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| SUPER SIZE ME* (*THE ASTERISKS OF STEROID USE) |
James Denton |
We chat to Chris Bell, director of new steroid documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (*The Side Effects Of Being American), to discuss steroids in sports, what constitutes ‘cheating’, WWE’s reaction to the film and why Perry Saturn is “a complete, unprofessional asshole”…
FSM: The film has been out in the US for a couple of months now. How
is it doing over there?
Chris Bell: For a documentary it’s doing okay. I mean, we don’t have a huge publicity budget like a lot of these other big movies, so to go up against The Hulk and Iron Man and Sex In The City is kind of difficult. But it’s slowly climbing the ranks, thanks to good word of mouth.
I’m actually trying to work with WWE and some other entities to see if they would be willing to promote it. So far I’ve shown the movie to Triple H, John Cena, The Rock and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and all of them are absolutely in love with the movie – it’s just a matter of whether or not they’ll be allowed to promote it.
We sent a copy to Vince McMahon and we’re just kind of waiting to hear back from him, to see if he likes it and would be willing to help us get it out to their fans. Because you know, even them putting a link on their website with ten million visitors a week is a big deal. So we’re trying to get the word out there via every method possible.
A lot of fans might be surprised that some of the names you mentioned reacted positively to the film. Has that been your general experience, that wrestlers – who people might expect to be defensive about the subject matter – have liked it?
Well, I think it’s about time that somebody came out and put this subject matter on the table for people to talk about. A lot of these guys have admitted to using steroids – they say, “Hey, I’ve used them in the past,” or “I’ve used them for this and that” – and they just get so killed by the media that I was kind of thinking, it’s about time that someone talked about this subject in an intelligent manner.
Like I say, all the guys that I named – besides John Cena – have all admitted to using steroids at some point for one reason or another, and what I wanted to examine in the movie is does that make someone not a hero any more? You know, what is the definition of a hero, or an idol, and all these expectations we have of them.
You’ve actually worked for WWE in the past…
Yeah, I worked there as a writer and I worked there for about four months, and I ended up getting let go for… it was kind of a weird situation. I didn’t have any bad blood at all, or any disagreement. Basically you work in a team of writers, and the team wasn’t much of a team – it’s more of a one-man show, and I just felt like I could never get any of my ideas through to anybody.
And when you leave and you make a movie I think you prove yourself, that like, “I’m better than you guys knew about or were willing to accept.” But I don’t have any animosity towards them. I actually thought, while working there, that Vince McMahon was probably one of the most awesome people to talk to – just being able to hang out with him and talk to him a lot.
You know, you meet your heroes, you meet Hulk Hogan and you don’t got much to say to him, and I realised that my career path and what I was doing was actually a lot like Vince. I like to work out and stay in shape, but I also like to be the thinker, the innovator, trying to think of new things and ways to do them. So Vince really just became a big inspiration to me.
From your experience with Vince during that time, do you think there will be a difference between how he might react to the film on a personal level and how
he reacts outwardly to the public?
There might be a weird dichotomy there, because the film is very down the middle. It basically tells the facts about steroids, and a lot of people come away with the idea that, “Well, steroids might not be as bad as we thought.” And if that’s what you come away with then maybe that’s your conclusion, but I didn’t really try to put a conclusion in the film.
I think Vince is in a difficult position, because if he comes out and says, “I love it” then people will say he’s supporting steroid use or something. But if he says he hates it then people will say that if it’s all about steroid education, why would you hate this? So he might even be in a position where he can’t comment at all.
Everybody wants to come down on wrestling for steroid use and all these other things, but we’re not looking at the bigger picture: it’s in every sport. It’s basically everywhere you look. In the movie I could have went into wrestling and made it look bad and tried to bury WWE. But why would I do that when I love wrestling? I’ve watched it since I was a little kid, I think it’s great entertainment, it’s been amazing for me, and what I was actually trying to say is that wrestling isn’t the bad guy here.
Our society has this win-at-all-costs attitude, and everybody from golfers to baseball players to basketball players to hockey players – everybody’s using steroids. So why are we so fixated in the media on burying wrestling? And they attack Vince so much that, to me, it’s totally unfair. If you’re gonna attack people, attack everybody.
So when we went out to talk to all these different sports entities, there was really no one that was cooperative. Vince didn’t say anything but actually I talked to Shane, and he said, “Chris, I’d love to help you out, but we just can’t get involved in something like this, because we’re always just killed by the media, and I hope you understand.”
Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the United States Olympic Committee all turned us down, and told us that we couldn’t use any footage. So we had to employ this law called ‘Fair Use’, and make an argument for each shot that we used to illustrate a point. And there are certain parameters of the Fair Use initiative, like you have to be making a social commentary, that the footage doesn’t exist in any other format or whatever – there were certain rules you had to go by.
When it comes to all those different organisations covered in the film, what has the response been like from the dedicated sports media?
