BOALSBURG, Pa. -- The professor arrived for lunch on a custom Harley, vaporizing stereotypes with the thunderous blatt-blatt-blatting of the chrome exhaust. The bike is purple. Or lilac. Or something. Probably not the standard pool vehicle from the School of Health Policy and Administration at Penn State.

The prof is Chuck Yesalis, mid '50s, gray Fu Manchu, black Spirit of Freedom T-shirt and fading jeans. If you prefer him as Prof. Charles E. Yesalis, M.P.H, Sc.D., Ph.D. (Hopkins, '75), generally the way he is presented in newspapers and news magazines coast to coast, that's cool.

This Yesalis is a seamless character, straightforward and fearlessly unself-conscious.

You can think of him as the Dick Vitale of doping, an enthusiastic media-savvy conduit everyone wants to access when the conspicuous tail-chasing we call steroid use and steroid testing swerves toward full lather. And boy it's all lathered up now, isn't it, Marion Jones? Isn't it, Barry Bonds? Isn't it, Jason Giambi and you handful of NFL superbrutes?

"I average about 120 major interviews a year," Chuck said in the backroom of a local tavern. "I know there are people thinking, 'That arrogant SOB loves to hear himself talk,' but the reason the media keep coming back is that they know I don't throw the bull. With the BALCO investigation, it'll probably be closer to 200 interviews this year.

"The thing is, I've earned my cynicism; they have not earned their optimism."

By "they," Yesalis refers to just about every cheery, bumbling sports administrative body doomed to chase steroid cheats in an era of designer steroids, sophisticated masking agents, cyclical dosing schedules, undetectable human growth hormone, and every other aspect of previously unimagined bio-engineering advances that have made it so that you have to be a moron to fail a drug test.

The book Yesalis is writing now is on the history of doping, which will require extra chapters when the BALCO stench gets its full airing. His previous works, "The Steroids Game" and a medical reference volume "Anabolic Steroids in Sport and Exercise" are ready evidence of his expertise, but probably not as noteworthy as the fact that Yesalis was the first to present evidence of psychological dependence on steroids and to demonstrate the association between steroids and violent behavior.

Most recently, he was the only one to scoff audibly at Congressional drug hearings in which the NFL came away looking like the model drug-testing entity, if only when you look at baseball first.

"The upshot of that was, 'Look, Bud [Selig], your drug-testing facade is nowhere near as good as the NFL's facade,' " he said over some crab soup. " 'You're going to have to get yourself a facade like the NFL's.' "

Yesalis' problem with the NFL system is that it is not transparent or conducted by a third-party, the implication being that the league can limit the number of positive tests it discloses or even look the other way in the event marquee players turn up dirty.

"The league feels that the medical staff that administers the program is, in effect, a third party," Steelers president Art Rooney II said from his South Side office the other day. "It's not like they're full-time employees."

Rooney said those staffers are paid by the league, but that the league's earnest commitment to comprehensive and independent testing is demonstrated by its funding of the new Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory in conjunction with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and the University of Utah, which should begin research and testing operations this year.

But it might be too late. Young football players, 14 and 15, linemen in particular, are keenly aware that an NFL future means they've got to find the fast track to 300 pounds and beyond.

"A mom came up to me once and said, 'My son's coaches are pushing him hard to use androstenedione -- the [Mark] McGwire drug,' " he said. "And she says, 'What should I do?' I said, 'I'd try as hard as I could to get the SOB fired.'

"I don't understand parents sometimes. They won't let kids drive past 11 o'clock, but they willingly turn them over to these sports systems."

The system in the drug cauldron now is the Olympic movement, especially as it relates to U.S. track and field athletes. The USADA has already cut a deal with sprinter Kelli White, who won the 100 and 200 at the world championships last year. White admitted using illegal drugs in exchange for a two-year ban, but could apply for early re-instatement if she cooperates in the investigation of Jones and her sprinter/partner Tim Montgomery, among others.

Jones, who won three gold medals in the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, will sue if the USADA effectively keeps her out of the Olympics on circumstantial evidence rather than a positive drug test, as it did with White.

There's this little matter of a check for $7,350 from Jones' account to BALCO just before the Sydney Games.

"It looks like the DEA, the IRS, the FBI, are finally putting in some first-teamers on this issue," Yesalis said. "For this to be effective, careers are going to have to be ruined. The more careers ruined, the better the impact on parents and coaches."

Yesalis leans back and smiles. School's out. It's time for his annual 2,000 mile Harley trek.

How's that, I wonder.

"Therapeutic," he said. "Extremely therapeutic."