There are legends in all sorts of areas that don’t bear too much visitation. 

I was watching the original Brian’s Song, and aside from the fact it looked like it was done in one take and hokey as hell (it still works, though; I wept), I started thinking – I can’t help it – that this was a familiar story. Recently familiar. A guy, a white guy who – while really good – has always been shoved aside by those better (and, lately, darker) and never gets the chance to be number one and receive the attention he’s due.  Or, so it’s posited.

 

For example, despite being the highest scoring collegiate player in the nation in his senior year (1964) at Wake Forrest, nobody in the NFL took him in the draft that year. Not one team.   Yes, he was good, but he was small for the NFL; and slow.  Still, he was aggressive and active and often annoyingly upbeat.  The Bears picked him afterwards, seemingly to be polite.   He became a backup running back, and did okay, not great.  What did this remind me of?  

 

Within a day or two, I knew.   Bill Romanowski was interviewed on Sixty Minutes.  The Brian Piccolo story sounds, in small measure, like Bill Romanowski’s, a linebacker with the 49’ers and the Broncos and the Raiders.  Damned good linebacker.  Took a lot of ‘supplements’ to stay competitive with, as he is accused of saying, ‘the black guys’ in the League.  He spit on people and razzed people and was a borderline bigot, which is to say a complete and unblushing asshole.  He was widely considered a dirty player in the Sam Huff mode.  He’s retired now.   He got in trouble with the law when his wife was accused of buying and providing illegal items to him.  I forget how that came out, but I think one third party took a dive on greatly reduced issues and he played for another year.  I could well be wrong.

 

He’s confessed, though, to taking things now banned, and maybe some actually banned or in that vast gray tundra of unknown legality during his stay in the league.  He’s sorry about all that, of course.  Not as sorry as he’ll be if he turns out to be another Lyle Alzado, another former Bronco and Raider, who died of cancer way too early, and suspiciously so.   Alzado blamed his anabolic steroids.  Alzado makes a stronger case for their power.  And their danger.

 

Alzado was not all that big and not very good by nature.  Although aggressive, he didn’t even become a star at the high school level.  He got no scholarship offers to college.  He couldn’t make a junior college team.   He hooked up with some players who turned him to Yankton College, South Dakota.  There, he started using steroids.  A lot. 

 

When a Bronco scout had car trouble in Montana, he watched a college game on tape (we’re talking bored) and came away impressed enough that Alzado became the Bronco’s fourth pick in the 1971 draft.  Let’s see.  Not good enough for a junior college squad this year, next year impressive enough for the Pros.

 

And a few years later, All-Pro.  Suddenly bigger and more aggressive than even most defensive ends in the NFL.  Alzado became a star.  He became demanding and vain and eventually started having huge bursts of temper.  Road Rage.  Domestic violence.  Police.  A lot.  Sound familiar?  He was dead at 43 of fast moving cancer.     

 

But do either Romanowski or Alzado sound like Brian Piccolo?  It was the late sixties for Piccolo.  A big defensive lineman then was only 260 pounds.  There are people one hundred pounds heavier today, who are faster, quicker (not the same thing) and far better than they were forty years ago.  

 

Piccolo was a long, long time ago.  Further, he made – from all accounts and with no contradiction – the mumbly, shy, black Gayle Sayers, the team star, his friend, and then his project when Sayers got hurt.  He took charge of Sayers’ physical therapy.  Sayers is generally considered the best running back ever.   O.J. Simpson once said you only have to watch the tapes, and it’s obvious Sayers was the best.  Things like that didn’t pop to Simpson’s mouth easily.   And Sayers credited Piccolo with helping him when he needed it.  That sounds like, well, not like Romanowski or Alzado. 

 

Brian Piccolo got a very rare form of cancer that can be either testicular or appear in the chest cavity.  They got to it late, because he must have ignored the signals, and he died at the age of 26.  He fought like hell to the end by all accounts.  But is it true?  By which I mean, is it possible that Piccolo was on a regimen of chemical enhancement that kept him going during his career in the NFL when his diminutive size and slow speed should not have?  And could not?  I’m all for heart and dedication and hard work.  But I’m suspicious because of the type of death at such an early age.

Maybe Romanowski and Alzado aren’t fair comparisons.  Maybe Seabiscuit is.

 

Despite the heartwarming book and movie, Seabiscuit was widely suspected of being a hopped up horse.  He, too, was small and rather remarkably aggressive on the track and remarkably docile off.   This doesn’t make it into the movies, though, at least in terms that easily recognizable.  The horse broke his leg, was not put down, and goes on to win races.  His jockey, also banged up, and too big anyway, wins with him.  So…..we’re to believe that a too small horse carrying more weight than his competition can still, with no help, chronically smoke the opposition?  Yes, we are.   Well, he did.  The question is: was he doing it legally.  Rather,  we’re to believe a too small horse carrying more weight than his competition in a heavily bet upon and corrupt sport could still, with no help, smoke the opposition during the Depression, an era of get rich quick schemes and in need of inspiring story.  That’s what we’re to believe, all right.  So many of us do. 

We don’t even mention that Man O’War, Seabiscuit’s grandfather, was such a drugged horse he even died in a state of excessive angel lust, requiring a strategically placed set of bed linen for the viewing.  (Yes, the horse had a viewing after his death.  So many people made money on him.   Just like Seabiscuit.)  It was common back then.  Still is, I hear.

I focus on all this because we’re surrounded by stories of drugged and enhanced athletes.  Here in Boulder we have a charming and champion bicyclist who insists, despite failing two tests, that he never took any enhancements.  He’s resorted to claiming the blood of his late – very late – twin fools the sensors and his censors.  Or something. 

And there is Lance Armstrong, whose survival of cancer and the interlocking way that treatment for it could very well have made him a champion again and again, since he was far more advanced in the medical field than competitors or race managers had any reason to be.  He denies it.  But like horseracing, bike racing has long been a drugged and enhanced sport.  Entire teams have been thrown out for their use, and recently, and it’s difficult for me to believe that Armstrong is so much better he didn’t need them to compete.   This enrages his fans, and I could well be wrong, but I have trouble believing it.

Baseball’s fallen heroes are too hypocritical and disgusting to warrant much defense.   Mark Maguire didn’t even attempt one when he came before the Congress.   Others lied before Congressional Committees and got away with it.  They posture as the successors to Roger Maris and get away with it.  We’re asked to believe that normal looking guys change into Mr. Incredible as they near forty with increased production.  That’s like Michael Jackson asking us to believe that diet, inherited skin disease, and normal aging changed him into whatever he is now.

Push to shove, I don’t know why we particularly care.  It’s their choice.  It strikes me that absent the medical danger, of which obligation exists to make them aware, it’s their life.  And how does it compare with what The Babe or The Mick took?  And who’s to say it wasn’t worse then?  With or without drugs, medical care, hygiene, and nutritional knowledge has improved so much that there’s no fair comparisons with past athletes now, anyway.   Why shouldn’t we let athletes drug themselves?

Ethically, because some worry they’re killing themselves for youthful and transient glory, and for the profit of others.  And we worry about debasing the records held by the gods of yesteryear.

And such is the aura of cynicism and disbelief that I even wonder about the cause of the cancer in the long late and deeply lamented Brian Piccolo who – even if he were guilty – certainly paid a price beyond the crime.  It’s come to this. 

But probably we should start with the truth, and then weigh it all out again.