Juiced (26 page)

I could be entertaining even when I was controversial-or maybe I should say especially when I was controversial. That's why, when those fans in Boston started chanting "Steroids, steroids," I just turned and flexed my muscles at them. I knew they'd go nuts, and they did. They didn't have a problem with me being on steroids. They just wanted to have some fun at the ballpark. And I gave it to them.

I truly believe that most of those fans would look at me and say: We came out here today, and Jose gave us our money's worth-whether he hit a few home runs, or struck out, or flexed for us. They liked seeing me walk out on the field looking good-six foot four, 250 pounds, tall, dark, and handsome.

They liked watching me move, watching the way I ran. And they loved it when I did something out of the ordinary to get their attention.

The fans were entertained by watching guys like me, or Bo Jackson, or even Ken Griffey Jr., though he wasn't flashy. Randy Johnson, with his stature, was an entertainer; so was Roger Clemens. Those were people who made it worthwhile for fans to come out and pay for their tickets and parking and hot dogs and sodas. They're the people who made the fans feel: Today, I got my money's worth.

Back in the 1980s, the Oakland A's were a team that delivered, game after game. Mark McGwire and I were the most intimidating duo in baseball-not to mention the biggest. People still tell me today: Jose, when you came up to bat, no matter what you did, we just sat still and didn't move. Nobody got up to get food, or go to the bathroom, because they didn't want to miss something extraordinary, like a ball being hit 550 feet.

That team was like a juggernaut. And believe me, we made the most of it-on and off the field. Our theory was to go into cities and have our way. We went out in groups, and the women were everywhere, ready to jump into our limousines and go with us. On the team bus after the game, we'd watch them as they chased us in their cars, flashing their boobs or throwing their underwear at us. Sometimes they'd be sitting in their cars naked. It was crazy. We were like rock stars.

We had a presence, those teams. Whether we were going to a nightclub or out to dinner, people knew we were there. It was a team of characters: Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Rickey Henderson, Dennis Eckersley, Dave Stewart, and on and on. We had all the show guys in baseball, each one of them with a different character and an interesting background.

I think that's what the game is missing now. I think baseball is struggling again, and it'll keep struggling if some major steps aren't taken to stop the erosion. Baseball needs leadership, and it needs imagination. It needs to remember that this is a game about individual athletes, not just money and ballparks and stats. It needs to encourage its players to turn themselves into entertainers, and look for new players who are born that way.

And the teams have to learn how to market their players that way-the same way pro wrestling does.

Of course, there are limits to the approach. As in any other industry, including basketball or movie making, not everyone is going to be marketable. Barry Bonds is marketable. Alex Rodriguez is marketable. Those kind of players have extraordinary talent. But baseball needs to do a lot more to bring out those personalities. The only way to do that is to hire a completely different marketing entity, outside of the Major League Baseball power structure, and market the stars of baseball in a fun, clever, unpredictable way that really gets people going.

The strategy of relying on steroids for bigger numbers and bigger players worked-at least for a while. It gave baseball energy and excitement when that's what it needed. I'm sure steroids will always be part of the game. But steroids alone aren't enough to keep the game afloat, and it's clear that the powers that be have realized that.

They blackballed me from the game because I was the Chemist-the godfather of steroids in baseball. They looked up and realized that the players' salaries had gotten too high, and the players themselves had gotten too big and strong-all because I started things off by educating a handful of influential players on steroids, and showed them how to use them properly.

All kinds of records were being broken, and the old-timers were complaining about how the new records were tainted. The horses were already out of the barn, but they sent me packing anyway.

Now, I'm sure they're wondering how to get steroids out of the game-how to herd those horses back into the barn. Their first step was to cut off the individual who brought it in-the stud, the buck, whatever you want to call him. By doing that, they hoped to send a signal to everybody: Canseco's out. Better clean up your act, or you'll be next.

As always, though, the real reason they want to stop the steroid revolution is that these more powerful players were costing them too much money. Not that they're going broke: The owners may say they're losing money every year, but if the fans understood how many billions there are in TV money-if they realized that teams would be making thirty or forty or fifty million dollars a year even if they never sold a live ticket to a game-they would be amazed. Tickets and concessions? That's just icing on the cake.

But that doesn't stop the owners from crying poverty. The truth is that some teams are making an astronomical amount of money, while other teams are only making a lot of money.

And everybody wants to get into the astronomical club. The Milwaukee Brewers want to make as much money as the New York Yankees, even though the Brewers are fielding a brutal, horseshit team. It's beyond me. Every team comes in at the beginning of the year and declares that they've put together the best team in the league. But the players know what a load of bullshit that is. Just look at the players they're spending their money on, and you can see that many of them aren't even trying to win-never mind putting together a world-class team. They're trying to save money. They don't really care about giving the fans what they want.

Baseball needs to change, but I don't know if it will. I would never buy a baseball team, because I probably wouldn't agree with most of the things the other owners were doing. I could never agree to blackballing players, the way they blackballed me, or colluding against players.

The owners are constantly being caught out in their dirty little tricks. Last year, after they were caught colluding again, I received a check from Major League Baseball for $290,000 as part of the settlement of a long-standing salary-fixing case. People blame the commissioner, Bud Selig, for this kind of problem.

But I don't really think he has that much authority in the first place. No one individual ever really controls a big organization completely, and it's the same in baseball: The brotherhood steers the ship. That's why when the owners collude, they all get caught together. It's also why it's hard to believe that baseball will really change its stripes-unless there's a major shakeup.

