Some drinks not the breakfast of champions

''Look at this,'' Dolphins linebacker Zach Thomas says, shaking his head.

He holds out an article he just got from the trainer's room.

The headline: ``Banned Chief Might Sue Drink Maker.''

The story is about how Kansas City linebacker Lew Bush recently had his name stained nationally and received a four-game suspension because what Bush claims was a sports drink the NFL filed instead under steroids.

There is an increasingly and exceptionally thin line between what football players think is ''getting an edge'' and the NFL deems ''cheating,'' a line so fine that players often can't see it and not even doctors and scientists with their degrees and microscopes can agree on where it should be, exactly.

So the NFL has banned substances like ephedrine, even though you, your grandmother and your 8-year-old son can walk into vitamin or health stores separately anywhere in the United States and get it legally in any number of pills, powders and drinks.

And Lew Bush loses four games of his career, and a lot of money, because of a drink he claims had ephedrine in it but was labeled incorrectly. There is a gulf of difference between former footballer Lyle Alzado killing himself by injecting more and more into his steroid-ravaged body in the name of performance enhancement and a guy drinking a legal product anyone can get with a double-click of a computer, but welcome to today's Orwellian NFL, where the overzealous athletes have to be protected from themselves.

''Come on, man,'' Thomas says. ``You get the same suspension for a drink that you do for taking a steroid needle and shooting hormones that will make your teeth grow? Please. This has gotten ridiculous. I can't even take normal cold-and-flu medicine because Sudafed has stuff in it the NFL has banned. My fiancée can take whatever she wants from our medicine cabinet, but I'm a professional athlete and I've got to come in here to make sure anything I take for a cold is OK.''

It is something of an infringement, the NFL making its way into the linebacker's bathroom, but our sports leagues do a lot of things for public-relations reasons, which is why commissioner Paul Tagliabue is publicly and laughably trying to cut down violence in a savage game that sells its big hits in everything from commemorative videos to video games and has eclipsed baseball in popularity at least partially because it features more blood lust in an American culture that craves it.

Ephedrine, used to boost energy and aid weight loss, was banned from the NFL July 1, not coincidentally after mammoth Minnesota Vikings tackle Korey Stringer dropped dead on the practice field and some of it was found in his locker. Never mind that the toxicology reports found no traces of ephedrine in Stringer's body. It had been found in Northwestern's asthmatic Rashidi Wheeler and Florida State's Devaughn Darling, college players who died during workouts, so that was enough for the NFL to create distance.

But this, like a lot of science, can be awfully subjective. Phentermine is NFL legal, even though Raiders linebacker Bill Romanowski, then with the Broncos, was tried for filing false prescriptions under his wife's name to acquire 500 diet pills from September 1998 to January 1999 (Romanowski was acquitted). Romanowski, like a lot of guys in the NFL, is an admitted pill freak who treats his body like an engine, forever fueling it but not terribly concerned with things like, oh, the brakes.

''Even with all the rules, it is just as bad now with guys going overboard on other things,'' Thomas says. ``Guys are taking a lot more caffeine now, which isn't good for you either but is legal. Caffeine will dehydrate you in hot weather, but what are they going to ban next? Coffee? Guys are taking caffeine pills a lot, eating them like M&Ms, trying to get that little extra oomph. That can't be good.''

Our seasons are long, and our athletes teeter between tired and bored, which might explain why San Diego Padres reliever Trevor Hoffman estimates 80 percent of baseball players use amphetamines and New Orleans Jazz point guard Baron Davis guesses 80 percent of NBA players regularly smoke marijuana.

Our athletes are forever trying to get any kind of edge, too. That's why Karl Malone has a helicopter fly him to the top of mountains in the offseason and makes his way down in a defensive stance. That's why Terrell Owens denies himself even one bad calorie during the season, not even allowing himself so much as a slice of pizza. That's why Broncos receiver Ed McCaffrey wears more aerodynamic and thinner pads, even at the risk of injury, and Thomas has a $10,000 hyperbaric chamber in his home to ease the aches, and Rams receiver Isaac Bruce, even on a day off when he is attending his brother's funeral, is sprinting on an inclined treadmill.

Makes sense, in this competitive an environment, that an athlete might turn to a pill that could make things easier, even if those pills increase the heart rate to dangerous levels.

''There is no elevator to success,'' reads a sign in Jason Taylor's locker, but, ah, the path might include a few steps through the pharmacy.

''I tried some ephedrine one offseason and it cut my weight and appetite, cut up my body,'' Dolphins running back Robert Edwards says. ``But I don't understand any of it now, what is legal and what isn't, so I just take whatever the strength coach gives me. That's the only way I know it's safe.''

The Dolphins, like all NFL teams, have a dietary-supplement hot line number posted prominently in the locker room so players can ask if what they're about to put in their body can lose them four games. Dolphins safety Scott McGarrahan, a health nut, carefully has what receiver Chris Chambers calls ''a toolbox, with all these little compartments'' for his daily vitamin intake.

Says Dolphins safety Brock Marion: 'You always hear guys asking the trainers, `Is this going to get me hit by the league?' It is pretty much impossible to cheat now. You can't do anything without getting caught.''

There are drawbacks to leveling the field, though. Thomas can't even order a drink without worrying.

''Can't have Crown and Red Bull,'' he says. ``I worry about any pick-me-up energy drink. It's funny, though. You look around the league, and you can tell just by looking at faces which guys were using stuff before that can't anymore. They're not as alert or aggressive. They aren't playing as insane.''