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Wrestling With Steroids

Posted: Apr 26th 2010 By: CMBurnham

Dewey Robertson might have covered his body with bulging muscles and his face with blue and green paint, but that still couldn?t mask what was going on inside him.

Like so many other professional wrestlers from his era, the former Kitchener man had an imposing physique carved from hours in the gym and more than a little help from anabolic steroids.

He got into steroids in the wild days of wrestling before cable television, when wrestlers like him engaged in nightly bloodbaths and self-prescribed a miracle drug to please promoters who wanted bigger and bigger men to thrill arenas of screaming fans.

He called himself The Missing Link, and for years, steroids kept him big and gave him the aggression he needed to go one more brutal round in the ring.

But later in life, Robertson knew the darker side of steroids ? the embarrassing impotence that caused him to seek testosterone from his doctor, the ?roid rage? that made him easily violent and difficult to be around, the beating the drugs laid on his heart and kidneys. He watched his wrestling friends drop like flies because years of steroid use had enlarged their hearts and left them vulnerable to heart attacks and cancer.

And if he knew more and more young men were turning to steroids to get big in a hurry, he?d probably put them in pile driver, say friends.

Police say the drug that Robertson blamed so many of his health problems on is now widely available through muscle-building websites, in local gyms, on sports teams, and at both the high school and university level.

?There?s no problem with getting steroids at the high school level. Once they can get through their contacts at the gym, I?m sure they can get it delivered to them at the schools,? said Detective Const. Jerome Codrington of the Waterloo Regional Police, who has worked on undercover operations to bust steroid dealers in gyms.

?It?s becoming more prevalent within the schools.?

When Robertson died in 2007, at age 68, he was a big man with one big regret ? that steroids had crippled his body and left him a shell of the hulk he used to be.

?Back then, the guys thought it was a short cut. They didn?t know they would pay the price for it physically and mentally later,? said his friend and fellow wrestler Gene Petit, who wrestled with Robertson in the 1970s and 1980s. ?Once he realized what it had done to him, he regretted it. But by that point, it was too late.?

A MIRACLE DRUG FOR THE EVERYMAN

Anabolic steroids, which mimic the effects of testosterone, the male hormone, have long been a dirty word in sport. But illegal steroid use stretches far beyond elite pro athletes, into universities and high schools, and into casual users. Some studies suggest the biggest users of steroids aren?t elite athletes at all, but average Joes looking to increase their attractiveness, not athletic performance.

It?s these kind of users ? the basement body builders, the gym rats ? who may be behind a spike in seizures of illegal mail-order steroids by Canada?s border officials. Last year, 1,920 courier and mail shipments were stopped at Canada?s three international mail processing centres. In 2008, the Canada Border Services Agency seized 1,624 shipments of foreign-made steroids Canadians tried to sneak into the country through the mail.

This month, a University of Waterloo football player was charged with running an illegal steroid pharmacy out of his basement bedroom. Police allege Nathan Zettler was selling human growth hormone and a range of steroids, including stanozolol, allegedly the performance booster of the choice of baseball?s Barry Bonds and sprinter Ben Johnson.

Coaches and sporting officials immediately expressed shock, and dismissed the case as an isolated incident. UW officials, meanwhile, refused to comment on reports that four football players, in the face of testing, had admitted to juicing and another refused to be tested.

But police say steroid use is far from isolated to a handful of people in Waterloo Region. As proof of this growing market, investigators point to rising seizures of steroids, saying more dealers of other drugs such as crack or marijuana are starting to carry steroids to feed the surging demand.

Though mail-order shipments are growing, steroids are still commonly bought in gyms, where dealers offer tips and will even inject their customers ? sometimes with the consent of gym staff, police said. It?s far from a refined science. Some users ignore the 12-week cycle rules and ?stack? their steroids ? using multiple varieties at once, including pills, in hopes they?ll get even bigger.

?Usually they?ll express that they?re not getting the gains that they want, and they?ll be approached by someone who will say, ?I?ve got something that can help you out with that,? ? Det. Const. Codrington said.

?A lot of people aren?t up front with it. You?ll either have to be introduced by somebody, or know somebody to get access to it. It?s still an underground thing.?

Often sold as a miracle drug, some dealers downplay the side effects, such as severe acne, baldness, liver damage, infertility and heart disease, he said.

A COMPLICATED PROBLEM

Enforcing the laws around steroids can be a challenge. Unlike cocaine or heroin, it?s a controlled, not banned, substance in the eyes of Health Canada. There are legal medical uses for steroids ? someone with anemia or osteoporosis can pick it up at a pharmacy with a prescription. Likewise, cancer and AIDS patients can legally get human growth hormone (HGH), but an athlete looking to add muscle can?t.

It?s illegal to import either HGH or steroids, sell them or possess them with the intent to sell them. And it?s illegal to prescribe steroids strictly for bodybuilding.

