|
|
[Definitie:] "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance."
(Wilmore and Costill) 
|
|
|
||
|
||
|
2 7 - 0 2 - 2 0 0 5 The Juice Box
The Arizona Republic
STRAWBERRY - For eager young athletes who see performance-enhancing drugs
as a way to pick up power and pack some muscle . . .
It may be time to take a close look at Tom Zeisberger.
Performance enhancers may bulk up the stars with the eight-figure salaries. But they can bring down the ordinary guy who craves only being big and strong.
Putting a face to all the dire medical warnings, Zeisberger at 54 is a ghost of the muscular man he used to be.
Now, what he wants to do is convince people such as his son Ty, 24, that steroids are not the way to go; that in the long run, everything gained will be lost.
Far from the spotlight of national controversies involving Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and others, drug dramas play out across Arizona.
As Zeisberger struggles to live, members of the 2003 Buckeye High football team wrap up their legal obligations caused from buying and using steroids. Gym rats hook up with their connections for human growth hormone, or buy over the Internet. A doctor in Tempe says he has weaned more than 100 athletes from the juice, but parents keep seeking ways to help their kids get bigger. And athletes who work hard to add size and strength may face that questioning look that says, How did you get so big, so fast?
High-flier hits trouble Looking back, I know that possibly steroid rage may have cost me a great future in sports, one way or another. I do know that it destroyed my health and it all caught up with me . . . - Tom Zeisberger, in a Feb. 9 letter to The Republic.
In his small home in the high country, Zeisberger spreads eight pills on a coffee table. There are two tablets for depression, two for pain, one for his stomach, another for high blood pressure, one to thin his blood, and another for energy.
He grinds them into a powder, mixes it with water and pours it into a giant syringe. He attaches the syringe to a tube that goes into his stomach and shoots the medication through.
He later shoots his dinner, a can of butter pecan Ensure ("They all taste the same to me," he cracks) through the tube with the same 60cc syringe. He sleeps with an oxygen tank near his bed, a tube in his nose.
To cap off his lonely nights, Zeisberger squeezes beer into his stomach.
"Nice way to live, huh?" he says, leaning back on a sofa, tilting his ball cap up.
Zeisberger believes his troubles stem from 20-plus years of using anabolic steroids starting after his senior year in high school in 1969 until he was 41.
He had a heart attack at 38.
Intense radiation for throat cancer 14 years ago killed off saliva glands. He can't eat. He can't drink. He's had three strokes.
His voice is now a whisper, making jobs in his specialty, sales, impossible. So the former football and baseball star at Camelback High, a one-time top sales representative in the fitness industry, an outdoorsman who used to be mistaken for Hulk Hogan, now lives alone in a country home north of Payson. He works for Gila County Search and Rescue when he can. And he writes letters.
There is a woman at the hospital in Registration that I see approximately every two weeks when I get my blood drawn. . . . Her husband had pretty much what I have, except the tube in the stomach. Well, last year, she came home from work and found his wallet, keys, wedding ring on the table, but no husband, just a letter. Anyhow, Search and Rescue found him, his ATV and handgun in the woods. He just couldn't take it anymore. - Feb. 5 letter to The Republic.
Old photographs on his walls, near a room filled with big game he's hunted down, remind Zeisberger of a time when he felt he was on top of the world. Then, he was injecting himself with anabolic steroids, man-made testosterone, drugs that were easy to come by working in the fitness industry. A member would hand Zeisberger the muscle- and strength-enhancing drugs for a girlfriend's free use of the club.
"It was like getting candy," he said.
Zeisberger said he also was handed cocaine, marijuana and LSD. Those, he said, he flushed down the toilet. He liked the steroids, the power he felt using them.
After graduating from Camelback in 1969, Zeisberger was 5 foot 10, 150 pounds. He saw how big the other football players at Phoenix College were, and he started taking small amounts of anabolic steroids. In three months, he said he gained 60 pounds of muscle and felt like he could take on a tractor.
By the time he was 40, he still cycled steroids, never abusing them with megadoses, he said, and had reached his goal of bench-pressing 400 pounds.
