The College Football Problem by Rick Telander

Author:Rick Telander [Telander, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683583530
Published: 2020-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

The head coaches are the ones who set the tone for any program, but the assistants, the position coaches, are the ones who can really mess with your head. They are the ones who grade your films, who sit through meetings with you, who know your every quirk, who whisper into your earhole while the head coach is high above in his tower or roving in a golf cart.

Last fall I wrote an article for Sports Illustrated about Tommy Chaikin, a former star nose tackle at South Carolina who nearly lost his mind and his life to anabolic steroid abuse. Tommy got big and strong and mean from taking the drugs—he grew from 220 to 270 pounds, increased his bench press to 500 pounds, and sometimes had visions of tearing people’s limbs off—but he also became physically and mentally ill. One day in the fall of 1987, the heart palpitations, anxiety attacks, paranoia, and depression became too much for him and he locked himself in his dorm room and placed a cocked and loaded .357 magnum under his chin. He was saved by his father, and after time spent in the psych ward at a Maryland hospital and then resting at home, he got his degree from South Carolina in the spring of 1988. He’s okay now, though he’s still not 100 percent.

As we sat working on the story, I was shocked by the physical horrors Tommy related. But the worst abuse was the way his position coach, defensive-line coach Jim Washburn, who had tacitly approved of Tommy’s steroid use, continued to play with Tommy’s mind, to work on his insecurities, even when Tommy was clearly deranged. By the end Tommy had reached the point where he was having anxiety attacks that were so severe he could not move, that made him feel so unbearably out of control that he thought constantly of committing suicide to end the pain. He could not distinguish colors any longer, but saw the whole world in faded, terrifying blurs of light and shadow. Against East Carolina in his third year at South Carolina he had an angina attack, a pre–heart attack condition marked by chest pains, numbness in the arms, and chills. Paramedics cut off his jersey and took him in an ambulance to the hospital where a doctor told him his blood pressure readings were off the charts. It was clear that Chaikin was beset with severe emotional and physical problems, and yet linebacker coach Washburn continued to goad Chaikin to get him to play even harder. “He would start other players in my spot to get me riled up,” says Chaikin. “He would scream at me if I made a mistake and tell me I was no good. He would say strange things like, ‘Ever think of just ripping someone’s head off?’He was hung up on being macho.”

I asked Tommy if he didn’t hate Washburn for what he had done to him, and he said no. He shrugged. Washburn was a coach,

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