a bit of personal perspective
Obviously, every player's experience is different. But for anyone who's tempted to believe the inference that Clemens and Pettitte never really talked about the steroids, hGH, Hydroxycut, Ephedra, speed, etc., here is one guy's experience ...
My college career overlapped Clemens. We played in the same conference (SWC), which at that time was the national powerhouse conference. At one point, all but one school in the conference was ranked in the Top 20, including 4 of the top 10 ranked (including both UT and my school). Among the elite Division I programs, baseball is an extraordinarily time demanding enterprise. Minimum 60 hours a week, not including travel during season.
Even back in those days, at the major college level, baseball's old-school dismissal of weight-training and physical fitness had been replaced by a "bigger, faster, stronger" mentality. Our mandatory weight program was overseen by the football weight program coaches in football facilities. 6-8 hours of weight work a week. Not standing around chit-chatting work. Serious, grinding to muscle failure with a scary defensive line coach screaming in your ear work.
Game days were an enormous relief from the practice workload -- 6-7 hour practices were the norm (that's in addition to your dawn weight routine, and post-practice running requirements). The human body and its joints wasn't meant to stand up to that. Which is where the rationalizations about "medicine" begin. Not long into the fall season, guys are begging for help from the training room. Mega-size bottles of aspirin sat at the back of the dugout. Guys gobbled them by the handful like candy. Yes, take a large enough handful of aspirin and it will numb the elbow and shoulder (in addition to the anti-inflammatory properties, it will literally get you tingly numb). But that's never enough. Guys in my era were in the training room constantly. I was naive, I HATED needles, I was a bit of a goody-two-shoes, I was decidedly not a "tough guy", macho type, swallow anything they hand me, stick a needle anywhere and laugh about it kind of guy. I wish I could say I had the clarity to have refused all the crap everyone else was loading up on because I had some grand morality that didn't want to cheat my opponents. In truth, that construct never even occurred to me. I didn't do the stuff mostly because the whole scene scared me. I was also the kid that skipped the unknown ingredient punch bowl at the party because I was afraid it might have been spiked with acid and I didn't want to get strung out on acid on a trip I couldn't control.
But most normal college kids don't have those reservations, and in the testosterone-laden, tough-guy, macho-guy environment of Division I elite athletics, it's almost a badge of honor to be devil-may-care unconcerned about this stuff. In fact, my introduction to the needle and dope culture came when I got sent after hours to the trainer to get "fixed up" so I could endure the practices which had ground my elbow into such pain I couldn't sleep at night. The preferred anti-inflammatory drug of choice back then was, naturally, illegal. Well, not entirely. It was legal for use on horses, although banned for use on humans. I refused. Virtually no one else did. And so the macabre jokes in the locker room were spawned, as the drug was known, in addition to destroying liver function, to cause infertility and shrinkage of testicles if used for periods of longer than 3 weeks. Or at least that's the info we got on the grapevine and on the sly from the doctors we asked "off the record". Which brings us to the first myth - the notion that a serious athlete, or someone with a potential future career wouldn't dare put something in their body they didn't know about. Utter nonsense. Nothing could be further from the truth. What was viewed as career-threatening was NOT keeping up, not taking what was necessary to get to the top. As for guys not knowing, it's a culture, you go to the training room, you do what everyone else does, what the trainer and doctors tell you to do. Even if they're asking you to sneak in after hours, you do it. (Well, some of us didn't. But lots did.). Look, over the course of my years in the game, I played with and against, directly, at least 100 guys who made it to The Show. I'm not speculating on the mentality.
And of course, there were the steroids and speed. I was unaware of hGH back then, and don't think it was there. But steroids and speed were. They were simply part of the landscape. They aren't thought of as some sort of exotic thing, they were just something guys did as part of the culture of doing what it takes to get to the next level, always the next level. I never knew a pitcher that didn't at virtually all times of the day, every day of the week, have a constant running thought about how to get an extra couple miles an hour on the fastball. Ditto for fields, always wanting just a little more umph on the old gun, leadoff hitters who didn't want just a bit more basestealing speed, guys who didn't want just a bit more power to convert some of those warning track shots into homers. "If only I had just that little bit more" is the constant mentality. Think about that mentality and you begin to understand why the entire all-consuming pursuit of that "little bit more" can lead to a whole range of things guys are willing to do to get it.
Rest assured, not only did guys keep the running jokes about shrinkage, sterility and sex alive at all times in the locker room, casual talk about all the rest of this was just part of the daily chatter. In the weight room guys were constantly worried about packing on pounds and gaining strength. It was an "event" when someone sheered off a bat in the cage. Macho hoorah. (Yes, even top-end Easton aluminum bats do "break" ... or literally sheer in half, when they reach metal fatigue).
Beyond the group macho talk that was pretty much always around, there were the more serious private conversations. I know everyone had them. The times where just you and your closest buddy or buddies on the team, asked each other what kinds of stuff you were doing and was it helping, and were you afraid? Yes, guys get abscesses once in a great while from needle use. It's just part of the deal. They get pimples and their testicles shrink, and all kinds of other uncool stuff. It isn't a secret. But the mindset is, "everyone's doing it, I gotta do it to keep up" and "if everyone does it, obviously you come out the other side ok, right?"
And remember, it's not just baseball players hanging out with baseball players. Scholarship athletes spend most of their lives at the athletic facilities and the teams and sports intermingle. The cultures of each sport are different, to be sure, but they all have a common bond, and no matter which sport you're in, you've got plenty of friends in the others and you hang and have a pretty good idea what it all looks like.
At any rate, I guess what I'm saying is, if you've been inside that world, you know the notion of Pettitte and Clemens working out all those years, doing everything they can to refine their diets, their workout regimens, etc., and never talking about drugs and doping, regardless of what they eventually chose to take or not take, is simply impossible for me to imagine, much less believe.
In the end, some guys use, some guys don't. But the idea that there are some guys who do the stuff, but talk about it only once or twice in a lifetime, is preposterous.
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