"I was in the best shape of my life," he said.
Then, in a matter of months, his health failed, the fitness company he worked for shut down, his marriage broke up and his savings disappeared. He had no insurance and was enrolled in the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the insurance program for the poor. He started losing his voice, and in 1991 was diagnosed with throat cancer. He said he underwent nearly 90 days of radiation. He shriveled from 5 feet 11, 200 pounds to 130 pounds.
He moved in with his parents, and later they helped him build a small home in the high country.
Zeisberger believes the long use of steroids triggered cancer cells. Dr. Michael Hinni, a head and neck surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale who has treated Zeisberger, won't rule it out.
"It affects the immune system," Hinni said of long-term steroids use. "It predisposes one to a number of issues, including cancer. It's not possible to say that steroids caused the cancer, but it's impossible to say that it didn't."
'We didn't know' Ty Zeisberger, who lives in north Phoenix with his mother, Lana, knows now, looking at his dad. But he didn't know in high school, when he used steroids from his sophomore to his senior years (1997-1999) at North Canyon.
He said he could bench-press 280 pounds as a sophomore and hit a baseball as far as anybody, even though he was 5 feet 5, 130 pounds.
He said he and a couple of friends injected each other, obtaining the drugs over the counter on trips to Mexico. They kept it a secret from school officials and everybody else, even his dad. "It would take about 24 hours, then all of a sudden you would notice," Ty said. "I just wanted to jump off the couch and do 100 push-ups. You want to go to the gym. You want to work out. . . . It makes you want to do it more."
Ty said he developed growths underneath his nipples. They had to be extracted. He said he is normally laid-back and soft-spoken, but the drugs would radically change his mood and he would get into fights. But he remembered how perfect his father had looked when Ty was a child, and he knew how his dad got that way.
"He was a perfect specimen to me and the greatest athlete," Ty said. "At the time, I didn't worry about long-term consequences. I didn't know. We were like, 'What could be the harm?' As far as we were concerned, we were building our bodies and making it stronger. We didn't know.
"I did know my dad did it. I guess, to be perfectly honest, I saw his ability and his strength and his body, and that would be the reason why I tried it."
Ty, now 200 pounds, works as a caretaker and wants to be an ultimate cage fighter. Tom Zeisberger said he worries that his son will get back on the "sauce."
He hangs on to educate Ty, to try to get the word out to anybody with an urge to be a superstar in a glass body.
The need to be big Looking back, Tom Zeisberger sees other personal fallout from steroids use.
He said he never made it to play in a college football game because he would get into barroom fights, brought on by "roid rage." But he charmed 18-year-old Lana. She was swept away by his strength, looks and climb up the corporate fitness industry ladder.
"Everyone called him 'Hulk Hogan,' " said Lana Zeisberger, who is divorced but still friends with Tom. "He looked like him. He had blond hair, a mustache, and he was huge. He told me he took Dianabol. I remember talking about it. At first, I was not aware what it was. He'd tell me if you take steroids, you can lose your hair, become impotent. . . . He said he heard tales if anyone had predisposition for cancer or something like that, it can progress the illness. Then, I'd say, 'What are you taking them for?' "
It was Tom's addiction: to be big, feel big.
"His behavior pattern changed," Lana said. "He was more pompous. I called him, 'King Kong.' "
Last chapter Why there is no one else in my life? Two reasons: One, my self-esteem is horrible. What I used to be compared to now. I look at myself as a sick loser . . . plus I don't want anyone to get involved with me simply because I wouldn't wish me on anybody. Then, if I got involved with someone, they'd spend most of their life taking care of a sick person who is just going to die in the future. Hell, I know I'm not going to grow old and gray, so why waste someone else's life when mine is pretty much shot. - Feb. 5 letter.
Writing helps him cope, Zeisberger says.
Shivering, he puts a couple of logs in the fireplace. He takes out a scrapbook of his high school football clippings. On the cover is a joyous man-child, looking strong and eager, ready to take on the world. On the back flap is a figure of a man, trapped behind bars.
It reads, "The End."
|
|
|
