Perhaps the first time Russ Bolinger realized he had a problem was when he sacked the hotel clerk. Bolinger and his Los Angeles Rams teammates were staying at a hotel the night before a game, and when he asked the clerk for his room key, the man went for laughs.
"Didn't you hear? You've been cut," said the clerk.He was only kidding, but Bolinger, buzzing with steroids and whatever else was in his system at the time, snapped. He leaped the hotel counter in one deft move, grabbed the man in a headlock and dropped him for a three-yard loss.
Then again, maybe the message didn't really reach Bolinger until he was laid up in the hospital with a shattered arm, and doctors were telling him they couldn't perform an emergency operation because a blood test revealed a pharmacy's worth of drugs in his system. Only a crazy doctor would sedate a man like that for surgery.
"What's going on here?" the doctors wanted to know.
That scared Bolinger. Scared him right into self doubt and introspection. How had he come to this? How had he wandered so far off the track onto this dead-end path?
Sitting in a cafe on a recent afternoon, Bolinger - tall and trim with an actor's square-jawed good looks - is clearly uncomfortable with his confession of steroid use, averting his eyes when the subject comes up. He has children, for heaven's sake. But he is compelled to tell his story of one man's journey into the world of steroids to continue the warning to the next generation.
"A lot of guys in the NFL won't talk about steroids even after they're finished playing," he says. "I'm not comfortable with it. I'm not proud of it. But someone has to talk about it. Kids need to know the truth."
Bolinger took steroids for four years, believing it was the only way he could play in the National Football League, and he was willing to do almost anything for that. In some ways, it is only in the eight years since retiring from the game that he has really come to understand himself. For years he labored as a fledgling writer in Hollywood, writing plays and screenplays that explored the limits of what a man will do to play pro football and to win. It was catharsis. Eventually, he returned to the game he had escaped, taking a job as a recruiting coordinator at the University of Utah.
"I told (head coach) Ron McBride I was going to talk about steroids when the opportunities presented themselves, and he said OK," says Bolinger.
Ironically, it was McBride who unwittingly played a part in Bolinger's decision to begin taking steroids. McBride was the offensive line coach at Long Beach State, and one of his players was Bolinger, a 200-pound reserve tight end. McBride told Bollinger if he gained 15 or 20 pounds, he could start at tackle. Bollinger gained the weight with steroids.
"Back then you could just walk into the campus infirmary and tell them you wanted to gain weight, and they'd give the steroids to you," he says. "No one knew anything about them."
Bolinger stayed on the steroids for a year, and then stopped taking them. He was drafted in the third round of the 1976 NFL draft by the Detroit Lions and became a starter in his rookie season. Seven years later he was traded to the Los Angeles Rams, who told him he needed to weigh close to 300 pounds. There was no way Bolinger, who is not a large-boned man, could hold such weight without help. He went back on steroids for three years, pushing his weight to 270 pounds.
"Everyone was doing it," says Bolinger. "Old guys were doing it because the new guys were doing it and they had to keep up with them."
The strength and weight gains were remarkable and immediate. Recovery time after hard workouts and games was cut in half. But there were side effects, which have come to be documented in recent years. Giant mood swings. The resulting strained relationships with loved ones. A susceptibility to tight muscles and muscle injuries. The use of other drugs.
Steroids produced a domino effect. With the steroids coursing through his veins, Bolinger had trouble sleeping, so he took sleeping pills at night, and in the morning he took amphetamines to get going again. Later in the day he turned to alcohol to relax from all the other drugs, and at bed time he was swallowing sleeping pills again.
It was a vicious circle. Bolinger had five major injuries. He blames four of them on steroids. He took pain killers, muscle relaxant and anti-inflammatories - more drugs - to treat the injuries, but also continued to take steroids - which helped cause the injuries - to maintain his strength and weight.
"Anyone who abuses steroids abuses everything, whether it's other drugs or alcohol," says Bolinger. "My drug of choice was alcohol."
Bolinger remembers sitting in the Rams' locker room one day when a teammate pointed to another teammate.
"That guy's a problem on the team," he said. "He has a drug problem."
"What do you mean?" asked Bolinger.
"He snorts cocaine."
"Well, we have a drug problem, too. We take steroids."
"That's different. It's not a problem. We take them for our careers. He's taking them for fun."
"No, it's the same thing. We have just as much of a problem as he has. The difference is, society will turn its head for one and not for the other. Both are drugs. Both are abused. Both are bad for you."
Every off season, Bolinger tried to get off steroids and its host of companion drugs, but never successfully. The irony is that in the end, the same steroids he took to sustain his playing career also shortened it, or so he believes. "I did it to compete," he says. "Then I abused it. Then it cut my career short."
