Steroid Survivor

[Prophet of Mike Zagurski 0]

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/8851251.htm

 

 

Steroid survivor

 

By JOSEPH PERSON

 

Staff Writer

 

 

Del Wilkes never hit rock bottom, try as he might.

 

Every time the former South Carolina football All-American and pro

wrestler thought his life could sink no lower, he would dive deeper

into the muck of his drug addiction and hard-living lifestyle.

 

There was the day when his wife, Teresa, now his ex-wife, drove him to

the Columbia airport while he sat in the passenger seat jamming as

many syringes of steroids into his muscles as he could before a flight

to Japan. One of the needles hit a vein in his buttocks and a stream

of blood sprayed on Teresa, like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino

movie.

 

Only this was real. And as Teresa tried to wipe away the tears and the

blood and asked aloud what kind of life they were living, Wilkes

figured his wife was just having a bad day.

 

Or there were the two occasions he took demo cars off the lot of his

employer, Herndon Chevrolet, and disappeared in search of the next

party and line of cocaine.

 

There were the two weeks he spent in jail in Greenville, where he had

gone to forge prescriptions for pain pills because all the pharmacies

in Columbia were on to his scam.

 

Wilkes, an All-American guard on USC's famous 1984 "Black Magic" team,

was arrested 18 times between 1998 and 2002. Most of the arrests

stemmed from forging prescriptions for painkillers, but there are

other ugly marks on Wilkes' six-page rap sheet, including the 1999

night when he roughed up Teresa, his second wife.

 

"Your whole life is out of control," said Wilkes, who drank and used

cocaine regularly after getting off the painkillers. "Things that you

thought you'd never do, places you thought you'd never go, people you

thought you'd never hang around with, become part of your life."

 

So when a judge in Newberry County finally sentenced Wilkes to prison

for a parole violation in 2002, it was with a sense of relief that

Wilkes walked into the Lower Savannah Pre-Release Center in Aiken for

the most important nine months of his life.

 

"You're finally clean and straight long enough where you can think

properly," Wilkes said.

 

Mostly, Wilkes thought about trading his rock 'n' roll lifestyle for

the kind of normal life he always had mocked. That is what he has

tried to do since his release last year. A big weekend for Wilkes now

means making breakfast and playing in the park with his two school-age

children near his home in Newberry.

 

He has been off drugs and alcohol for two years. He has a job selling

cars again, but no license to drive one. He has three children and two

ex-wives. And he has a fascinating story that he shares with church

youth groups throughout the state.

 

The message from a man who made his living wearing a mask and climbing

into a ring: Normal is not so bad.

 

FROM FOOTBALL TO WRESTLING

 

Wilkes weighed 225 pounds in 1979 when he played offensive line as a

senior at Irmo. "Today, that wouldn't make a decent linebacker," he

said.

 

The era of the supersized football player was beginning when Wilkes

arrived at USC the following fall. He remembers seeing pictures of the

Pittsburgh Steelers' offensive line, a unit that included former

Gamecock star Steve Courson.

 

"Those guys were jacked," Wilkes said. "They had legs hanging off

their shoulders."

 

Courson also had steroids streaming through his body.

 

The first time he tried steroids, Wilkes was a sophomore during Jim

Carlen's final season at USC. Having trouble gaining weight, Wilkes

contacted a team doctor and asked if he would call in a prescription

for the anabolic steroid Dianabol.

 

"His response was, 'What's the pharmacy number?'" Wilkes said. "So it

was that easy."

 

Carlen was the reason Wilkes chose USC over Clemson, Georgia and

Georgia Tech. So when Carlen was fired before the '82 season, Wilkes

left with him, quitting school and driving a delivery truck for a

year.

 

When Joe Morrison replaced Richard Bell as head coach in '83, Morrison

called Wilkes and invited him to lunch at Shealy's Sandwich Shop. By

the end of the meal, Wilkes was convinced Morrison was the "ultimate

players' coach" and decided to return to the team.

