From bulk to bust and back again
Former NFLer opens up about his drug abuse, getting sober and never giving up
Tony Mandarich was juiced up on steroids, an outsized, chemical-loaded freak of nature, when he posed shirtless on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1989.
The Incredible BULK, hollered the headline, which enticed potential readers further with a subhead noting he was “the best offensive line prospect ever.”
Mandarich would return to that cover in 1992, clad in a Green Bay Packers jersey, his bulky body a battleground of too much booze and copious painkillers. The humiliating headline read: The NFL’s Incredible BUST.
Mandarich went away shortly after that issue hit the stands; nobody in the NFL wanted him.
Three years passed, most of it on his couch, indulging the same old habits. Then he got clean and made an improbable return to the NFL, where he played for Indianapolis for three seasons.
“I could have tucked my tail and stayed quiet in northern Michigan, just kind of faded away and lived a quiet life,” says Mandarich, who was in Saskatoon recently to tell his story to young football players. “But it didn’t sit well with me, that it ended the way it did. When I got sober, that drive inside me said, ‘You screwed a lot of things up, so what are you going to do about it?’ Some of those wrongs, you just can’t right. But a lot of them, you can.”
Mandarich, a native of Oakville, Ont., who was the highest ever drafted Canadian in the National Football League, publicly admitted his collegiate steroid use in 2008, writing a book — My Dirty Little Secrets: Steroids, Alcohol and God — that laid out an addiction-laden life.
Mandarich says his steroid use was restricted to his collegiate days at Michigan State, where he was a larger-than-life figure both on and off the field. Green Bay picked him with the second selection of the 1989 NFL draft, behind Troy Aikman and ahead of Barry Sanders, Derrick Thomas and Deion Sanders. All but Mandarich would make it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Today, Mandarich is a professional photographer in Phoenix, a family man, and he tells his story — “a cautionary tale,” as he puts it — to football players ranging in experience from Pop Warner to the pros.
Q You’ve said you didn’t take steroids during your NFL career. At that point, it came down to the painkillers and the alcohol. How did that impact your NFL career?
A The painkiller abuse, and the alcohol abuse, was the main reason for the failure in Green Bay. Every single day, for the four years I was in Green Bay, there was not a sober day. That does not mean I was a falling-down drunk every day, but every day I was drinking and/or using painkillers. And if I couldn’t get painkillers from a doctor, I would drink more, because you could just go into a store and buy alcohol.
For four years, you’re not ever looking through clear eyes. And after four years, I’d embarrassed myself; fell on my face; didn’t live up to any expectations I had or everybody else had. They didn’t want to renew my contract or have anything to do with me, and I can’t blame them. Q Two or three years into your career, did you know what you were doing to yourself? A I knew that was the common denominator with all my problems and issues, but my ego kept pointing the finger at everybody else, whether it was the Packers, the media, my parents. I would point at anybody but myself, but there was no doubt I knew it was a problem and it had to be corrected. I had tried a bunch of different ways on my own to do it, never successfully, and then March 23 of ’95, I put myself into a treatment centre just outside Detroit, and really got educated for 17 days, detoxed, and I’ve been sober ever since — never had to go back out and drink or drug.
Q So it was that one day, you just decided that was it, and you were going to make a break from it?
A Yeah. My buddy had a talk with me about three days before I went into treatment, and he said if you don’t change what you’re doing, you’re going to die. You’ve been out of the league for three years, you’ve been sitting on this couch for three years ... and that really hit me. It felt like I’d been out of the league nine months.
When he said three years, I was like, wow, three years has gone by in a blur. That opened my eyes. Whatever my plan was, it wasn’t working. I was willing to listen to somebody else’s plan; I’m feeling miserable, I’m unemployed, and there I am, 28 years old.
Q How about your college days? That’s what a lot of people focus on, is your steroid era. What went through your head the first time you took steroids?
A The first time I ever took steroids was my last month of high school, May of 1984. I could not bench press over 315 pounds. I spoke to my brother, he was taking them, and it was “I can’t get over this hurdle.” I’d already signed the scholarship with Michigan State, and I needed to get myself prepared.
I took a cycle of what would be considered, by steroid standards, a very low-dose steroid. And lo and behold, two or three weeks later, I benched 315. In a way, it’s the worst possible thing that could have happened. It proved to me that it works. If somebody had given me a placebo, I might have still benched 315. But I tested that theory throughout college, and there’s no doubt — steroids work. That’s why there’s a problem with them; it’s because they work so well.
Q Football players are resultsoriented. They see you landed in the NFL with a hefty contract for the time. How do you tell kids, then, that this isn’t something they should be doing? Because obviously for you, as a college player, your results were pretty good.
A They were. I had very good results with it, and a lot of work went into it. It wasn’t just taking steroids that made it happen; it was a lot of work and a lot of commitment. But one of the things that’s basically a fact is 99 per cent of the players don’t take steroids, and they still make it to the NFL, and they still play phenomenal. That would be the message.
Q You were on the cover of Sports Illustrated (for a flattering profile before the draft). Do you have any regrets about that story? How do you look at it all these years later?
A That 1989 story is of a naive, cocky, arrogant college football player. Do I have regrets? Looking back, could it have been done better? Yes. But it is what it is, and I learned from it. If I start to get cocky these days, I’ll refer back to those articles and say, no, I don’t want to go back in that direction. It re-grounds me and re-sets me.
Q You have a platform now that a lot of players choose not to take or don’t have. When you look back, are you satisfied with your place in football history?
A If I had to say yes or no, I’d say yes, I am. What’s harder to do than making it to the NFL, is taking three years off, then making it back to the NFL. Overcoming the adversity, to me, carries much more value than being the second player taken in the draft.
I’ve got so many emails and (messages) on social media from people who say “after reading your story, I can relate, because I have a painkiller problem and I figured if you could kick the habit, there’s no reason why I can’t do it.” Then they’re emailing you, and they’re two years sober. That, to me, is way more valuable than any paycheque the NFL can give you, because now you’ve been a small catalyst in changing someone’s life.