Kim Wood remembers one of the last times he talked to Brian Pillman, the handsome, sex-crazed wrestling star known as Flyin' Brian.

"He was sitting across my kitchen table when he was trying to make a comeback with the WWF," remembers Wood, the Cincinnati Bengals' strength coach, who mentors athletes in all sports. "Brian had a big welt in his arm from a horse needle."

Wood suspected it was from a monster shot of human growth hormone. "I'll give you 10 seconds to get out," he told his protégé.

A year later, in 1997, Pillman was dead at the age of 35. He was found in a hotel room, with open bottles of muscle relaxers and sleeping pills beside his lifeless body.

The cause of death was listed as heart failure. Wood, who's never seen a performance-enhancing drug that he likes, thinks 'roids helped push Pillman's heart over the edge.

	Brian Pillman's mentor still mourns his death. But Kim Wood of the Bengals thinks the NFL has brought "sanity" to the drug wars.

I ask Wood: What did that teach you?

"It taught me that I could be a nice person and still lose."

That's why Wood is glad that he's not in baseball. "I'd be a nervous wreck," he said the other day from Cincinnati, where he's getting ready to start his 27th season as the Bengals strength coach, making him the dean of NFL weight rooms.

Wood had a case of déjà vu last month when he heard Don Fehr tell Congress that random drug testing would infringe on his members' right to privacy. The NFL Players Association had that debate a dozen years ago and endorsed random testing. It figured that if one player was using the needle, others would feel compelled to dope just to keep their jobs. "If the NFL didn't test, I'd probably have to quit," Wood says.

"Baseball can't save itself from within," he says frankly. "All you have to do is look at football in the late '80s. Before Pete Rozelle instituted steroid testing in 1987, the NFL was a mess. Football was the first pro sport to get hit with steroids, and there were a lot of severely damaged players. Many strength coaches in the NFL were really just drug procurers. There were a lot of scumbag coaches."

Where did that leave you?

"With a lot of tension, that's for sure. You had the pro-steroid coaches on one side. And then there were the guys like me who've always said, 'This will not happen under my watch. You don't need steroids. You just need to work hard.' I set up the first organized weight-training program in the NFL 30 years ago. I know what hard work can do."

Something had to give. And it finally did when Rozelle made steroid use punishable by suspension. The next year, his successor, Paul Tagliabue, made the testing random. Today, the NFL conducts 10,000 tests a year -- randomly testing about eight players per team on a weekly basis during the season. The tests look for 23 kinds of steroids and 20 chemicals that mask human growth hormones. It's also venturing into supplements, having today added the stroke-causing supplement ephedra to the list of banned substances. A positive test nets an automatic four-game suspension.

As a result, Wood says, "I see a sanity in football. The league took the craziness of drugs away."

And what about baseball?

"I see no sanity there. I have friends who were saying that it was out of control five years ago. I can only imagine what the pressure on them must be like today."

When I wrote a couple of columns about steroids last month, I mentioned that the deaths of wrestlers like Pillman should serve as a cautionary warning for today's athletes. I got scores of e-mails blasting me for being naïve. Many said I was ignoring advances in pharmacology, not to mention the living proof of athletes who've been doping for years with no discernable negative health effects.

Wood, who still misses Pillman, doesn't buy it. And when NFL training camps start next month, he'll be telling his Bengals what Don Fehr should be telling his members:

"The supplement industry is a hustle. And it's coloring the thinking of everyone. It's telling people that they're inadequate if they don't use what they're selling. And that's a lie. But the lie is so pervasive that if I was left alone, I couldn't fight and win. The propaganda is just too strong."

Shaun Assael a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine, is the co-author of Sex, Lies & Headlocks, a biography of Vince McMahon to be published by Crown next month. E-mail him at shaun.assael@espnmag.com.