BELL LAP #23

MARK MCGWIRE--THREAT TO MASTERS RUNNERS? (February 9, 2000)

When I last visited (in this column, at least) with homerun slugger Mark McGwire, it was with a concern that his admitted use of androstendione might have adversely influenced our nation's youth. "Andro" sales skyrocketed in the months after McGwire rose to glory and admitted taking the stuff, and most of those sales have been attributed to young people wanting to be muscle-bound like Mark.

Not too long ago, McGwire reported that he had stopped taking the substance. To paraphrase the slugger-king, he doesn't want to have that kind of impact on kids, even though there isn't anything wrong with taking Andro. Or something like that. I hereby dub that kind of reasoning "baseball player logic."

Now, though, I have to admit that McGwire's greatest legacy might not be in corrupting youth, but rather aging males like myself. I say this after receiving--over the past few months--five separate12-page, magazine-size brochures from a company called "Gero Vita Laboratories" in Toronto, Canada. These flyers promise some magical things to us guys over 50 if we'll buy their products. More to the point, they warn about dire consequences--most of which involve various forms of catastrophic shrinkage--if we don't.

Believe me, this can get your attention.

One of these brochures is titled, "The Key to Great Sex for Men Over 50." It shows a somewhat eroded but nattily-dressed male sitting on a director's chair (nice loafers, dude!), with a fetching blonde behind him, her hands on his shoulders, a baseball cap on her head, and a "Whatta guy!" look in her eyes.

Seeing this, I immediately concluded that "the key" must be a 25-year-old girlfriend. But actually--and here's where we get to the McGwire part--the key is buying their products, one of which is an androstendione-based supplement.

McGwire doesn't sign on as an endorsee, but he's definitely the star of the opening paragraphs, which relate in great detail how he got caught with Andro in his locker. Just so us older males get the point, this section is headlined, "It's Not Just Your Bat: It's the Amount of Testosterone Behind It That Makes the Difference!" And it concludes that McGwire successfully defended himself by stating, "It's a legal and important nutritional supplement."

The author of this brochure, Dr. Larry Doss of Ohio--who looks sort of like Tim Allen's "Home Improvement" buddy Al would look if he had an uptown barber--concludes by saying, "Most people in the sports field are excited about androstenedione because it isn't dangerous like the infamous anabolic steroids. There is no heart or kidney danger. It doesn't induce breast growth on men and facial hair on women."

I'm not sure who "most people in the sports field" are, but somebody might let the good doctor know that the stuff is banned by the National Football League, the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee as a performance-enhancing and potentially harmful drug. As Don Catlin, head of the Olympic drug testing laboratory at U.C.L.A. says, "Androstenedione is a steroid, there's no question about it. It shouldn't be available."

Let's conclude this discussion with several important questions:

1) Who gave this company my address? Possible answers: a) the AARP, which seems to have acquired information on every aging human in America; b) my so-called friends.

2) Why is that gray-haired guy on page 5 frowning down at his towel?

3) What does the subheading, "Every woman looks good at 2 a.m." mean?

4) What's that sound? The booting-up, perhaps, of the search engines of thousands of aging Runner's World online readers? Don't you guys know that androstendione is banned? Stop that!