New York Times, November 26, 2003
An Athlete's Dangerous Experiment
By JERE LONGMAN
LANO, Tex., Nov. 25 - After recording one save last season,
Taylor Hooton expected to join the starting rotation next
spring for the baseball team at Plano West Senior High
School.
"You could count on the kid to throw strikes," said Billy
Ajello, Taylor's best friend and a catcher at Plano West,
which is located amid the affluent sprawl north of Dallas.
By all accounts, Taylor was popular and ebullient. He was
a cousin of Burt Hooton, the former major league pitcher,
and his brother pitched in college. Next spring, he would
make his own mark during his senior season. But on July 15,
a month past his 17th birthday, Taylor Hooton killed
himself. The authorities ruled the death a suicide by
hanging.
His parents and a doctor familiar with the case said they
believe that Taylor's death was related to depression that
he felt upon discontinuing the use of anabolic steroids.
The sense of euphoria and aggression that accompany the use
of steroids can be replaced by lethargy, loss of
confidence, melancholy and hopelessness when a person stops
using performance-enhancing drugs, doctors said.
"It's a pretty strong case that he was withdrawing from
steroids and his suicide was directly related to that,"
said Dr. Larry W. Gibbons, president and medical director
of the Cooper Aerobics Center, a leading preventive
medicine clinic in Dallas. "This is a kid who was well
liked, had a lot good friends, no serious emotional
problems. He had a bright future."
Taylor Hooton's example is extreme, but the use of steroids
by athletes and nonathletes in high school is considered
even more troubling than the use of them by elite athletes
who are involved in widely publicized scandals in sports
like football, baseball and track and field, a number of
doctors said.
While there are relatively few professional athletes, some
doctors estimate that 500,000 to one million high school
students, or more, use steroids. Adolescents are also more
susceptible to some physiological dangers, including
premature cessation of bone growth, which can limit a
person's height, doctors said.
By nature, teenagers are risk takers, and they are less
likely to understand the health risks or to be concerned
with potential side effects like infertility, atrophied
testicles, high blood pressure, liver damage and prostate
cancer, some of which may not appear for 20 or 30 years,
doctors said.
"I'm worried about kids," said Dr. Donald A. Malone, a
psychiatrist at the Cleveland Clinic, who wrote a 1995
study indicating an association between depression and
steroid use. "Elite athletes know the side effects, and
they can afford to pay for the real stuff. Kids don't have
the knowledge, and they're buying it from some clown
selling it at school. Who knows what they're getting?"
High school students take muscle-building steroids to
enhance athletic performance, improve self-confidence and
become more attractive to the opposite sex, athletes and
doctors say. Young athletes say they are influenced by
their professional role models who use illicit substances.
Parents are often clueless about signs of steroid use and
some parents even encourage it in a misguided attempt to
promote their children's careers, doctors said, while many
coaches are also uninformed or seem to turn a blind eye.
Four percent of high school seniors said in 2002 that had
used steroids, according to a survey by the University of
Michigan. Other surveys indicate that 3 percent to 11
percent of high school students said they had used
steroids. A survey by the National Collegiate Athletic
Association indicated that nearly half of college athletes
who admitted using steroids had begun in high school. As
many as 3 percent of eighth graders said they had used
steroids, according to the Michigan survey.
"While we focus on the elite athletes that are headline
grabbers, the underbelly of all this is a much more serious
problem," Dr. Gary I. Wadler, a professor of medicine at
New York University, said.
Parents and students are rarely willing to speak about
steroid use in high school. But Don Hooton, Taylor's
father, and Ajello, Taylor's close friend, have begun
holding seminars and granting interviews, believing that
parents, administrators and coaches need to become better
educated and need to confront the issue more forcefully, so
that another tragedy may be prevented.
"Don't tell me it's not a problem," Don Hooton, a director
of worldwide marketing for Hewlett-Packard, said. "My kid
just died."
