Smallpotatoes said:
Am I to understand he didn't just lift weights and eat a lot?
Yeah, if you swallowed the preposterous puff pieces/cover stories spun out by the Michigan State sports information department; there must have been a couple dozen of them during the fall of 1987, all following a nearly-identical template: "Tony Mandarich, the All-Natural Man," (Never Failed A Steroid Test

), a listing of the incredible (in the literal sense) amount of food Mandarich was supposedly eating, dozens of eggs a day, pounds of steak, shopping carts full of food, hundreds of bucks a week, 30,000, 40,000 calories a day, pouring down gallons of triple-strength coffee, cartons of Jolt Cola, all to explain his massive weight gain and buzzing-at-the-eyeballs hair-trigger attititude and behavior; and recaps of his insane workout regimen, which featured pounding tons of iron virtualy every waking moment he wasn't eating or, presumably, taking dumps.
That autumn, I remember talking to a doctor about the stories. "Jesus Christ," he said. "Why doesn't he just come out and say he's on roids? Being on roids is 10 times healthier than eating 50,000 calories a day and mainlining pure caffiene into your bloodstream."
The stories generated a strong suspicion of "wethinks they doth protesteth too much." The stories also never mentioned, a) where Mandarich got the money to pay for these hundreds and hundreds of bucks worth of groceries every week, and b) one single word about ever attending classes.
I think Telander wrote a version of this story for SI, I think it was the story in the "Incredible Bulk" issue. As I recall, Telander was so disgusted by the blatant propaganda and lying he asked to be switched off the college football beat.