'Romo' Comes Clean

Bill Romanowski Talks To Scott Pelley About Deliberate Violence And Steroid Use.

(CBS) 
Romanowski says that pressure is what drove him every day. And it drove him, time to time, over the edge.

Romo wasn’t just the meanest. Some would say he was the dirtiest. Fans were outraged when he spit in the face of wide receiver J.J. Stokes, something for which Romanowski was fined $7,500.

But he defends other hits, like one that busted the jaw of quarterback Kerry Collins in two places. Collins was out for the season and the hit cost Romo $20,000.

Romanowski says it was “one of the best hits of my career. It was perfect. It was one that you dream about.”

In his book, "Romo: My Life on the Edge," Romanowski writes about a playoff game against the Giants where he found himself buried with running back Dave Meggett.

“I am pissed. And I am down there just trying to rip that ball out of his hands. And all I could get was a finger. And at the time I thought it was his. But, just, whatever it was … I just snapped it. And I could hear a scream at the bottom of the pile,” Romanowski says.

Romanowski says he now feels “awful” about the incident.

His more visible fouls made him a league leader in fines, costing him tens of thousands of dollars.

In 2003, he got into a training camp fight with teammate Marcus Williams and crushed his eye socket. Romanowski paid $415,000 in a court settlement.

If this extraordinary violence sounds like "roid rage" from steroid abuse, Romanowski says it is not. He says he used steroids only in the end, from 2001 to 2003.

He got them, he says, from Victor Conte, head of the infamous sports supplement lab called BALCO, the Bay Area Lab Cooperative.

Romanowski says Conte gave him bullet-sized vials of a foul tasting gold liquid. It was a new anabolic steroid the NFL wasn’t testing for, known as “THG,” what Conte called "the clear."

“He called it a clear substance, possibly a pro-hormone, a designer steroid,” says Romanowski. "He really didn’t know exactly what it was. He just thought maybe it could help. And it wasn’t something they could test for."

While Romanowski admits to THG, Conte was pushing other banned performance drugs, so Pelley asked if there was something else Romanowski had not admitted to.

“Did you take human growth hormone from Victor Conte as well?” Pelley says.

“I took it a brief period of time. And I didn’t receive any great benefits. Definitely didn’t receive what I got out of THG or what I thought I was getting out of THG,” Romanowski says.

In his book, Romanowski wrote, “As soon as I found out something could be tested for, I stopped taking it.”

“I compromised my morality to get ahead, to play another year, to play two more years, to win another Super Bowl,” says Romanowski.

The BALCO controversy ran for two years.

What was the most difficult part for the NFL star? “The embarrassment to my family, and friends, to teammates, team owners and the league, that hurt. And ultimately a little boy that looks up to his dad, and he said, ‘Dad, do you do drugs?’ And that one hurt me more than anything,” Romanowski says.