Symptoms Overlooked
Those who knew Taylor Hooton described him as a young man
who smiled often, was popular with girls and had many
friends from different backgrounds. "He was very popular,"
Blake Boydston, the baseball coach at Plano West, said. "He
always came to the field in good spirits. When he spoke, it
was, `Thank you; no, sir; yes, sir.' "
Ajello said that Taylor was also a teenager who colored his
hair and looked twice when he passed a mirror. During a
chemistry class in the fall of 2002, Taylor mentioned that
he might begin using steroids, Ajello said. When Ajello
asked why, he said Taylor replied: "I'm not doing it for
baseball. I'm doing it for myself."
After Taylor's death, his parents said they had learned
from his psychiatrist that he had low self-esteem, and that
to feel as if he measured up, he had to make himself
bigger, drive a big pickup truck. A junior varsity coach
had also suggested to Taylor that he get bigger, Don Hooton
said.
Late last winter and into the spring, Don and Gwen Hooton,
who is an elementary school teacher, began to notice
changes in Taylor's physique and behavior. Taylor, who was
6 feet 1 1/2 inches, grew to 205 pounds from about 175
pounds. Initially, his parents did not suspect steroid use.
Don Hooton said he felt proud that his son seemed to be
working hard in the weight room.
"There is a checklist of symptoms, and he was showing
almost all of them," Don Hooton said. "We didn't know any
better. We should have."
Taylor began to develop acne on his back and to exhibit
signs of aggressiveness and irritability that are often
associated with steroid use, his parents said. He flew into
rages, then became tearfully apologetic. He took several
hundred dollars from his parents' bank account without
permission. He would pound the floor with his fists in
anger. Once, he punched a wall and injured a knuckle on his
pitching hand.
After his death, his parents said, they learned that Taylor
had hurled a phone through a wall, hiding the damage behind
a picture, and had pummeled his girlfriend's former
boyfriend, who required nine stitches to close a wound.
Ajello said that he had warned Taylor about the health
risks of steroids, but that Taylor "kind of blew it off."
Apparently, none of Taylor's friends alerted an adult.
"The last thing you want to do is accuse someone of being
on steroids," Ajello said. "You don't want to make their
work ethic look bad."
Boydston, the high school's baseball coach, said he had
noticed no troubling behavior by Taylor, and that if he
seemed to be gaining weight, it appeared natural. "He had
room to grow," Boydston said.
Eventually, Taylor's parents became suspicious. He
mentioned an interest in steroids, then later confided to
his brother, Donald, that he was using them, while still
denying it to his parents.
At his parents' urging, Taylor was tested for drugs last
April, but his parents said they later discovered that the
screening had involved recreational drugs, not steroids.
When the test came back clean, Taylor told his parents, "I
told you I hadn't been doing anything."
Still, his behavior grew more alarming. During a rage last
April, he told his mother, "I'll just take a knife and end
it now." His parents sent him to a psychiatrist. Taylor
told the doctor that he had been injecting himself with the
steroid Deca 300, and taking oral Anadrol, Don Hooton said,
but by May 19 Taylor said he had stopped using the drugs.
Ajello said he believed that Taylor had halted his usage
later and had planned to start again after a family
vacation to England in July.
While on the trip, Taylor did something completely out of
character, stealing a digital camera and a laptop computer,
his father said. When the family returned home on July 14,
his parents, brother and sister confronted Taylor and told
him that his behavior had become unacceptable. He was
grounded.
The next morning, Taylor asked his mother to lift the
punishment, but she said no. He went upstairs and, using
belts to fashion a noose, hung himself from the door in his
bedroom, Don Hooton said. Later, when Taylor's room was
inspected by the police and his father, vials of steroids,
along with syringes and needles, were found. An autopsy
revealed the presence of the metabolized steroids
19-norandrosterone and 19-noretiocholanolone in Taylor's
system, a report by the Collin County medical examiner
said.
Taylor was not the first athlete whose death was believed
to be related to the psychological effects of steroid use.
