those days when players smoked and trainers handed out amphetamines, wasn't the healthiest to begin with.
Shea has a defibrillating pacemaker in his chest. "But I don't know if that's from steroids or all the speed I took," he says.
Doubts linger for some of the men and their families.
Kocourek, whose visit to the doctor late in that 1963 training camp prompted the players to rethink Gillman and Roy's plan, was never able to have children.
Don Norton, a wide receiver, had his first heart attack when he was 39, and died 20 years later from complications during open-heart surgery. Norton's two surviving brothers, Dennis and Steve, and his widow, Luanne, say there was no history of heart disease in the family, and that Don kept his normal trim physique after he left football.
After he started lifting and taking Dianabol, Luanne Norton says, Norton added 25 pounds of muscle.
"He took them as long as the Chargers gave them out," she says. "He thought they had a great deal of impact on his health. I know he never took any of that afterwards."
Players almost never discussed the Dianabol even among themselves, Hadl says, until stories about steroid abuse started breaking in the 1980s and '90s.
"Through the years, Lance and I were glad we didn't do it," he says.
Not because of health concerns, he says. They're just glad they haven't had to apologize for taking a performance-enhancing drug.
The "wild West" days Sweeney mentions included a number of behaviors the players of the day might not be comfortable explaining: recreational drug and alcohol use, amphetamines by the bucketful, parties that would make even Hugh Hefner blush. Yes, they paid -- some are still paying -- the toll those things took on their bodies. But they behaved that way by choice.
As the players on the Chargers look back on their Dianabol days, the slow revealing over the decades of what the steroids might have done to their health is in a different category.
"It gives me a little anger. It makes me angry. To do something like that …" Shea says. "People that you trusted -- Sid Gillman; Barron Hilton, the owner; the other coaches -- no respect for us at all."
Mix says Gillman and Roy should have known better: The warnings were available. If Kocourek could find out by asking his physician, Gillman and Roy could have done the same.
"[Roy] was a very knowledgeable guy. Unfortunately, apparently, he had a major character flaw," Mix says. "And that character flaw was [that] he wanted results. He didn't care how you got the outcome of the results. And, if the outcome of the results included using something that had the potential of being dangerous, he endorsed it. Hence the Dianabol."
That's unfair, Roy's daughters say. They don't want their father's life to be a throwaway line, that he was "the steroid guru of football" and nothing else.
"He never had an opportunity to be in the debate to share his views," Astrid Clements says.
Gillman died in 2003. Roy died in 1979, before the press and public fully considered steroids' place in sport, four years before the NFL banned them. His daughters say they have never found a word about steroids or any other performance-enhancing drug in all of his correspondence.
Clements likes to think her father probably felt the same way John Ziegler, the physician who pressed the U.S. weightlifters to use steroids, did at the end of his life: deeply remorseful for what he had unleashed.
"It was something that was originally created to be cutting-edge, something that would enhance strength, and would be good, that ended up turning out to be not so good," she says.
Petrich says he can't blame Gillman and Roy; nor does he worry that the pills might have affected him, especially as he, Shea and Sweeney swap stories about their artificial knees and hips.
"The game itself did a lot more damage to us than any steroid could ever do," Petrich says. "And, if they told you to take a pill and you didn't want to take it, what are they going to do? Force it down your throat? You did these things voluntarily, and had they known that they were harmful to us … "
Here, Petrich pauses. Then, "I venture to say there's a 50-50 chance they would have not done it."
T.J. Quinn is a reporter for ESPN's Enterprise Unit. He can be reached at
[email protected]. ESPN producers Rayna Banks and Arty Berko, along with Sean D. Hamill, also contributed to this story.