Juiced (2 page)

I believe every steroid out there can be used safely and beneficially-it's all a question of dosage. Some steroids you cycle off and on, depending on the dose. You just have to make sure you give your liver enough time to filter them out. There are other steroids that have very low toxicity levels. Those can be taken continuously by most healthy people. It just depends.

Growth hormone? You can use that all year round. Same thing with your Equipoise, your Winstrols, your Decas-taken properly, those are fine all year round. But something like Anadrol, and some high dosages of testosterone-those have to be moderated, taken more selectively. This is all important because when ballplayers talk about steroids, they really mean a combination of steroids and growth hormone, and that requires some serious planning if you don't want to get yourself in trouble.

Believe it or not, I first found out about the benefits of growth hormone in a book. That was when I was first educating myself, years ago. There were certain bookstores that had a big selection of books on body building and related subjects, and you could go into the stores and flip through the books, or buy them and bring them home like cookbooks full of recipes to try.

Or you could just go talk to bodybuilders. They were always on the lookout for the latest information themselves, so often they would sell the books or magazines with the newest tips. It took me some time, and a lot of effort, but I educated myself. I read and I listened to bodybuilders talk about the subject. Little by little, I turned myself into an expert and that gave me a huge edge as a baseball player.

There's always that competitive angle in baseball: The pitchers trying to stay in front of the hitters, the hitters trying to stay in front of the pitchers. As hitters, we were always looking for better equipment and for any other edge we could gain. We may keep a video camera on a pitcher, trying to find out if he's tipping his pitches. The game has become so technical. You can go back during a game after every at-bat to look at what you just did. You have five computers with ten different camera angles, and you can slow it down, fast-forward it, break it down, this and that. You can use the computer to break down where your hot zone is and know exactly what you're doing wrong pitch by pitch.

You feel like a damn scientist back there: They play back every one of your at-bats, watching them in slow-mo, and from every different angle. It's just incredible. You can re-examine each at-bat to analyze every element of your performance: where your hands were, how your feet were placed, the speed of your swing. This radical new technology has taken over baseball, and all of sports. It's awesome, really-but it makes sense, given all the money at stake now. And that applies to every kind of technology, running the gamut from digital video and high powered software to steroids and growth hormone, and whatever comes next.

Remember back when Mark McGwire and I were called the "Bash Brothers" during our time together on those memorable Oakland As teams from the late 1980s to early 1990s? I didn't always like that tag, but people were right that McGwire and I spent a lot of time together. Of course, we didn't talk much.

What we did, more times than I can count, was go into a bathroom stall together to shoot up steroids.

That's right: After batting practice or right before the game, Mark and I would duck into a stall in the men's room, load up our syringes, and inject ourselves. I always injected myself, because I had practiced enough to know just what I was doing, but often I would inject Mark as well.

It helps to have a partner to do the injecting for you. It's difficult to inject yourself, especially when you're first starting out, because you have to get the needle at just the right angle to hit the glute muscle in the ideal spot. Whenever you're going to inject into muscle tissue, you have to hit your spot just right. I don't recommend injecting steroids into yourself in the early going. Get a friend, or a doctor, to do it.

Growth hormone is a little different. For best results, you want to inject growth hormone into your abdominal muscles-you just pinch a thin layer of fat and inject yourself right there. It's pretty easy, and you can get good at it quickly. Some of the players were injecting growth hormone every day, or every third day. It all depended on how big you were and what results you wanted.

As a rookie, McGwire was a skinny kid with hardly any muscles on him at all. There's no doubt that Mark was always a great hitter, even before steroids: He hit forty-nine homers in his first season, 1987, which is still the rookie record for home runs. He always had a smooth, compact, and powerful swing; he had amazing technique. But the steroids made Mark much bigger and much stronger; perhaps most important of all, I personally observed how they made him feel more confident and more comfortable with his own body. All of that definitely helped him break Roger Maris's record in 1998. I don't know of anyone in baseball who won't tell you that's true, so long as they're talking off the record and in private and don't have to worry about being quoted in a splashy headline somewhere.

Have other superstars used steroids? If you don't know the answer, you've been skimming, not reading. The challenge is not to find a top player who has used steroids. The challenge is to find a top player who hasn't. No one who reads this book from cover to cover will have any doubt that steroids are a huge part of baseball, and always will be, no matter what crazy toothless testing schemes the powers that be might dream up.

Is it cheating to do what everyone wants you to do? Are players the only ones to blame for steroids when Donald Fehr and the other bosses of the Major League Players' Association fought for years to make sure players wouldn't be tested for steroids? Is it all that secret when the owners of the game put out the word that they want home runs and excitement, making sure that everyone from trainers to managers to clubhouse attendants understands that whatever it is the players are doing to become superhuman, they sure ought to keep it up? People want to be entertained at the ballpark. They want baseball to be fun and exciting. Home runs are fun and exciting. They are easy for even the most casual fan to appreciate.

Steroid-enhanced athletes hit more home runs. So yes, I have personally reshaped the game of baseball through my example and my teaching. More than that, I am glad that soon enough the work I've done will help reshape the way millions of you out there live your lives, too. Why should only top athletes with huge salaries reap the benefits of the revolution in biotechnology that will define our times? Why shouldn't everyone get to ride the wave?

I hope this book will help you get over any biases you may have about steroids. I will do my best to help you unlock your own potential, so that even if you are not a professional athlete, you can look like one and feel like one and, in some ways at least, perform like one.

