By far the biggest prospect to come out of college football in the 1989 NFL draft was Tony Mandarich. As a 6’5", 315 pound lineman, the Green Bay Packers overlooked Barry Sanders to get Tony on board in the first round. Sadly, a series of mishaps (attributed by some to his being unable to continue steroid use) has kept Tony a somewhat obscure player in the NFL.
I distinctly remember one edition of Sports Illustrated from about 1988 giving the details of Mandarich’s daily food intake–somewhere around 12,000 calories. I’d really like to find that list again, if anyone has it.
But more interestingly, while I was looking for the list, I ran across this cached Google page:
I remember being flabbergasted at the spectacular list of items in the SI article. In college at the time, I asked several of my large collegiate lineman friends about it.
To a man, they called BS on it. 260 to 290 pounders themselves, they said neither they nor anyone they knew consumed anywhere near the staggering amount Mandarich claimed.
Only the “pancake” reference (his ability to put an opponent flat on his back) turned out to carry appreciable weight.
Speaking from the perspective of a fairly large man I am pretty familiar with the daily caloric input-output balance while training intensively for contact sports and 12,000 calories per day is (to me) an absolutely absurd figure even for 300 lb linemen. The highest caloric consumption I can ever recall hearing for any athlete is for the larger professional marathon and ultra-marathon runners (170-210 lb) when running 20 miles + per day and that was around 4000-5000 calories per day. While pro footballer linemen train hard they could not chew up more than 7000 - 8000 calories per day even with the intense pre-season training regimen. Consuming 12,000 calories is a possibility for Willam Perry but he was 450 + lb tub of goo at the height of his bulk and was certainly not maintaining a playing weight at that absurd consumption level.
I should clarify one point in my previous post. I just don’t see 12,000 calories per day as a weight maintenance consumption level even if training intensively. A large 300 lb class professional athlete could possibly force themselves to eat that much but they would gain weight (a lot of weight) by doing so.
This may have absolutely nothing to do with the topic on hand, but I do know that soldiers need 6,000 calories per day to survive in battlefield conditions with marching and little sleep. Not to go into a debate of football players vs. soldiers re: who works harder, I would say that 12,000 calories is a hell of a lot of food for someone who is not marching 15 miles a day with 80 pounds on their backs and getting shot at.
I would think It depends on the guys metabolism. Was he a skinny kid?
A guy I work with lifts weights and runs. He is like 5’11 or so and 160 lbs. He is also about 3% bodyfat and eats like a horse. I watch him put down at least 4000 calories just at work, and he claims to put down just as much at home. He has been doing this since I have worked there, about 10 months, and has not gained weight. (noticable anyhow, perhaps muscle mass)
If this Tony has a similar metabolism, works out, trains, and has managed to get up to 300+ lbs, I can see him eating 12,000 calories. How he manages to eat it all is beyond me though, I have never seen somebody eat 8k before I started working where I am now. (and he smokes alot of Pot to be able to do it)
I have a pretty normal metabolism, when I was working on a machine at work that kept me pretty busy, and still worked out 5 times a week, I was eating 4000 calories a day, and was still losing weight. (of course now I am on a much easier machine, and only work out 3 times a week). I got sick of eating just 4k, I couldn’t handle 12k.
Professional cyclists typically consume 6000 to 10,000 calories/day. But they ride some 120 miles in about 5 hours every day for many days at a time. And cyclists are not especially large. Being large is actually a disadvantage in cycling. Most of them are only of average height and weight and have very low body fat percentages.
However, there are very few other kinds of athletes that burn calories like cyclists. I would expect that maybe ultramarathoners might or endurance swimmers. And of course triathletes.
At 315 pounds, young and living just an idle existence, one would need 4000-5000 calories a day to maintain body weight.
Now, a 180 pound guy might need only 2700…but bigger guys do require more to hold body weight.
NFL players during the season easily burn an additoinal 1000-2000 cals through exercise and the paces of practice, weight training, etc.
It’s is most reasonable to conclude that at times he ate 12,000 calories in one day, but that his average caloric intake was probably around 6000-8000.
It is unlikely that he was counting.
It is likely he was fluffing the numbers.
I don’t remember due to the age of the article Mandarich emphasizing the number of calories needed, it was more the volume of food he’d knock out in a day or week.
This was illustrated by pictures of him in a grocery store filling a shopping cart(s) with what he claimed to regularly consume during training. Sofa, did his cart runneth over or what?
Emphasis was on the number of chickens, pounds of steak, bushels of corn, etc. since this was visually staggering.
I think Tony was saying “Hey, look at all I can eat” rather than “I need 12,000 calories however I get it.” And I do think his numbers, like his perceived potential, were vastly overinflated.
Yeah, lieu’s not kidding about that article, and Tony’s shopping cart. In retrospect it seems like a humor piece. I wonder… was it an April edition, by chance?
I swear there was a list of his daily intake included, perhaps as a sidebar. It looked something like this:
One gallon of milk
A chicken
2 lb of potato salad…
…et cetera. I suppose I might be able to run down to a library and see if they have SI archives dating back that far.
Mandarich was clearly hamming it up for SI, which has had a history of falling for/promoting “colorful” characters who end up meriting nowhere near the hype they get – cf. the self-promoting B. Bosworth, and Gordy Lockbaum, previous SI darlings.
I remember the shopping cart shot well. There was something about multiple gallons of milk too. How he would afford this amount of food on the NCAA-sanctioned per diem (I think scholarship athletes are allowed to take a small amount of cash in lieu of eating at the training table) was not addressed.
Now, I don’t know the effects of massive steroid use on appetite, which might be an additional factor.
For a 315 lb, 6’5", 20 year old “idle” man - the calories required per day are about 3600 per day which squares directly with my real world observations and experience as a large framed, 6’3" man who has been from 190 to 280 and currently hovers around 230-240. If we go from idle to “extremely active” for the 6’5", 315 lb 20 year old, the calories max out at around 5700 per day.
I have been counting calories since I was 19. Most people cannot count calories very accurately and have no real idea how many calories they eat and tend to grossly under or over estimate their average caloric consumption.
The issue here is not if people can eat huge amounts of calories per day. They can. They issue is what is required for maintenance of a specific weight within a given fat/muscle/metabolism envelope. 12,000 calories per day is an absurd figure for weight maintenance by an active 315 lb man by any stretch of the imagination. If someone wants to make the argument that Mandrich had the metabolism of a shrew go ahead but I am here to tell you that people (even athletes) who can achieve weights of 300 lbs or more rarely, if ever, have higher than average inherent, baseline metabolic burn rates.
My french isn’t that great but couldn’t “Il etait un nullite” be also translated “He was a nothing”? Maybe the reference was to the player and not the diet.
