By PETE IACOBELLI / Associated Press
Posted Aug 27, 2005 at 4:01 AM
Long before Jose Canseco’s tell-all book or the televised congressional hearings, the spotlight on steroid abuse in sports centered on South Carolina’s football team and the frightening tale of former defensive lineman Tommy Chaikin.
In 1988, when few people could pronounce “stanozolol” let alone understand its effects, Chaikin wrote in “Sports Illustrated” of routine and rampant steroid use, unexpected rage and his near-suicide the night before the Clemson game.
Chaikin co-wrote the piece, “The Nightmare of Steroids,” with Rick Telander and claimed South Carolina coaches encouraged steroid use to improve performance. Chaikin, with the Gamecocks from 1983 to 1987, said about half the 1986 club used steroids.
“I don’t judge. I’m not an expert,” Chaikin told The Associated Press by phone Wednesday from his Maryland home.
“I used them. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have done them.”
Time also has mellowed Chaikin’s views about telling his story to the nation. “I did it,” he said. “But I was young and didn’t understand the ramifications of opening my mouth to the press.”
Ex-sports information director Kerry Tharp recalled receiving an advance copy of the story and heading to the office of the late coach Joe Morrison.
“Coach, you need to read this,” Tharp told Morrison.
“He looked at the first couple of pages, but I really can’t say what he said” because of Morrison’s stark, angry language, Tharp remembered.
Steroids have become the “oh no” buzzword of American sports. Any change in an athlete’s appearance or performance leads to whispers that he’s “on the juice.” Baseball fans of all ages tuned in to watch Canseco, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa testify as a congressional panel tried to get to the bottom of steroid use in baseball.
A scandal such as Chaikin alleged likely would send a college program into a tailspin today, but 20 years ago, few outside the locker room or the gym knew what steroids could do or the toll they could take.
“It was common knowledge that we were using the stuff. I had bottles of juice all over the place. ... Coaches would walk in and see the stuff, but nobody gave a damn,” Chaikin wrote.
The problems Chaikin had were evident in his article’s first few lines. He describes sitting in The Roost, South Carolina’s athletic dorm at the time, the day before playing Clemson in 1987 with the barrel of a .357-caliber Magnum “pressed under my chin.”
“A .357 is a man’s gun, and I knew what it would do to me,” the story said. “My finger twitched on the trigger.”
Chaikin wrote that he eventually let his father come in to his room and the two flew to a hospital in Washington, D.C., missing the Clemson game. He had rarely surfaced publicly since then.
“Once in a while people try and track me down,” Chaikin says now. “I guess I’ve been reluctant to talk about it.”
As for nearly killing himself in a dorm room, “I was pretty beat up. But that’s a big step to take,” he says. “I don’t know how close I was to that.”
However, Chaikin’s accusations appeared to negatively affect the Gamecocks.
The 1988 team opened 6-0 but lost four of their final six games -- most of those defeats coming after Chaikin’s charges.
South Carolina assistants Jim Washburn, Keith Kephart and Tom Kurucz pleaded guilty in federal court to misdemeanors involving steroids.
Leaders in the athletic department had to deal with increased athlete drug testing and harsher outside scrutiny.
“It was a scary time,” said Sparky Woods, who took over as South Carolina’s head coach after Morrison’s death in 1989.
Washburn, sentenced to three months in a halfway house in 1989, had little interest in reliving his South Carolina days. “That’s about the last thing I want to talk about,” said Washburn, an assistant with the NFL’s Tennessee Titans.
Todd Ellis, then the team’s star quarterback and now its radio announcer, said Chaikin’s story affected players who wondered how someone who shared their world would turn on them.
“No question there was betrayal, hurt and surprise,” said Ellis, an attorney. “If he had problems, he should’ve come to the team and talked instead of bringing in third parties. I’m not sure what the gain was for Tommy Chaikin. ... Nobody understood.”
In fact, Chaikin’s story said Ellis asked to get steroids. Ellis denied it then and now. “The alleged stories were blown well out of proportion from what I know,” he said.
Tharp recalled Chaikin as “kind of quiet, someone who flew under the radar.”
“Looking back on it, though, you could see where people are probably thinking these guys did have some big weight gains,” Tharp said.
For a while after Chaikin’s article, players forged an “us against them” bond to deal with the daily headlines and TV cameras. “It could be pretty brutal,” Ellis said. “We were very passionate. We had to circle up and come together.”
Tharp said the negative publicity was overwhelming. “It was a very disappointing time,” he said. “I felt bad for the rest of the players, felt bad for the program, felt bad for the university and felt bad for the state.”
The school escaped serious NCAA sanctions despite the steroid problems and the federal court cases, but it took time to wash away the stain of Chaikin’s words.
Other recruiters would paint the Gamecocks as a drug-using school that broke rules. And the new staff had to deal with the lax attitudes about drinking and drug use by players they didn’t recruit. “They kind of brought me in to clean up Tombstone,” Woods said. “I did what they mandated me to do.”
Still, given the serious allegations, other issues soon swept past steroid worries for South Carolina.
Morrison died unexpectedly in the winter of 1989. The biggest issues of the next two seasons were the school turning down bowl bids because of conflicts with final exams, something Woods regrets to this day.
By the time South Carolina was accepted in the Southeastern Conference for the 1992 season, Chaikin’s story was a little-discussed matter among fans, players and the team.
The reason, Ellis said, could be the public’s knowledge about steroids wasn’t close to what’s out there now. “It’s like the difference between a smoker in the 1960s and the knowledge there is now,” he said.
South Carolina’s athletic department tightened up its drug testing policies and became a model for other schools. “It allowed us to create a very strong wellness program,” Tharp said.
Woods is proud of where South Carolina has gone in the two decades since. “The environment changed a lot,” he said. “Really happy a lot of that happened when we were there.”
Chaikin, now 40, says he’s physically fine. He went to graduate school for a time, eventually settling into the family business. He’s been married 10 years and has two sons, ages 9 and 7. “My older boy’s playing football,” he says.
From time to time, Chaikin hears from old teammates or college friends, some even trying to get him to a game at Williams-Brice Stadium. “I’m not sure how people feel, and I don’t want to spend a game hearing from fans who aren’t too thrilled about what happened,” he said.
