http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/football/nfl/stories/060708dnsposherringtoncol.2c5b402.html(There's a video interview with Dave on this story page as well, pretty interesting...
Don Hooton recently received a message about a guy wanting to take up the cause, maybe talk to youth about the dangers of steroids.
Unfortunately, Hooton never got around to calling David Jacobs.
"Waiting a week or two can be fairly costly, I guess," Hooton said.
Jacobs once wanted badly to tell his high-profile story. You could see it in interviews and read it between the lines. Most men in his perilous position would run from reporters and the soul-baring spotlight. Not Jacobs.
Video
In an April 2008 interview, David Jacobs talked about his experiences as a steroids user and dealer (DMN - Video/editing: Nathan
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Once mastermind of one of the nation's largest steroids networks, he gave the NFL canceled checks and e-mails and text messages and names. He figured to "clean up" sports. Go national. Clear his conscience.
Before his death, ruled a suicide Friday by the Dallas County medical examiner, Jacobs kept a running dialogue with reporters from this newspaper. Last month, he reportedly scheduled a meeting with one from ESPN.com.
But something happened to dull Jacobs' chattiness. Could have been the NFL security detail that spooked him when it showed up at his door unannounced. Could have been the friends who suddenly distanced themselves.
Could have been the prospect of becoming a pariah in the town where he lived.
"If Jacobs lived in New York or even Duluth, Minn., things might have been different," wrote ESPN.com's Shaun Assael, author of Steroid Nation. "But he lived in Plano, Texas. ... A town that was thrown onto the steroid map by the suicide of high school pitcher Taylor Hooton – and remains there thanks to the crusading efforts of his father, Don."
Don Hooton, who started a foundation in his son's name to educate parents about the dangers of steroids, understands what that last paragraph means. After Taylor, depressed after going off steroids, took his own life, Don heard the denials.
"Public officials here wanted to think that our tragedy might have been an exception," Hooton said. "We're kidding ourselves in any community to think that.
"And here we had one of the largest dealers in the country right under our noses."
Or at least that's what the feds say about Jacobs. For his testimony, he got three years' probation last month.
He supposedly turned over damning information on a half-dozen well-known NFL players. The only player he named publicly was former Cowboy Matt Lehr, and Lehr's attorney says that, based on his conversations with authorities, his client won't be indicted.
But if what Jacobs alleged is true, the NFL has a BALCO case on its hands.
Consider the possibilities, and it hardly seems much of a stretch. If you think only bodybuilders and baseball stars and Olympians and racehorses have been on steroids, you haven't walked through an NFL locker room in the last 20 years.
Players are bigger and more ripped than ever. The beneficial aspects of steroids (increased ability to work out, thus building muscle mass) and at least one detrimental side effect (aggressive behavior) both would contribute to success in football. To think that at least some players in the most violent of professional sports wouldn't take advantage of such an edge is naïve, at best.
How come they rarely test positive then? For the same reasons that Olympians and others haven't, because of masking agents.
Jacobs reportedly had information about those agents, including finasteride, used in treatment for hair loss.
Frankly, Jacobs made lots of public allegations, which was part of the problem. Besides counting athletes as customers, he said he sold to police officers in Garland, Richardson, Dallas, Arlington and Plano. He even said a Plano cop stole $4,500 from him during a raid last year.
"One of the feds told me that [Jacobs] was talking a lot more than they wanted him to," Hooton said. "They weren't happy about that at all.
"The last thing they want to see is all this stuff on the evening news."
Sometime in the last month, the message must have gotten through to Jacobs. Three days before the ESPN interview, he canceled with an e-mail that read in part:
"Everyone's getting their big stories, front page headlines and bonuses but I am not getting anything in any way except a guarantee of thousands of people to be extremely pissed off at me for ruining the images of their favorite sport and heroes."
Also Online
Video: David Jacobs tells his story in a May 2008 interview at his Plano home.
Link: Watch Amanda Jo Earhart-Savell training with David Jacobs for the 2007 Figure Olympia contest
05/22/08: Plano steroids supplier meets with NFL security officials
05/02/08: Plano steroids supplier wants to help clean up NFL
04/25/08: Plano resident's steroid distribution ring was one of the largest in U.S.
11/14/07: Plano trainer says he supplied Cowboys players with steroids
So now that Jacobs is dead, as well as his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Amanda Jo Earhart-Savell, what will be his legacy?
Will he become the reformed sinner who forced the NFL to undergo the same scrutiny that has scarred Major League Baseball?
Or will his allegations fade as the uncorroborated testimony of a dealer with delusions of celebrity?
Hard to say. But everything he once alleged so willingly must now be investigated, and not just for its lurid potential. Whether you believe Jacobs' sad story ended in murder-suicide or something even more sinister, it's a story, like Taylor Hooton's, that shouldn't die with him.