EPILOGUE: Forever Young

Genetically, I wasn't dealt the best hand. That's not to knock my father, or his father back in Spain, or all the generations that went before. My dad is smart, and he passed his brains on to us; in the end, that's what matters most. But when it comes to my body, I'm here to tell you one thing: Despite what we're all used to thinking, genetics is not destiny. It's a starting point, that's all.

Look at me. See me on TV, or in the newspaper, and you'll see that we do have choices in life about how we want to look and feel. If you don't mind turning forty and feeling worn down and powerless, and looking like someone on the down slope to the nursing home, that's your choice. But if you want to head into your forties feeling strong and active, and looking as good as you ever have, the way I do, you can choose that, too.

I have chemically restructured my body, giving myself one of the best physiques in the world and enabling myself to do things at forty that most twenty-year-old kids couldn't do. Best of all, I have prepared myself to maintain that body for years to come.

My strength, vitality, and appearance are my best argument for what I'm saying. If I were exaggerating the effect that growth hormone and steroids can have when used properly and carefully as part of a program of weight lifting, fitness, careful nutrition, and clean living, then why would I look and feel as good as I do?

The only answer is, I'm telling the truth. So please keep that in mind as you see me out there talking about the future of baseball, and you see the sportscasters and media types who I know are already preparing to take their best shots at me, without even bothering to read this book and think about what I've said. I don't care much about the blowhards on TV; that's their job, to shout at each other in high-pitched voices and look self-satisfied.

But I do care about you out there-regular people with good sense. And all I ask is that you trust your own instincts. I think people know when they're being told the truth, and when they're hearing lies. And I'm sure that the truth in this book will shine like a bright light for anyone who isn't willfully blinding himself to it.

All I'm saying is that the lives we lead are the product of the choices we make. What I've learned is that there is a way to stop the aging process, or at least slow it down by 90 percent. If you stick with a program of good nutrition and a consistent approach to fitness, and know the right mix of steroids and growth hormone to take, you should be the same at fifty years old as you are at thirty.

For me, turning forty was a great experience. It felt like a celebration, not something to worry about. I can't emphasize it enough: If you look good, feel good, and have energy, life after forty is full of promise. I fully believe that in the future, as my ideas are accepted, more and more people will feel the same way.

We've still got a lot to learn about the power of steroids. I'm sure new chemicals will be developed in the coming years, which will open up new possibilities we can't even imagine at this point. As that happens, and other people experiment on themselves over time, I expect we'll see human beings commonly living to be a healthy 120 or 130 years old. What is aging, after all? Any of you out there who think you have all the answers on that one, go ahead and take a step forward.

The truth is: Even the top scientists really aren't sure exactly why our DNA starts breaking down after a certain huge number of cell divisions. What role can systematic use of growth hormone play in resetting our bodies' natural lifespan? Nobody knows, but it's going to be interesting to find out, that's for sure. Stem cell research and other developments in biomedicine and biotechnology will only accelerate the trend toward longer lives.

If you think about it, such developments will surely bring all sorts of new challenges for the world of sports. Before too long, the sort of physical changes we've seen because of steroids and growth hormone could look like nothing. With the many millions of dollars at stake in sports, athletes will always pay for the latest edge they can find. Genetic engineering and gene therapy could push science to make bigger and stronger athletes than even now. Maybe the combination of genetics and steroids can make a superhuman athlete. It's just a question of working out the science.

One thing is for sure: Ideas like age and life span are totally relative. Having cracked a few books in my day on the subject of steroids and related areas, I know scientists believe that as recently as ten thousand years ago most people didn't live past thirty years old. Wrap your mind around that one: Back then you were lucky to see thirty. What we're seeing now is just the natural extension of a long trend toward longer and longer life spans.

Civilization started, after all, when cavemen figured out how to use tools. They learned to work with flint so they could make sharp points to put on the end of their spears, and that technological step not only enhanced their lives, but increased their time on this earth. Isn't that really just the first step toward applying technology to our own bodies? Sometime later, a new group of cavemen figured out that there were useful properties associated with certain herbs they'd come across. Some herbs helped calm the stomach. Others helped bring down a fever.

Those discoveries, and others like them, led to longer lifetimes.

There have been a lot of big discoveries along the way since then-right down to penicillin. The point is, at every step along the way, there have always been naysayers-people who thought the status quo would always remain, even though the lessons of history teach us otherwise.

For example, one so-called expert named Louis Dublin made an interesting prediction back in 1928. He said he was certain that life expectancy would never be more than 64.75 years.

That's pretty priceless, guessing down to the .75 like that; you can just imagine how he worked it all out with a slide rule. He was wrong, of course. He was a fool to imagine he could place limits on human progress and human potential. As recently as 2002, life expectancy was 76.7 years-and only an idiot would expect it to stop there. A recent article in the magazine Science predicted that average life expectancy will reach 100 sometime around 2060.

For that to happen, of course, the human race will have to break certain bad habits-things that are truly harmful to the body, like smoking cigarettes. We will have to change as a culture to eliminate our addiction to high-pressure lives, and our fetish for stress. The problem with stress is that it takes its toll on your body and your body's ability to maintain itself. We'll have to find a way to get our act together and clean up the chemicals in the air and the water that bombard us all the time. Chemicals can rob us of life as surely as they can enhance our lives. You just have to know how to use them.

We're due for an open discussion about our attitudes about using chemicals to give ourselves a better quality of life, and I hope this book helps make that national discussion more honest and revealing. It took me some time to think about what I wanted to say in this book and compose these chapters, but things have a way of working out, don't they? If you're reading this as the steroid controversy is picking up in the new season, I hope it'll help you get beyond the headlines to something closer to the truth-the way we, the players, lived it.