In August 1989, Eric Elofson of Bakersfield, Calif., hung
himself from a tree in his front yard. He had stopped using
Dianabol about a month before his suicide, his parents
wrote in a journal, The Physician and Sports Medicine.
Suicide attempts related to steroid withdrawal are "more
common than most people suspect," Dr. Harrison Pope, a
Harvard psychiatrist who has done extensive research on
steroids, said.
No Drug Testing at School
After Taylor Hooton died, Plano West made counselors
available to its baseball players. In September, 600
administrators, coaches, students and parents attended a
steroids seminar at the school. Another seminar earlier
this month at Plano Senior High School drew a disappointing
number of male athletes, Don Hooton said.
He and Ajello said they doubted that the school district
was taking the dangers of steroids seriously. Ajello said
that Boydston, the baseball coach, had not mentioned
Taylor's death to him since shortly after school started, a
statement the coach said was inaccurate.
"They don't want to talk about it," Ajello, an 18-year-old
senior, said of school officials. "They want to pretend it
didn't happen. The administration will probably tell you
otherwise, but from a student's perspective, it's done and
over with."
Mike Hughes, the athletic director and football coach at
Plano West, disputed this. "We're not trying to brush it
aside," he said. "We hurt, but we have to move on and
continue to educate kids."
Phil Saviano, the principal at Plano West, said Taylor
Hooton's death was his first encounter with steroids.
Some of the coaches and athletic officials insist that
steroids are not a big problem at Plano West. Hughes said,
"I have been in the district 21 years and I have not known
of a kid that was on steroids."
Asked about the most urgent challenges the school faced
with students, Boydston said, "I think steroids are at the
bottom of the list."
Ajello had a more disturbing assessment. He said that he
had never used steroids himself, but that use of steroids
at Plano West was "extremely widespread" before Taylor's
death. Some students had been scammed by dealers selling
vials containing water and cooking spray, he said. "Some
kids have stopped," Ajello said. "It hit home to some
people, but I don't think enough."
Don Hooton said he had no evidence that coaches encouraged
his son to use steroids. Hughes and Boydston said they had
advised players to get bigger and stronger properly,
through better nutrition and weight lifting, and had
cautioned against using steroids.
The translation of that message by players is somewhat more
complicated, Ajello said. "Coaches don't come out and say,
`Take steroids,' " Ajello said. "Freshman, sophomore,
junior year, they tell you you're too small. A kid thinks
high school sports are everything: `I have to take it to
the next level to get bigger and stronger to play.'
"You take every little step, every chance you get to win,
to play, to step on that field in front of a couple of
thousand people on Friday night. I think the coaches know
and almost kind of turn their heads. I think if they knew
for sure, certain coaches would pull a kid aside and say,
`What are you doing?' I think other coaches would turn
their heads, and even if they knew wouldn't say anything to
a kid."
The United States Supreme Court has granted schools
permission to screen for drug use among students who
participate in extracurricular activities. A school
district like Plano, which has built a $15 million stadium
and indoor practice facilities for its three high school
football teams, could surely afford drug testing, Don
Hooton said.
But school district officials say they cannot afford to
test students for drugs. "We've all said drug testing is
good," Cliff Odenwald, athletic director for the Plano
district, said. "At this point, with the financial
situation we're in, we can't do that."
School officials said that the football facilities were
built through bond issues approved by voters and that money
for drug testing would have to come out of an annual
district budget that is stretched to the limit. This year,
the district sent $130 million, or 32 percent of its
budget, to the state for use by less affluent school
districts, officials said, and next year Plano faces a $15
million budget cut.
So how are students to be discouraged from using steroids?
Dr. Tedd Mitchell, associate medical director of the Cooper
Aerobics Center, said the most effective approach might be
an appeal to their honor.
"If you play football," Mitchell said, "you never say,
`We'll let this team have 11 players and you get 8.' That's
cheating. If you start cranking up on steroids, that's
cheating. Any coach that allows this is allowing cheating.
Any parent trying to live vicariously through their kids
and who looks the other way is allowing cheating."
Copyright © 2003 by The New York Times