Gary Aprahamian - Ken Leistner (1984)

Steve Zinn reports that Gary Aprahamiam died in his sleep on August 23rd, 1984. He was 22 years of age. A phenomenal strength athlete who had an 18" arm when he was 15 years old, a man who made training lifts of 1015 in the squat, 640 in the bench, and 800 in the deadlift. He was never able to put such lifts together in competition, and reportedly overindulged himself in many ways, including the intake of up to three gallons of milk per day.

An autopsy revealed that he died of an immune system failure. He had no white corpuscles in his system to fight off infection. The autopsy also revealed that his liver weighed 50 pounds (six pounds is normal), and both his heart and digestive tract were three times normal size. 

The article begins . . . 

By now, the news will be as cold to many of you as the body: Gary Aprahamian is dead. Much will be made of his passing by those who can use him as an example and this, as much as his loss by those close to him, would be a crime. 

I did not know Gary that well, although, like everyone else in the New York area, I knew a lot about him. He was a monstrous teenage, a true phenomena that threatened to lift world record poundages. Tales of his combative skills were bandied about at many a local tavern. He had a bright future ahead of him.

Anyone who weighs 350-400 pounds at 5'8" is going to have serious health problems in addition to favorable powerlifter leverages. 

I met Gary a year ago, and we discussed his recent weight loss (down to 300-320), and his lifting difficulties. His calorie and protein consumption were far in excess of his actual requirements and his overall lifestyle was in need of discipline. 

His intake of fats was dangerously high. His list of health problems was extensive: chronic bronchitis, recurrent kidney infections, numerous colds and minor illnesses. He claimed no blood pressure problems, but he did little or no cardiovascular work. One needed little medical training to understand that he was on a very dangerous path.  

Gary trained at Steve Zinn's Gym in New York, at the Brooklyn-Queens border. When I last spoke with Steve, he told me of Gary's demise and, to his knowledge the cause of death was respiratory failure, a consequence of avoiding hospitalization despite having pneumonial infection in both lungs, compounded by kidney dysfunction.

"He decided to train with double pneumonia. He should've been in the hospital, but he refused to go."  

There was also speculation that his immune system was not functioning properly and there was some sort of blood dyscrasia. He had been told to reduce his protein intake to relieve the stress on his kidneys, but this advice, too, was ignored. 

His heart and other organs (starting to sound familiar?) showed enlargement and signs of degeneration. 

His lungs, of normal size, were literally being crushed by other internal structures.

In addition to his lifting, Gary spent his time working as a bouncer in various area establishments. This meant late nights, exposure to alcohol and other agents, and an occasional episode of violence. 

An objective look at the entire package would easily reveal a physiological accident waiting to happen. Longevity future health would have been a longshot at best.

I will not state that Gary did or did not use anabolic drugs. I believe that he was exceptionally strong long before he even heard of the drugs. Already, there are those trying to profit from Gary's death, trying to use him as an example of the 'scourge of steroid use' (starting to sound familiar?). There are those claiming that he died as a direct result of steroid use. There's no doubt that anyone who does use anabolic steroids or other growth-inducing agents runs a risk. No one knows what the risk is quantitatively, not yet. 

Some would have you believe the risks are so minimal, as to be "textbook cases only." The other side, one individual in particular, would have you believe that they are in intimate contact with the best bodybuilders, powerlifters, and field event men in all the world and thus know precisely what they do or do not take, and, furthermore, that numerous good friends, top competitors all, have died, are dying, or definitely will die or live their lives with every organ at the point of meltdown.   

The truth, as it will probably be revealed two or three decades down the road (written in 1984), will be somewhere in the middle. I'd be shocked if the drugs proved to be risk free. I'd be shocked if some of the potential damage wasn't of a serious nature. I'd be just as shocked if we discover that absolutely every steroid user, or even every heavy user, is subject to that damage. 

Some individuals will have greater sensitivity than others, some will suffer serious ill effects on very low dosages. Others will take enough to float everyone in the Pro Bowl and never regret it. 

One of the greatest dangers lies not in the taking of the drugs, but in the perception of them. 

The trouble lies in both camps. You've got medical doctors stating that many "patients" have suffered no side effects with steroid use. Well, the "MD" after the name gives any statement a lot of clout, or at least makes it easier to rationalize a drugtaking stance. If it is a given truth that "everyone" at the top in powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, and bodybuilding is using and that if the NFL started testing for athletic enhancement drugs they'd have trouble fielding a dozen teams, then it makes it very easy for an athlete to feel that he'd be foolish not to use, if performance was important to him. After all, "all the guys aren't dying and the doctor says it's okay." 

On the other side, we have the "experts," hawking their wares everywhere, selling as hard as they can with the stance that "you will die if you take this pill!" Citing chapter and verse, listing every dread disease known to modern medicine; never naming but implying that almost every former "Mister" winner is suffering through the final stages of cancer, liver, and cardiac deterioration; they present their case from the "scare the hell out of you, because it's true" point of view. 

The uninformed may, in fact, be scared off anabolic use, and that's good, but it's for the wrong reason. 

If an impressionable kid sees the same lifters, bodybuilders, and football players doing well, year after year, he wonders, in time, if his fears may be misplaced. At some point there's the chance that he'll say "screw this, these guys aren't in the hospital or dropping dead; I'm going for it!" 

It's time for someone, someone armed with facts and/or a reasonable semblance of the facts to present an anti-drug case. Athletes will decide to ignore the drug sellers only if they believe it's in their best interest to do so.

 If they believe, based on an informed decision, that they could succeed as well without steroids as they would with them, then the market would dwindle.

 If they believed that any possible performance enhancement might be compromised by physiological damage, the market would dwindle. 

If it was believed that it was not in their best interest to use anabolic steroids and related drugs, they wouldn't. 

As long as you've got hysterical screaming on one end, and an everything's-cool-for-the-profit attitude on the other, the athletes will fall back on competitive instinct and that instinct will keep many using. 

I don't want my son to use drugs for any purpose, especially for athletic enhancement. Forget about fairness and other such stuff. I hope that he participates in athletics for the joy of doing so and for the physical benefits, and that he will realize that drug use compromises both. 

I would regret that he was exposed to doctors and others who advocate drug use for their own profit, and those who would exaggerate the smallest scientific truths to propagate the opposing position, also for profit. 

I would very much regret Gary Aprahamian being used for profit, because it would neither be true, nor fair. 

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Chuck Klosterman, New York Times bestselling critic, journalist, and, yes, football psychotic, did not write this book to deepen your appreciation of the game. He's not trying to help you become that person at the party, or to teach you how to make better bets, or to validate any preexisting views you might have about the sport (positive or negative). 

Football does, in fact, do all of those things. But not in the way such things have been done in the past, and never in a way any normal person would expect. 

A hilarious but nonetheless groundbreaking contribution to the argument about which force shapes American life the most.

 

Cut it out and come up with an original title! 

Enjoy Your Lifting!