 

Wilkes encountered a different locker-room atmosphere when he

returned.

 

Steroid use was more widespread, with four of the five offensive line

starters on the '84 team doing cycles of injectable steroids,

according to Wilkes.

 

And though USC was at the center of a steroid scandal in 1988 after

the publication of Tommy Chaikin's Sports Illustrated article, Wilkes

believes steroid use was just as common among the Gamecocks' opponents

as it was at USC.

 

"You could go into any gym back then and get anything you wanted," he

said. "It was like buying a cell phone. There was nothing to it."

 

Wilkes was USC's most decorated player in '84, when the Gamecocks

finished 10-2 for the best season in school history. He had tryouts

with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Atlanta Falcons but did not make an

NFL roster.

 

So he decided to follow his other passion. In high school Wilkes and

his friends from Irmo showed up at The Township whenever the pro

wrestling circuit came through Columbia. In 1987 Wilkes gave up on a

football career and visited the Fabulous Moolah, the Columbia woman

famous for training wrestlers.

 

"It was with pure intentions of having a great career. And I did,"

said Wilkes, who made as much as $250,000 a year wrestling. "But you

never realize your dream would end up being a nightmare."

 

Wilkes began wrestling as "The Trooper," an ironic role given his

future dealings with law-enforcement officers. He later became "The

Patriot," a flag-waving, masked character created to take advantage of

Americans' nationalism after the end of the first Gulf War.

 

Wilkes was a bigger hit in Japan than he was in the United States, but

that didn't stop him from living like a star. Wilkes says a pro

wrestler is like a rock star without the guitar.

 

"You're exposed to the same vices and same excesses," he said, "a

young guy with a lot of money."

 

At night the wrestlers found alcohol, drugs and women waiting in every

city, from Tokyo to Toledo. Days were spent in local gyms, where

Wilkes lifted weights to ensure he received the maximum effect of the

steroids he pumped into his body for the better part of a decade.

 

"It was a part of my job," he said. "I made a living without a shirt

in front of large audiences and on worldwide TV every week."

 

The 6-foot-3 Wilkes bulked up to 300 pounds and had muscles that were

too big for his tendons and joints to support. He ruptured the tendon

in his right triceps twice in a two-year span. In all, the 42-year-old

Wilkes has had nine surgeries on knees, shoulders, elbows and triceps.

 

PRESCRIPTION SCAM

 

The injuries helped lead to a vicious cycle of pills. Wilkes took pain

pills and muscle relaxants before his matches, sleeping pills to get

through the night and cocaine to get the next day started. Marcus

"Buff" Bagwell, a wrestler and longtime friend of Wilkes, said drug

abuse was widespread in the wrestling industry.

 

"We did 'em all," Bagwell said. "We did everything."

 

At one point, Wilkes was scarfing down more than 100 pain pills a day,

preferably Percoset or Percodan.

 

"You're caught up in it and you just think that's the normal way of

living," Wilkes said. "Everyone else I worked with is doing it, so

it's almost like you're going out here living the normal lives. (Other

people) are the weirdos."

 

When he wrestled in Japan, the last thing Wilkes would do before

leaving Columbia was inject steroids rather than risk taking them on

the plane. And the first thing he would do when he returned home was

to have Teresa take him to the closest pharmacy.

 

"Directionwise, he just kind of wandered," Carlen said. "I think he

wanted to be big and strong, and then he got there and the drugs just

controlled him."

 

Joel Hackett, a former World Wrestling Federation doctor based in

Indianapolis, was the "Doctor Feelgood" for wrestlers who needed

steroids or painkillers, calling in hundreds of prescriptions for at

least a dozen wrestlers. As a gesture of thanks, Wilkes once paid for

a Las Vegas vacation for Hackett's family.

 

Said Wilkes: "He was part of your budget - light bill, mortgage,

Hackett."

 

When Indiana's Medical Licensing Board suspended Hackett's license in

1999 amid allegations of illegally prescribing steroids and

painkillers, Wilkes needed a way to feed his addiction.