We’ve been getting some pretty outstanding reviews. A lot of the sports journalists have been saying these things for a while, and a lot of ideas in the movie are kind of our take on them. Like, we were looking at this one journalist talking about Tiger Woods getting Lasik eye surgery and we thought maybe that should be a theme in our movie. So we definitely did a lot of research, and as a documentary filmmaker that’s what you do – you kind of go out and collect all the best news clippings and you put it all together and tell a story.
There’s a perception that wrestling fans are quite smart to the need for and use of steroids. In your experience with these other fields, do you think wrestling fans really are any more advanced in their understanding than your average sports fan?
I think wrestling fans don’t care. They like big guys and they want to see entertainment. Vince put a Wellness Program in after the Eddie Guerrero incident and then kind of tightened down more after the Chris Benoit incident, and I don’t necessarily think that wrestlers shouldn’t be allowed to use steroids. I just think that they shouldn’t be using them illegally – they should be totally supervised by a doctor.
But part of the allure of wrestling is these big, jakked, larger-than-life guys, and I think it’s totally different than when you’re playing a sport that involves fair play. In wrestling, their idea of fair play is arm-wrestling a guy and pulling him over the table and hitting him in the head with a chair, you know? It’s entertainment, so it doesn’t necessarily involve “cheating” as long as it’s done in a safe manner.
We’ve shown that these drugs can be used safely and effectively under the medical care of doctors, and the biggest problem is that we’ve driven this behaviour so far underground that nobody’s going to go to a doctor because they’re not willing to prescribe it, and there are all these different factors that are making steroid use a lot crazier than it should be.
It’s to the point now, as you noted in the movie, that it’s difficult to get any real education on it because the culture has become so underground.
Yeah, and you could go to a doctor and get it prescribed, which a lot of people do, but the fact is that there aren’t a whole lot of doctors that know a whole lot about steroids. You go to medical school and you’re there for eight years, but how much of that is spent learning about anabolic steroids?
In discussing this with some doctors that do prescribe anabolic steroids and human growth hormone, they said it’s about four hours. And I’m like, that’s it? That’s all you learn about this powerful hormone that’s in everybody’s body? And I think that’s a testament to the fact that these drugs have been demonised, and we need more research and information before we can make any judgements.
There was German research published last year by Giselher Spitzer (see issue 22), which studied Olympic athletes in the former East Germany who had been pumped full of these drugs over long periods. The outcome of that study was overwhelmingly negative…
A lot of that had to do with the women, right? The swim team and stuff like that?
In women it was causing a lot of miscarriages and physical and mental deformation in subsequent generations of children.
You know, these are powerful male hormones, and when you put them into women you’re basically asking for trouble. However, it’s been shown in women to increase sex drive, to help cure osteoporosis and all these other things, but like I said – monitored by a doctor, in the right dosages.
You get these women that have abused steroids for either athletic purposes or bodybuilding, and you saw the one woman in our film who says, [gruff masculine voice] “I like to stay feminine and I still look like a woman,” and she’s kidding herself a little bit. But steroids have what they call ‘virilising effects’, which basically means they will turn you into a man.
The enlarging of the clitoris, for example, is the vagina turning into a penis. It’s really scary. So if you’re a woman you really have to consider, do you want those side effects? But then there are over 200 different kinds of steroids, so there are steroids that are safe and effective for use in the right way on women as well.
So we have to take all these things into consideration and re-evaluate what society thinks about steroids, because they’ve been demonised and driven underground and nobody wants to talk about it. All I wanted to say in the movie was, “I’m not gonna tell you this is good or bad, I’m just gonna tell you this is what it is.”
As you brought up, Tiger Woods underwent laser eye surgery and now has better than 20/20 vision. There’s Paralympian “The Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius, who has been cleared to compete against able-bodied athletes with his carbon-fibre legs. Swimmers can wear full-body hydrodynamic swimsuits that mimic sharkskin. There’s all these other forms of performance enhancement, many involving surgical modification, that don’t seem to be forbidden. Yet steroids, derived from naturally occurring hormones and bodily agents, are classified as cheating. Why is that?
Well, you look back at World War II and we’re at war with the Germans, who are pumping up their soldiers with testosterone. It started with that and grew into the sports world, with the Germans and Russians using it, and they were our ultimate enemy – you only have to watch Rocky IV and these old war movies.
I think it just got this bad rap, because that was what “the cheaters” used, like, “Oh, those evil Russians are cheaters, they’re using drugs to win.” And it began this idea that using drugs to win is a bad thing, whereas every other profession – for example, you look at rock and roll, drugs are so accepted that to be a good singer or songwriter you have to be on drugs, almost.
And those drugs are definitely shown to be a lot more dangerous – drugs like cocaine have been shown to cause more emergency room visits and adverse side effects. So I feel like they’ve been demonised from day one because it came from that “Eastern Block” mentality.
If you look at some of these performance enhancers, like that runner needing his legs chopped off – I don’t think anybody would elect to have that done. If they would, they’re crazy! But there’s an interesting case of Tommy John, who was a pitcher for the New York Yankees, and he became known for ‘Tommy John Surgery’, where they take a tendon from your knee and replace it into your elbow.