Hobbled by two torn hamstrings, Bolinger took pain pills and amphetamines to enable him to play a game early in the 1985 season, but he nearly passed out in the locker room. Dazed and confused, Bolinger thought he had forgotten to take his pills when in reality he had taken too many of them. He swallowed more pills, and when he took the field he couldn't feel his feet or arms.
On the opening kickoff, Bolinger took a crushing blow from an opposing player. "When I went to protect myself, I couldn't react fast enough," recalls Bolinger. "I got an arm halfway up, but my palm was limp. I was so groggy on the field that I was not coordinated. If I had been more alert, I wouldn't have broken my arm."
Bolinger's forearm was broken in several places, and one of the bones was poking through tape he had wrapped around the arm. Incredibly, he played another play. "That was my mentality then," he says. "That's called being tough." When he discovered that he couldn't use the arm, Bolinger went to the sideline and asked trainers to tape up the arm so he could continue to play. They took one look at the protruding bone and said no way.
The injury required immediate surgery, but the doctors were in a quandry. "We can't put you under because you've got too many drugs in your system," they told him. "You could die on the table." They had to wait eight hours before they could do the surgery.
Says Bolinger, "That scared me. I thought, `It's over.' I'd been leading a double life for so long. It was a question of morals. I had great parents, who gave me my morals. The first person I thought of was my mom, who had died recently. I thought, she didn't raise me to be this. It was a terrible feeling. I knew I had a problem. I had built this monster, and now it was time to come home. I had a Fu Manchu and a short temper, and all I wanted was to kick ass on the football field and get a Super Bowl ring. It was time to come home."
In the hospital he had been given one injection of steroids by a team doctor to help wean him off the drugs, but, "after that I went cold turkey," says Bolinger. "I went through the itching and the sweating . . . it was like coming off any type of drug, I imagine. I was sluggish for a month. I was like a whipped dog. It kicks your butt in the end."
Lured by the possibility of a championship, Bolinger returned to the Rams late in the season. By then, his weight was down and he was a milder man than the one who had entered the hospital two months earlier. "People would say, `You're not the same guy,' " recalls Bolinger. "My heart was not in it. When I went back to Detroit, no one even knew me."
After the Rams missed a trip to the Super Bowl by one game, Bollinger considered returning for another season. But by the time his arm was healed enough, training camp was just one month away. To get in shape and regain the weight in time for camp, he would need to resort to steroids, and he was no longer willing to do that. Bolinger retired.
When he retired from football, Bolinger took acting classes and continued to take parts in movies, TV shows and plays. One class required him to write scenes for a play. Bolinger, teaming with another ex-football player, John Schalter, wrote scenes that explored life as a football player. The teacher was impressed and suggested they write a full play. They did, and eventually Bolinger and Schalter were paid to produce the play, which they called Game Face. Two years later Game Face debuted in L.A. and made a 13-week run. It won good reviews, and eventually the writers were paid to turn it into a screenplay.
"The crux of the play was what is the limit a guy will do to win and what is the psychological makeup of a football player," says Bolinger.
A couple of studios have looked at the screenplay, but so far the film remains unmade.
After five years of writing and no football, Bolinger ran out of money and took a position on McBride's staff at Utah. His screenplays continue to be shopped to the studios, but, in the meantime, he is recruiting players for the Utes and raising his three children in Utah.
At 37, Bolinger is reconciled to the mistakes of his past, both mentally and physically. For a year after his retirement from football he was sick with complications from the years of steroid and alcohol abuse. His kidneys were bad (the result of alcohol), his cholesterol count was off the charts (the result of steroids) and he was diagnosed with the Epstein Barr virus. A doctor urged Bolinger to change his lifestyle. With the same obsessiveness and dedication that made him a pro football player and led to his excesses, he did just that. He ran and dieted to shed 40 pounds of excess football weight. He quit drinking completely and became a strict vegetarian. Today he munches on onions and garlic like dessert.
"I feel great," he says. "Clean and sober is much better. I enjoy my family. My relationships are much improved. I don't get upset. I'm pretty low key."
There is a picture of the old Bolinger - the one with the Fu Manchu and the attitude - in a Lions uniform in McBride's office, but Bolinger doesn't even know that man anymore.
"I was wrong," he says. "Winning isn't as important as people. It wasn't worth it when I look back. What was worth something was the people, the relationships."
*****
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Steroids:
Advantages Side effects
Promotes tissue growth tendons can grow weaker and be more
prone to injury
increased muscle mass arrested growth in adolescents
improved strength risk of hypertension due to fluid
retention
increased weight due to greater addiction
fluid retention
increased recovery from muscle dramatic mood swings
fatigue
increased irritability
increased hostility
increased aggressiveness
high blood pressure
cardiovascular disease
liver disorders
reproductive disorders