PROLOGUE: The First Time Hurts Most

I was really scared the first time I used steroids. It all started for me late in 1984 when I was twenty years old. I had vowed to my mother that I would become the best athlete on the planet, no matter what it took, and I was totally focused on making that happen. I came back to Miami after playing minor-league baseball in the Oakland A's system for the 1984 season, and I was more determined than ever to turn myself into an amazing physical specimen. Fortunately for me, I had a friend from high school (I'll call him Al) who knew a lot about steroids and had experimented with them. He had enough firsthand experience to know what the hell he was talking about.

After I finally decided it was time, I looked him up when I got back to Miami. I had asked him a few general questions before, but now it was like I was cramming for a test. I pressed him to give me as many details as possible about how steroids actually worked and what they actually did to you. I was always thinking about trying to make myself better and stronger and faster, and since I was still a runt at that stage, five foot eleven and one hundred and ninety pounds, I knew I had a lot to gain from dabbling with steroids.

The first time I injected steroids was in Al's room, over at his house. We'd been talking about steroids so much, I knew it was just a matter of time before I gave it a try, and one afternoon we went to get something to eat at this pizza joint near Coral Park High and had one more discussion about what I would need to do, and how long it would take to work, and what sort of increases I could expect in size and strength. I remember being very nervous as we went back to his house.

I was worried about allergic reactions and things like that, but at the same time I had my doubts about whether steroids really worked. That may not seem like so long ago, but let me tell you, it was another era as far as knowledge about steroids goes.

Nowadays, you can hop on the Internet and dive right into a mass of information about steroids and find out anything you want. There are tons of Web sites that offer precise breakdowns on every steroid imaginable. Twenty years ago, there was not much to go on. You always heard stories about fake steroids, and I was wondering about that, too. Would it be something fake I was injecting? I had no idea. It could be anything. Back then, nobody even knew if steroids were illegal at all.

The first time is strange. You're so scared; your nerves are heightened and you kind of exaggerate the feeling. I'm serious.

You actually feel the needle penetrating your buttock muscle that first time. Then the needle is pulled out, and you expect that to hurt, too, but it doesn't. And then it takes about eight to ten seconds for the oil-based steroid to get into your body.

From then on you pretty much know what to expect, and the next time it doesn't hurt nearly as much. Soon you're totally used to it and it doesn't feel like anything, at least no more than pulling off a Band-Aid. I was always trying to learn more by talking to other people who injected themselves, asking them for the details of how they did it right. If someone does it perfectly, you don't feel anything at all. Al was pretty good, and that was lucky for me.

Steroids don't do you any good unless you're working out hard, and that afternoon when Al injected me for the first time, we headed straight for the gym and did an upper-body session, working on the shoulders, back, and triceps. Back then, I was bench-pressing only around 200 pounds, usually five reps.

Those first injections were with an oil-based steroid, so it took about two weeks before there were any noticeable effects. The first thing you notice is an increase in strength. If you stand there in front of the mirror and really check yourself out, you won't see any actual differences for a good two weeks. But you start to feel stronger much sooner. That's partly psychological, but I remember noticing about ten days after that first injection that I really felt stronger, especially when I was lifting. The first injection hurt a little, and so did the others that followed every two weeks or so after that, but to me the pain felt almost good, because I was so determined to live up to that promise I had made to my mother.

1. "You'll Never Add Up to Anything"

I always told Jose and Ozzie,
"Do better next time."
I'm obviously a very serious man.
I never fool around with anything.
But I was never stern or a dictator.
-
JOSE CANSECO SR.,
My father

My dad earned a good living in Cuba during the Batista years, working as a territory manager for Esso Standard Oil. He also picked up a little extra cash working nights as an English teacher at the Professional School of Commerce in Havana. He worked hard and was a good provider for our family.

As soon as Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, though, my father was smart enough to know that before long the new leftist system would control the entire country, and that would not be a good thing for people like my father. He figured that everything he had worked for in Cuba would be lost, and he was right, too. Soon after Castro came to power, my father lost his job. Then he lost his house. And then his car.

He was in an unusual position in that he had already spent time in the United States studying English. He had gone to Shreveport, Louisiana, as a teenager and lived with an uncle there for several years, starting in 1940, and his time in American schools gave him enough of a grounding in the language to teach it in Cuba. As much as he would have liked to stay in Cuba, his country, he was also comfortable with the idea of diving into a new life in the United States-if that was his only choice.

So my father notified the Cuban government that he wanted to leave the country, and the government basically answered: Tough luck. There was a serious shortage of skilled professionals, and Castro could not afford to lose white-collar workers like my father. The government announced that such workers would only be allowed to emigrate if a specific replacement could be found to handle their particular job. But no one was available who was qualified to take over my father's job with the oil company. The government wrote him a letter saying that because of his professional ability and expertise, he was not allowed to leave the country until further notice. He would have to wait years for them to change their minds.

My dad was born in 1929, in a town called Regla, on the outskirts of Havana. Both my father's parents had come over from Spain and his father, Inocente, had a big, light-green Packard car that he used to earn a good livelihood. He would load six or seven tourists into the Packard and drive them all over the place showing them the sights of Havana. Back then, baseball and boxing were the top sports in Cuba. My dad used to listen to New York Yankee games on the radio; his favorite players were Babe Ruth and, later, Roger Maris and Joe DiMaggio. But my father was not much of a baseball player himself. He shagged a few balls when he was a boy, but that was about it My father met my mother, Barbara, when they were both teenagers in Regla. He had come back from Louisiana and was studying at the Institute of Havana, from which he graduated with a degree in English. They used to go ballroom dancing or take strolls together around the town's central park. Sometimes they would go to the movies to catch the latest Errol Flynn picture or sweeping sagas like Gone With the Wind.