In 1963, a hard pill to swallow

Originally published Dec 14, 1983

Ron Mix has a pretty good idea when anabolic steroids crept into professional football. The year was 1963. The place was San Diego. The team was the Chargers.

That summer, the Chargers became the first pro club to hire a full-time strength coach, luring a former Olympic weightlifter by the name of Alvin Roy away from Louisiana State University. Roy, now deceased, believed strongly in the benefits of pumping iron.

He also believed strongly in anabolic steroids .

"Alvin introduced us to them ( steroids ) along with weight training," said Mix, an NFL Hall of Fame offensive lineman for the Chargers. "In his initial address to the team, he introduced the pill and described it as a pill that would help our bodies assimilate protein. He said it was a pill that the Russian athletes had been taking for years and that their athletic programs were more scientific than anyone else's in the world.

"He told us if he could do only one thing for us - if it had to be either weight training or taking this pill - he would have us take the pill. "

For the next four or five weeks, all of the Chargers dutifully took daily doses of steroids .

"Alvin would place them in cereal bowls with each of our meals and we'd take them and not think anything of it," said Mix, now an attorney in San Diego.

But a short time later, one of the Chargers' players injured himself and elected to see his own physician rather than the team doctor.

"One of the first questions the doctor asked the guy was if he had been taking any medication," recalled Mix. "The guy said, 'Well I don't know if it's medication or not, but I've been taking Dianabol in camp. '

"The doctor reacted somewhat aghast. He asked the player if he'd ever seen any of the literature that accompanies the pill. The player said no. So, the doctor showed it to him.

"I was captain of the team that year, so the player brought (the information) to me. It's on every package: 'Warning - dangerous side effects. Not to be taken over an extended period of time. Can cause liver damage, muscle damage, bone damage and testicle shrinkage. ' It described the extended period of time as being six weeks. So we were like a week away from forming a boys' choir.

"I took the literature and showed it to (coach) Sid Gillman. I said, 'Coach, I'm sure you've never seen this. ' He looked at it and said he'd talk to Alvin about it. A couple days later, Coach got back to me and said that Alvin said that none of that stuff had ever been proven. That the Russians have been using it for years.

"Then he told me to tell the squad about it and that he was gonna leave the pills out there and that they could take 'em if they wanted to.

"I told the team and most of the guys stopped taking them. The vast majority stopped taking them. A number of them would lay off of them and maybe take them just once or twice a week.

"However, the pills continued to be given out to young players. See, we discovered a secret. You could take a tall, thin, aggressive football player who was too light to play professional football and add 40 to 50 pounds to him with steroids and have a heckuva football player. We did that with a number of guys - Gary Turner, a 205-pound lineman from USC; Terry Owens, a 6-7, 220-pound lineman from Alabama. We put 50 pounds on each of them with Dianabol. "

One of those tall, thin, aggressive football players that the Chargers bulked up was a defensive lineman by the name of Houston Ridge, who weighed 225 pounds when he joined the Chargers in the summer of 1965. One year and thousands of milligrams of Dianabol later, Ridge was tipping the scales at a hefty 278.

Three years later, however, Ridge suffered a career-ending hip injury and sued Roy, the Chargers and the National Football League for $1.2 million, charging that steroids and the other prescription drugs that the club had been force-feeding him contributed to his injury. Three years later, the case was settled out of court, with the Chargers paying Ridge $260,000.

"Professional football teams, in effect, maintain a combat medical center," said San Diego attorney Robert Baxley, who represented Ridge in his suit against the Chargers. "They hire team physicians, generally an orthopedic specialist and a GP (general practicioner), and they have a trainer who is a registered physical therapist.

"They maintain prescription drugs on the premises. They permit the trainer, who is an unregistered pharmacist, to dispense drugs. As a result, the players are given all kinds of things. Not to get them well . . . but to keep them playing. And bleep the consequences. "

Steroids are not the unknown drug now that they were back in 1963 when Roy introduced them to the Chargers. But Mix said more knowledge hasn't necessarily meant wiser decisions.

"There has been a kind of education process," he said. "But it hasn't been a healthy one. The education process hasn't been that the pills are damaging. The education process has been that weight training will improve strength and improved strength will improve performance.

"All teams now have weight training coaches and all weight training coaches are familiar with the use of steroids to increase muscle mass and bulk."