True Heroes Don’t Inspire Tragedy

Early in the 2001 major league baseball season, Rob Garibaldi was astonished after seeing Barry Bonds. As Garibaldi’s father tells the story, his son spoke in exclamation points: “Look at him! He must’ve put on 30 pounds! Look at his shoulders! His head!”

Ray Garibaldi never paid much attention, but his son did: “Bonds was his idol.”

They were lefthanded-hitting outfielders who grew up near San Francisco and became college players at the highest level. More than hero worship, Garibaldi had a clinical interest. He studied videotape of the Giants’ great hitter, looking for mechanics to incorporate into his swing.

“Rob got another videotape from the previous season and showed me what Bonds looked like then,” Ray Garibaldi says.

Even the father could see the difference from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001. The son said, “Nobody can put on that kind of muscle mass in a period of three months without doing steroids.” What Ray Garibaldi didn’t know, and would learn too late, was that Rob himself had used steroids for almost four years. The father also learned what Rob thought after seeing the new body of his athletic model: If Bonds has to do it, I have to.

Since high school, he had been told to get bigger. Five-foot-11 and 160 pounds wouldn’t cut it. So Rob Garibaldi began with creatine, not a steroid but a “nutritional supplement” that helps build muscle the new-school way. When creatine didn’t get it done, he moved to steroids, because they absolutely get it done and done quickly.

The sticky thing with steroids, aside from documented health risks, is that they’re illegal. Their sale and use without a doctor’s prescription is a felony. Scientists, doctors and lawmakers long ago decided that steroids are drugs so dangerous that they must be subject to medical and legal control.

Not everyone agrees. There are civil libertarians who argue that all drug laws are authoritarian violations that chip away at the basic rights of freedom. And baseball fans have shown by their ticket-buying habits that they don’t much care if their favorite home run hitters are steroid criminals. If a guy wants to shrink his testicles, it’s fine by them as long as he keeps banging baseballs over Big Mac Land, onto Waveland Avenue and into McCovey Cove.

After all, in a performance-enhanced society, what’s the problem with performance-enhanced athletes?

Maybe none. Maybe athletes paying big bucks for pure stuff and expert supervision can make themselves into superheroes without falling into the abyss.

But talk with the Garibaldis. Talk with Ray, a building contractor, and his wife, Denise, a clinical psychologist. Talk with them about their son, Rob, who was told to get bigger and who, in this bizarre sports world we’ve created, knew how to do it and do it quickly.

He became a good college player at Southern California with the help of steroids, which were the beginnings of a horrific story involving trips to Mexico to buy the junk, injection sessions with teammates and blind-eyed supervision by trainers and coaches.

“Rob’s first manic episode,” his mother says, those words chilling, “was in October of 2000 after the College World Series. He was raving, paranoid.”

Breaking up furniture. Threatening people.

“His friends slept with baseball bats,” Denise says.

She first suspected a bipolar episode. The parents learned of their son’s steroid use after he assaulted his father and threatened suicide. Locked in a psychiatric hospital in 2001, he admitted to his parents that he had done three nine-week cycles of steroids over the previous two years. For all of Denise Garibaldi’s training, she was not prepared to see the agonies of her son on steroids.

“He never thought of it as ‘drugs,’ ” she says.

So a kid who would run away from cocaine ran toward steroids?

“Exactly.”

How, then, does she feel about the Bonds stories of late?

“I’m elated. No one was paying any attention before.”

Ray Garibaldi says, “I would like Barry Bonds to own up to it all and say he made a poor choice. Then he could become a different example to these kids. He needs to apologize not for what he has done to himself but for creating a situation where cheating is OK -- and not only OK but a requirement.”

Still needing to be bigger, stigmatized by steroids, Rob Garibaldi was not drafted by professional baseball when his college career ended in 2002. Near midnight on Oct. 1 of that year, he told his father he was going out for a drive. Ray Garibaldi went to bed. Between 6 and 7 the next morning, the police called.

At age 24, Rob Garibaldi had killed himself. He used a pistol.