They did that basically out of desperation, because this guy couldn’t really move his arm any more, and they said, “You’ll probably never play baseball again, but we’ll so how it works out.” And the way it worked out was it made him pitch faster and he played 14 seasons after that surgery. And they said that with a ‘real’ arm, he probably wouldn’t have been able to play that long or throw that fast.
So now if anybody gets a tweak in their elbow, they go get Tommy John Surgery. And they have to sit out, it takes about a year to recover, but once you recover you’re throwing the ball faster. So are people using it for performance enhancing effects, or are they using it because they actually need it?
Like Tiger Woods.
Exactly, that’s where the question comes in of Tiger Woods – was he trying to gain an advantage, or was he just like, “Sure, I’ll get my vision to 20/15 instead of 20/20 – that’d be nice, to be able to see al little bit better than everybody else!” So that’s where you have to look at the intention. I was brought up in a very moral Christian family, and all in all I was brought up to play by the rules and not to cheat. So if you play a sport, you have to play by the rules. But what are the rules?
In bodybuilding and powerlifting there are no rules against steroids. But if you look at the same profession, of professional athletes, a baseball player is a cheater because it’s against the rules in his sport, but a powerlifter isn’t a cheater because it’s not against the rules in his sport. So whatever the rules of a sport are I think people should live and play by them, otherwise you have lawlessness – you have what goes on in pro wrestling when the ref takes a bump!
It’s just like in the movie where we show “The Million Dollar Man” hiring the evil twin referee to cheat The Hulkster out of the title. You have to define what cheating actually is in a sport, and then you have to be able to enforce it. For example, the Olympics are coming up and there’s gonna be 15,000 athletes in Beijing, and there’s not a test for human growth hormone. So how do we know that there’s not 15,000 athletes all taking it?
So again, you’ve gotta enforce the rules – they say you can’t use growth hormone, but they’re not gonna test you for it? Because they don’t want to put up the money, even though they have a billion-dollar contract with NBC, and they don’t want to throw a little bit of money at testing? It’s really bizarre.
And when they do conduct testing you get situations like Carl Lewis, where – as you highlighted in the film – if you fail a drug test but you’re one of the ‘chosen ones’, maybe you didn’t fail the drug test after all.
Right, you get the golden pass. If you look at WWE and the Chris Masters case, he was released because he failed a couple of drug tests, but he was trying to get his life back together and go through rehab and things like that. Then you look at the case of Randy Orton, whose name was on this [Signature Pharmacy] list with all these other wrestlers, like Edge and everybody else.
All the guys who were over didn’t get fired, but they had to make an example of somebody – so they make an example of the guy who doesn’t have as many fans and isn’t as over with the crowd. But if they’re going to have a Wellness Program I think that everybody should follow those rules, because it’s an honour to wrestle for WWE.
Your brother, Mike, had that honour quite regularly as an enhancement guy. Probably his most (in)famous match was against Perry Saturn on WWE Jakked, where Perry got really rough with him – there was a botched spot and he just flipped out, in what many would term a “roid rage”, and beat the hell out of Mike. What do you remember of that match?
Well, Perry Saturn is a complete asshole, first of all. What happened was he went for a hiptoss, and he was all messed up on painkillers – at the time, my brother said he could barely even talk straight. Before they went out to the ring he wasn’t listening, and Mike was saying we need to do this and a this, and he’s just like, [gruff, strung-out voice] “Yeah, I’ll tell you what to do when we’re out there,” and he was just being a jack-off.
So they went out there and they messed up this one spot, and Perry basically threw my brother out of the ring and he landed on his neck – he could have broken his neck. Then Perry proceeded to punch him in the face and smack him around, and it’s like the only time Mike has ever shown restraint in his life – I’ve seen my brother beat up a lot of people, because he’s not the most sane guy either.
But he told me afterwards that when he was in that match he was like, “This is my big chance, and I can go back and tell Vince, ‘Hey, this is what happened and I stayed professional.’” But nothing came of it – Vince and everyone asked if he was okay, and Saturn got in big trouble for it and got given the Moppy gimmick, but if my brother had kicked his ass in the middle of the ring, that would have been a different story.
You know, you never get ahead by being a nice guy. And the problem with that is that my brother isn’t a litigious guy – and he could have sued WWE for a tonne of money, because he hurt his neck so bad that he still has arthritis in it. His neck is all screwed up now. And it really pisses you off watching your own brother, and you know he’s being paid to get beat up – but not humiliated.
If you’re gonna commit to go out there and wrestle, and somebody messes something up – whether it was Mike’s fault or Perry’s fault – the guys are there working together. And I think anybody who does something like that is a complete, unprofessional asshole, and should be kicked out of the league…
For the rest of this feature, check out issue 30 of FSM – available at WH Smith and all good retailers. (For US readers we are now carried at Borders and Barnes & Noble, so check for local availability or click here to subscribe.)
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