Author's Note: In Language Arts, we were working on Character Development. I did this piece on Mick Johnson, a high school football star who turns to steroids to help. He finds himself trapped within the situation, and has no where to turn. The paragraphs are organized as follows: Intro, P1: How was it like in the beginning, P2: How he changes, P3: How he influenced others, P4: How he influenced the reader, P5: Comparing him to another character, Conclusion.
Steroids are becoming a huge problem in high school and professional sports. That is an understatement in the book Gym Candy by Carl Deuker. Mick Johnson, a high school football star, gets stopped short of the goal line at the end of a critical playoff game. The image sets into his mind, forcing himself to think that he's not strong enough to play high school football. That leads him to the thought of taking steroids. Peer pressure by his trainer forces him into drugs and steroids, where it changes his football career and his relationships with others forever.
Mick had just graduated as an 8th grader and is looking to make the varsity football team as a freshman with his friend Drew. They start lifting weights, practicing six hours a day, trying their hardest before the tryouts in August. Drew and Mick end up making the team, but finding their selves at the bottom of the depth chart. Working their way up by hard work and with a little bit of help from injuries, they both are looking down to everyone but one person in their respective positions. At this part of the story, he feels like he can do anything, without cheating.
After a frustrating season for Mick, not being able to move up on the roster, the playoffs bring him a new life. Matt, the starting running back gets kicked off the team for unnecessary physical violence off the field. Mick is put in as the starting running back. He carries his team all the way to the final, against the state champions the past three years. Down by 3, Mick is stopped short of the goal line as time expires. Like every football star, the whole loss is put onto Mick's shoulders. He starts training even harder, but he chooses the wrong place. Pete, his personal trainer, offers him the idea of steroids, and once making this decision, there is no going back.
Throughout the story, Mick not only changes himself, but changes others as well. Obviously steroids will build your body up like Hulk, but the after effects are taxing as well. Steroids usually give younger kids serious cases of acne, and because of this occurence, Mick is not able to go swimming with his friends, or even play volleyball with them. There are also good effects on his teammates though. The 'roids are making him stronger and faster, which puts him on the front page of newspapers in the Seattle area everywhere, with his team right next to him. But once his best friend Drew finds the syringe in his bag, and everything is downhill from there. Being caught is terrible, but not knowing where to go after that is even worse.
Once Mick saw that the syringe was taken from his duffel bag, he decided to meet Drew by the lake to talk with him. Mick tries to explain that this was the only way that he could get stronger, but he can't convince Drew. Drew starts to babble off about how this is wrong, and he needs to report this to the team officials right away, because up to the point in the season, it had all been a joke. Mick pulls out his second plan, a gun. I believe that this effects the reader immensely because of the power a gun brings to the story. When guns get involved in anything, it is very serious. Mick threatens to shoot Drew on the spot, but then Mick's conscious gets the better of him. He starts to realize why he had brought the gun in the first place, not to shoot Drew, but something up. By now the reader is predicting that he wasn't going to shoot Drew, but shoot himself. This effect on the reader is huge. The perspective on the story about taking drugs has gone way too far, and to see that it can really come to something like this is really serious.
When you are influenced by a character in a book, your train of thought suddenly turns to people you could relate this to in your life. There are many people in baseball, soccer, football, any sport you can think of that take steroids, but the one that happened most recently was Lance Armstrong. After Lance Armstrong's amazing seven year run at the Tour de France, the U.S. Anti Doping Agency ratted him out for drug use during his races. Lance Armstrong and Mick Johnson have a lot in common because of their willing ability to take steroids. Even though it's illegal, Lance and Mick think that to get better they have to take steroids to get better, which is wrong. You could probably compare Mick to any athlete who's ever had steroids, but it just goes to show that if you take steroids, real life or not, you're going to get stuck in a situation you never wanted to be in.
All of this points to one main idea, steroids may help you in the short run, but once you get further and further down the line, your going to find yourself trapped. Mick, Armstrong, and other athletes are prime examples. Although they got all these awards and medals and wins, their life was ruined because of a dumb mistake of taking steroids. Once you take steroids, there's no going back; you'll soon find yourself in the worst position possible.
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