 

He had heard Hackett call in enough prescriptions that he was familiar

with the lingo. Having obtained Hackett's Drug Enforcement Agency

licensing number, he started calling Columbia pharmacies pretending to

be Hackett.

 

Wilkes also used the names of a couple of Columbia doctors whom he

refused to identify. It worked for several months. And when it stopped

working, Wilkes got in his car and drove to Sumter, Lexington,

Newberry and Fountain Inn, four places where he was arrested for

forging prescriptions.

 

Other than the two weeks he spent in the Greenville County Detention

Center in November 2001 on the Fountain Inn charges, Wilkes managed to

escape serious consequences. Officials at Herndon Chevrolet declined

to press charges when he took off with the dealer cars, and at least

one of the drug sentences was suspended contingent on Wilkes getting

treatment.

 

He did four stints in rehab, although each time he began drinking and

using drugs again. Wilkes went through a tortuous withdrawal from the

painkillers while imprisoned in Greenville, and managed to kick his

pill addiction.

 

"But I just pointed it in another direction," said Wilkes, who

continued abusing cocaine and alcohol. "I think I may have gotten even

more out of control after that point than I ever did."

 

Wilkes' memory is hazy on the details from this period of his life.

Teresa divorced him in the spring of 2000. Recurring injuries forced

him to quit wrestling that same year. In 2001, Lexington police were

searching for him and the stolen car, and his various other legal

problems were stacking up.

 

Said Wilkes: "The reason I drank was to get my mind off the miserable

mess my life was then. I couldn't take it stone-cold sober."

 

Several times Carlen and Allen Adkins, who dated Wilkes at USC,

intervened on his behalf. Both admit now that their assistance enabled

Wilkes to continue his downward slide.

 

"People kept saying the best thing to do is shoot him and forget him,"

Carlen said. "I just kept thinking if I stay (involved) long enough,

he'll recover. Well, they were right and I was wrong. I should have

let him go to jail."

 

Eventually, Wilkes did go to jail, a nine-month stint that might have

saved Wilkes from himself.

 

A NEW LIFE

 

For a man who had traveled the world during his wrestling heyday,

Wilkes' longest road trip might have been the 45-minute bus ride he

took in shackles while being transported from Kirkland Correctional

Institution in Columbia to Lower Savannah in Aiken in May 2002.

 

Wilkes had blown most of the money he had made wrestling. His kids,

who lived with Teresa in Cayce, were not in contact with him. And he

was heading to jail. But at least he was alive.

 

"At the end of nine months I'm going to walk out of here and you get a

chance," Wilkes remembers thinking. "You do right or you don't."

 

Wilkes tried to make the most of his time in the minimum-security

facility, where he was assigned the same private room that rock 'n'

roll legend James Brown had stayed in previously.

 

In charge of the canteen, commissary and library, Wilkes did not get

back to his room until after 10 most nights. There he would read and

write weekly letters to his children, who never wrote back.

 

"I hadn't been a daddy at all," he said.

 

Wilkes had his 18-month sentence cut in half for good behavior, and

walked out of Lower Savannah a free man on Valentine's Day, 2003. He

moved in with his mother, Kathleen Wilkes, in Newberry, landed a job

at Love Chevrolet Hummer in Harbison and later moved into a rental

house not far from his mother's place.

 

With his driver's license revoked until August at the earliest, Wilkes

relies on family members to transport him to and from work. He has

done well at Love, where he divulged his past problems during his

interview.

 

"We felt like he deserved a chance. We gave him a chance and he's

become a very good salesperson," said Love general sales manager Mike

Corley, noting that Wilkes consistently scores high on

customer-service surveys.

 

"From day one, I guess, he really appreciated (the second chance),"

Corley said. "He's lived up to everything he said. He's got a job here

as long as he wants it."

 

Former employer David Herndon called Wilkes a "good salesperson and a

good person, period."