Then there?s the added confusion of legal sports supplements, which are sometimes sold online next to illegal steroids. There are ever-changing varieties as producers tweak recipes and change product names. There are hundreds of websites selling thousands of brands that boast ?natural? alternatives to anabolic steroids ? with long lists of obscure ingredients that would confuse even the most experienced chemists.

Though anabolic steroids like M1T can?t be sold in Canada without a prescription, there are plenty of foreign websites promising discreet delivery. But buyers don?t need to stray that far. Even after busting one of Canada?s largest underground steroid labs in 2008 ? a counterfeit drug wholesale business run by self-taught Waterloo chemist Fernando Reis ? police believe steroids may still be being made in the region.

With a credit card, an internet connection and a basic understanding of pharmacology, a dealer could easily import the raw materials and make steroids in his own kitchen, said Insp. Daryl Goetz of the Waterloo Regional Police.

?Some of it is manufactured here. They?ll order the different ingredients and make it themselves. Or sometimes they?ll import it like any other drug,? he said. ?It?s available to any person that wants it.?

Homemade steroids are especially ?of grave concern, because you never know what they?re putting in it,? added Det. Const. Codrington. Users can also get their hands on legal steroids through doctors? prescriptions intended for cancer and AIDS patients. But the vast majority, some 80 per cent, comes from the black market, according to the RCMP.

None of this seems to concern users. And that may be because despite all the side-effects, steroids do make people bigger and stronger. And that?s a powerful temptation for both elite and amateur athletes alike, said Tim Elcombe, a sports ethicist at Wilfrid Laurier University.

?I don?t think the issues that are driving the professional athlete are very different than the ones driving the high school athlete. A lot of these athletes are doing it for prestige,? he said. ?In high school, that?s not attached to contracts, but the sense of recognition and prestige is the same.?

They known it?s morally wrong. They know it?s cheating. But that doesn?t matter nearly as much as excelling, he said.

And if they become injured, many athletes are willing to do anything to heal faster. Enter steroids, a ?miracle drug? that promises to restore confidence to an athlete?s fragile psyche, said Elcombe?s WLU colleague Jill Tracey, who specializes in sports psychology.

?If they?re injured, they?re looked at as damaged goods,? she said. ?That?s very difficult for many athletes to deal with, whether they?re a professional, a varsity athlete, or a younger athlete.?

WRESTLING WITH DEMONS

Dewey Robertson played a lot of roles in his wrestling career but he was best known for one ? The Missing Link, a crazy, anti-social villain. He was pretty convincing in that role outside the ring, too.

As the Missing Link, he was a wildly popular wild man ? with his shaved head, always howling, smashing chairs and bashing his head. His heavy steroid use made this less of an act than fans thought, he admitted in his autobiography, Bang Your Head. Outside of the spotlight, the drugs made him so aggressive he?d want to fight at the slightest provocation, said his friend Gene Petit.

It was a bad habit that would rear up again when he would inject himself with testosterone.

?Sometime when we?d have an argument ? if he didn?t want me to leave the apartment, he?d grab my arm so hard he?d leave fingerprints on it,? said his former girlfriend Karen Antoniak, who lived with Robertson in the final years of his life in Hamilton. ?You?d have to walk on eggshells around him ? It could be really scary.?

By then, steroids had sapped his body?s ability to produce testosterone to the point he needed a doctor?s prescription for testosterone to fix his impotence. That was a frustrating experience that Antoniak says made him hate the steroids he was once so dependent on.

?When they?re young and vital, guys don?t realize (steroids) can take its toll on your virility. The more you take steroids, the harder it gets for your body to produce testosterone,? she said. ?It might seem like a quick fix at the time. But you?re going to pay for it, major.?

Robertson blamed steroids for a lot of his health problems, and friends believe it was his years of abusing the drug that caused the cancer in his kidneys. He lost one kidney to the disease in the early 1990s, and when his second one was overwhelmed in 2007, he died.

In the early days, when he was selling furniture in Kitchener and wrestling in front of crowds at the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium, Robertson was squeaky clean. It wasn?t until the late 1970s that he was introduced to steroids while wrestling in North Carolina.

Robertson already spent most of his free time in gyms, but these new drugs allowed him to keep pace with his younger, ever-expanding co-workers. They self-prescribed a range of steroids that were coming in from shadowy sources in Russia or Germany, said Petit, who may be best remembered by wrestling fans under the moniker Hillbilly Cousin Luke. Pretty soon, steroids were as common in wrestling as the pain killers the men took to get back in the ring, night after night.

?In the wrestling community, things got around pretty quickly. It was just a way to hang on to their jobs,? said Petit.

Robertson didn?t know it at the time, but he?d deal with the fallout from those steroid years for the rest of his life. It would make him sick. It would make him ?a monster,? to use his own words. But back then, he was just doing what everybody else was doing, Petit said.

?When it first started, the guys didn?t know the consequences. They just knew the results,? he said.

Tags: Dewey Robertson, Missing Link, Cousin Luke