older brother, John, now deceased but then a nose tackle for the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League; the Michigan State head coach, George Perles; the Spartans' strength coach, Dave Henry; several teammates; and by his agent, Vern Sharbaugh.
"I got the steroids just by word of mouth," Mandarich says. "Put the word out in a gym, and it's like talking to a concierge, somebody will say, 'Here you go.' It was that easy."
As Mandarich prepared for the draft, his lifting partner was fellow Michigan State student Rob (Buck) Smith, a fired-up, 5'4" ball of muscles. Now it's Wendy Keimer, a bodybuilder with long blonde hair, a dark tan and triceps to die for. Today they are working on arms, and as Keimer yells at Mandarich to keep pumping, he sighs, "I'm too old for this."
But he isn't. As he'll admit after doing close-grip rack benches with 315 pounds, "I feel comfortable in the gym environment." And why not? Even now, when Mandarich can't come close to his career-best 585-pound bench press, the comfort of lifting remains.
Mandarich didn't start on his junior varsity team in Oakville, Ont., even though he was 6'3"and 220 pounds. Once when he was 13, his mother, Donna, a tall, stout woman, body-slammed him for insubordination. "I don't know if she or Reggie Whiteman handled me worse," Mandarich says with a chuckle. It was his beloved brother who got him on steroids after Tony moved in with him for a year while John was a senior at Kent (Ohio) State and Tony was a high school senior.
By 22 Tony ran like a deer, blocked like a truck and preened like a rooster. "I had tunnel vision," he says. "I wanted to be a new kind of offensive lineman, go first in the draft, make millions. Your SI story did it. I saw 50 copies displayed across the top shelf at the airport—me and my steroid-fueled muscles. That fed my arrogance. I thought, You're doing things right!"
Right before the '89 draft, Mandarich moved to Southern California to train. When he complained one day about how sore he was, a trainer, whom Mandarich refused to identify, said he had something to help. "Roll up your sleeve," Mandarich recalls him saying. "I thought, No big deal. A shot on your upper arm. But he grabbed my wrist. I said, 'What are you doing?' He was going to shoot this stuff into my vein, like a drug addict. He said, 'Trust me.'"
That first shot was the prescription narcotic Stadol. In 15 seconds Mandarich was flooded with pleasure and peace. "That first one is the best one," he says."That's the one you chase."
And chase it he did, downing pain pills like candy during his years in Green Bay, conning at least 10 doctors in four states into writing him prescriptions for painkillers, even hiding syringes in his jockstrap and taking bathroom breaks during practice to shoot up. There is a lump in the crook of his left arm, a bulge in the large blue vein between biceps and forearm. "That's where I shot," he says.
His lowest point may have come when his brother was near death from cancer in the winter of 1993. Tony drove off on a 16-hour round-trip to pick up pills for himself that he'd persuaded a doctor to prescribe. When he got back, John was dead. "Painkillers were more important to me than holding my brother's hand as he died," Tony says.
The addictions ruined his first marriage and left him depressed. He was emotionally arrested, he tries to explain, and needed to grow up. Rehab and Alcoholics Anonymous finally got him straight. Fourteen years later he hopes his book will help others, even as it helps him wipe his own slate clean and show that there is hope even for "a bust, a loudmouth, a no-good liar at the very bottom, like me."
Mandarich's second wife, Charlavan, who dated him for two years at Michigan State, and with whom he shares four children (two from his first marriage, two from hers), says she has seen great change in Mandarich during their five-year marriage; he has become humble and calm and spiritual. They work extremely hard and close together at their web-design and Internet marketing business. Char almost mists up describing her husband—"a brilliant, gentle, white light, a beautiful light," she says.
But character reversal doesn't undo collateral damage. I wrote so many steroid stories in the 1980s that his fraud is like salt in a wound. Through the SI cover story Mandarich indirectly abetted the growth of the steroid culture among young athletes, and his chemically induced strength and rage helped him humiliate many clean players he competed against.
"There's damage done," agrees Jim Irsay, the Colts' owner and a big fan of the Mandarich who played fairly well for Indianapolis. "But his story is one of the great stories of redemption. There was a massive price he paid. But it shows that everyone is salvageable. For you, well, everyone should remember that when you forgive, you become free."
Fine. But I'm still angry. I'm angry at George Perles too. Were there 15 steroid users on his bowl teams at Michigan State, as Mandarich alleges in his book? "Tony was a great player, a great kid, a great leader," Perles, a member of the school's board of trustees, says when I reach him. "I wouldn't know about steroids."
In 1989 Perles claimed Mandarich was strong because he ate so much and worked so hard. The former coach likewise is clueless about the drug tests Mandarich and his mates passed with ease. "The NCAA did all the testing," Perles says."They're the ones you should talk to."
Better to hear Mandarich describe it: "[For] the Rose Bowl in 1988, we were tested two weeks before on campus, and then we heard there was going to be a second test [in Pasadena]. I'd already gotten back on Anadrol-50, a steroid which makes you significantly stronger within a day or two, and now I'm freaking. I'm in this large 24-hour store, about midnight, brainstorming, thinking how am I going to beat this test?
"In the pet area I see this rubber doggy squeaker toy. I get that, then I go to another area and get a small hose, and in the medical area I get some flesh-colored tape. I'm like the Unabomber getting supplies. Back home I rip the squeakers out of the toy, tape the hose into one end and experiment by filling the thing with water. At the Rose Bowl I taped the toy to my back, ran the hose between my butt cheeks, taped the end to my penis, and covered the hose tip with bubblegum. I had gotten some clean urine from somebody else. The tester stood behind me, couldn't see anything, and when I removed the gum everything worked fine."
At the Gator Bowl the following year Mandarich customized a squeezable glue bottle to replace the doggy toy. "A quarter twist of the cap, no leak, no moving parts—it was almost too easy," he says.
But that's all over now. At least for Mandarich. The steroid world keeps expanding, with testers lagging behind the cheats. I show him the SI article I wrote in 1988 with South Carolina football player Tommy Chaikin, in which Chaikin detailed his own steroid abuse. "I can relate to the mind racing," he says."I can relate to the anxiety attacks. I can't relate to the near-suicidal part. I was much more homicidal than suicidal." He stops. "Really, Rick, I am sorry."
I have finished with my gentleman's 175 at Mountainside Fitness, same as two decades ago, and Mandarich has finished his iron work. When we join Char and her 14-year-old daughter, Ani, at a budget Chinese restaurant, I see that this modern family works well, that Tony is a sweet, self-deprecating guy. I ask Ani what she thinks of the big galoot in the sweat-stained Michigan State T-shirt and backwards cap. She says that she'll never abuse substances after hearing her stepfather's stories. That's good. It's a start for those of us who remember.