Claims that Ravens’ linebacker Ray Lewis had used a deer antler extract spray -- which contains a substance on the NFL’s banned list -- to recover more quickly from a torn triceps made for one of the weirder storylines leading up to last Sunday’s Super Bowl XLVII.
Like most of us, former Cowboys’ defensive end Tony Casillas isn’t terribly familiar with the healing effects of deer antler spray, but in an appearance on 105.3-FM “The Fan” this week, he was quick to point out that football players using obscure products to recover from the physical toll taken by the game is nothing new.
But where Lewis supposedly used a product made from and animal, Casillas says he and his teammates used a product made for an animal -- horse liniment, to be specific.
The other chief difference between the liniment supposedly used by the Cowboys in the early 1990s and the spray allegedly used by Lewis: The liniment didn’t contain anything banned by the league, according to Casillas, who won two Super Bowls in his three-season stint in Dallas.
“When I heard about deer antler spray, when I heard that, I said, ‘That’s nothing,’” Casillas said, per ProFootballTalk.com. “We used to use this stuff called DMSO. That’s what veterinarians put on horses, on a muscle, so this is stuff that you can rub, and we used it in the locker room. We had a bottle and you’d take it. It goes straight to the bloodstream. And I’m not sure about this deer antler stuff, but, I mean, it was prevalent in our locker room. It’s called DMSO. You get it from the veterinarian and it goes right to the bloodstream. It’s an ointment that’s like anti-inflammatory. You put it on your skin and you put it on a muscle, and I guarantee you, in about 30 minutes you’d feel it. It wasn’t on the list. If you’re going to talk about the deer antler stuff, we used DMSO and people knew it. Everyone knew about it."