 

'HE WAS THE HERO'

 

Clean and sober for two years, Wilkes isn't a member of support

groups. But he is committed to his new lifestyle, taking

doctor-prescribed nonnarcotic painkillers to ease his chronic knee

pain.

 

Wilkes has not had a thorough physical since he quit wrestling, afraid

to find out what the years of drug and alcohol abuse might have done

to his body. He was diagnosed with high blood pressure last year, but

is uncertain whether it is related to his steroid use. The 255-pound

Wilkes walks 30 minutes every morning and has no interest in going

inside another weight room.

 

Several pro wrestlers, including some of Wilkes' friends, have died

since 1997 from problems brought on by steroid and other drug use. The

BALCO scandal has brought renewed scrutiny to a new blend of designer

steroids.

 

When Wilkes speaks to area youth groups, which he has done a handful

of times, he stresses abstinence: "The best way not to have a drug

problem is don't try it."

 

Adkins, Wilkes' friend since college, accompanied him to one of his

speaking engagements.

 

"He was the hero," Adkins said. "I cried. It was just hard to believe

how far he'd come. And he'd done it all himself. He'd chosen, with

God's help, to pull himself up from the depths."

 

Wilkes is again involved in his children's lives. He gets his two

youngest, 8-year-old Mallie and 7-year-old Del III, every other

weekend, and sees Robert when the 18-year-old's schedule allows it.

 

The only wrestling Wilkes does these days is with the two school-age

children on the living room floor. They like it when their father

pretends to be a ring announcer, introducing the main event.

 

Other than that, Wilkes and his children rent movies, take walks to

the park and cook sausage and eggs on Saturday mornings. Pretty boring

yet Wilkes would not trade it for anything.

 

"I used to say, 'Man, I never want to live a normal life.' But you

know what? It's so much better than how I was living," he said. "To

see them come running through the front door, you're glad they're with

you."

[Placebo Effect 0]

One of the needles hit a vein in his buttocks and a stream

of blood sprayed on Teresa, like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino

movie.

HAHAHAH

 

Great read, though I do beg the question of why Del continued to take steroids long after saying "Fuck it" to wrestling and selling the gimmick to Brandi. I know the addiction played into it, but the idea of him fervently searching, getting arrested, etc. for steroids when he wasn't even in the profession anymore funny.

[Guest Man Of 1,004 Modes]

I'm glad to see Del Wilkes back on his feet. He's always been one of my guilty favorites, and I never even knew of his problems. I guess this is one major reason why he wasn't around much in WWF/WCW in the mid 90s.

[Lil' Bitch 0]

Too bad nobody wanted his Patriot shit off E-Bay.

[Guest Man Of 1,004 Modes]

Too bad nobody wanted his Patriot shit off E-Bay.

Maybe it was Tom Brandi's. I didn't check the thing, but did it actually say WHICH Patriot?

[Lil' Bitch 0]

I don't think so. I assumed Del since he always seems to be in of cash. I have no idea what happend to Brandi

[Guest Man Of 1,004 Modes]

I don't think so.  I assumed Del since he always seems to be in of cash.  I have no idea what happend to Brandi

He's wrestling on a Pennsylvania indy show as himself, Salvatore Sincere, Kwang The Ninja, The Patriot and Doink the Clown.

[Lil' Bitch 0]

According to the auction, the item is located in Columbia, SC...so whoever lives there is him.

[Guest Man Of 1,004 Modes]

According to the auction, the item is located in Columbia, SC...so whoever lives there is him.

OK, that's Del Wilkes. Tom Brandi only appears in the Northeast, so I don't think he'd bother traveling from South Carolina to Mass. or Pennsylvania for an Indy booking instead of closer.

[JJMc 0]

Brandi as Doink, eh? So is that gimmick public domain? Because I've seen guys all over using it. There was one show in Lawrence, MA (right near me) like a year ago, and they advertised "Doink the Clown from the WWE" . It was this cheap ass knockoff version. So what's the deal?