Driven with a burning desire to make something of himself, Doug Smith calls upon his only marketable skills-those honed as an amateur boxer-and despite not learning to skate until the age of 19, punches his way into the world of professional hockey. Join Doug "The Thug" Smith during his unlikely journey as a minor-league hockey enforcer, the most unique and peculiar job in all of sport, as he takes on all comers to protect his teammates from opposing tough guys, wins a championship ring, and climbs to the second-best hockey league in the world. Smith, the directionless, wayward wanderer, desperately searching, defeats impossible odds to succeed in the riotous world minor-league hockey, which lends a measure of purpose and meaning to his life. And while the enforcer role is currently being removed from the game of hockey, underdog stories never go out of style, and the best ones get made into Hollywood movies. Literally fighting to become more than a common street ruffian, Smith transforms himself into a respected and productive member of his community, and the subject of a cult-classic motion picture.

Three years of resolute weightlifting had not gone as planned for this scrawny 18-year-old. But it was 1980 and a legal prescription for the magic elixir, anabolic steroids, was just $20. Now he would transform himself while away at college and return home with trophy-winning strength and a body like Greek god-a Charles Atlas magazine ad come to life. That didn't go quite as planned either. This revealing memoir recounts an athlete's experiences with performance enhancing drugs at a time when the public and law enforcement knew little about them. Venturing into the ""steroid underground,"" the author used and sold them, was featured in muscle magazines, went under a surgeon's knife and faced interrogation by a federal marshal.