Rozelle

  anatomy of the big plays. It was easy for the Rozelle propaganda

  mill to produce a gaggle of writers for the event.

  “That was the day I decided that Pete Rozelle might just be the

  coolest man in the world,” Steve Sabol, who would later take nfl

  Films far beyond his dad’s expectations, told me.

  They were all there . . . the biggest writers in town . . . the ones with national audiences . . . even some players from the Giants. So the lights go out and the music comes up, and the title is there big as life. We are just ten minutes into the film, and then crash . . . bang . . . oh, crap.

  A waiter trips over the projector, and it goes down into the hors

  d’oeuvres. The lights come up, my dad says, “Uh . . . uh, well, just

  give us a moment,” and before he says anything else, Pete is up and

  he is addressing the room.

  He never skips a beat, while he brings up Frank Gifford and Del

  Shofner and Alex Webster, and he’s holding a press conference about

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  Another Day, Another Dragon to Slay

  their thoughts on the game they are about to see in film while we’re cleaning up the mess and getting the film out of the crab legs. By the time the film is ready again, we have a fascinated audience. I think

  only Pete could have done that. It could have been disaster.

  Rozelle knew he had taken a major gamble on what films could

  do for the game that was his product. Today, the experiment that

  the Sabols began has become the greatest propaganda and mer-

  chandizing tool in sports history.

  There was a moment when much of this could have been lost.

  nfl Properties, noting the commercial success of nfl Films, tried

  to get the Sabols to move into Manhattan under the nfl Proper-

  ties umbrella. Rozelle refused to let that happen. It was his opin-

  ion that “Films” was not like selling jerseys. He did not want the

  “suits” to muscle in where they had no background.

  He believed Films might be a kind of country cousin to Proper-

  ties but never under its editorial control. He felt that left down in

  Philly, away from Properties’ influence, Films could remain pure

  to the public relations purpose he and Sabol had agreed was the

  right direction for it. “He understood even better than we did,”

  the elder Sabol said, “how we were remaking the game of football.”

  I remember when this issue came up, he said he wanted us to stay

  down in Philly. He said to me, “This is no deodorant you are selling.

  You don’t need to be up here with the ad guys and the lawyers. You

  need to be left alone, and remember that you are not making films for

  the owners or the coaches or the players. You are making them for

  the fans. And you will continue to see that a lot clearer down there

  instead of here with people looking over your shoulder.

  “Don’t worry about the owners. They don’t even understand what

  the hell you are doing— thank God.”

  It was not an idle boast when, speaking of nfl Films’ early

  success, Steve once said, “The only other human endeavor more

  thoroughly captured on 16- mm film than the National Football

  League is World War II.”

  Another Day, Another Dragon to Slay

  209

  14

  At War with the Counterculture

  I think the [social] drug thing really hit him hard. He was worried that we could be headed to where the nba was at the time in the matter of so- called social drug use. Even before Len Bias and Don Rodgers died from cocaine overdoses, he had been trying to formulate a disciplinary plan he hoped to get past the players union.

  —Jay Moyer, former nfl in- house counsel

  The trouble was that the men went crazy for steroids. They figured if one pill was good, three or four of them would be better, and they were eating them like candy. I began seeing prostate trouble and atrophied testes.

  —Dr. John Ziegler, father of synthetic anabolic steroids, who later

  regretted introducing them to athletes

  Pete Rozelle knew what was coming, and he was desperate to derail

  its runaway course. In 1986 during an interview in his office he

  told me, “We have a huge drug problem in this country here and

  now. We have it in the culture and on the campuses of our col-

  leges, and it’s naive to think you can look away because the young

  men coming into our league are shaped by that culture and come

  off of those campuses.”

  He never mentioned the single biggest trigger for his concern

  that day. He didn’t have to. We were coming off a summer that ate

  away at Rozelle’s worst fears. During an eight- day span in June,

  twenty- two- year- old Len Bias, an enormously gifted basketball

  forward out of the University of Maryland and the number- two

  choice in the overall nba draft, died of a cocaine overdose just

  two days after his selection. A week later the Browns’ Don Rod-

  210

  gers, a former rookie of the year at safety and an all- pro, died the same way.

  This wasn’t something whose impact had sneaked up on the

  commissioner. Cocaine and pot were a growing problem around

  the nfl. He had already commissioned Don Weiss, a top aide, to

  work with a team of outside lawyers to get some kind of drug pol-

  icy in place.

  How long had the problem nagged at him? He had made a

  serious personal decision to do something about marijuana years

  earlier after an unplanned experiment had given him firsthand

  knowledge about marijuana, which he knew had already been

  smoked in nfl locker rooms and preceded cocaine in terms of

  popularity.

  In the early 1970s Acapulco was still at the zenith of its popu-

  larity as a vacation magnet for celebrities, jet- setters, and moneyed people. Its growth had begun in the 1950s in the northern part

  of the city, where celebrities such as Errol Flynn, Clark Gable,

  John Wayne, Hedy Lamarr, and Roy Rogers, to name just a few,

  flocked there for fun in the sun. Small wonder that in 1957 the

  attraction inspired Frank Sinatra to sing “flying down Acapulco

  way.” And they did.

  Elvis Presley made a highly forgettable movie there called Fun

  in Acapulco. Luxury hotels began to sprout in the southern part of town. Travel agencies spread the word that now LA secretaries,

  college kids, et al. could share that fun in the sun with the stars

  at affordable prices.

  But the beach houses to the north continued to be popular with

  old- guard snowbirds. One of them was Ed Sabol, who spent a lot

  of winters in the old beach settlement with his closest friends. One

  of those regular houseguests was Pete Rozelle, who loved the sun,

  the easy life, and, most of all, the fishing in the Gulf of Mexico

  for which Sabol was the perfect companion.

  Blair Sabol, Ed’s daughter, who knew the commissioner well,

  told me this version of a night circa 1970 when the commissioner

  expressed an interest in learning exactly what the big deal was

  At War with the Counterculture

  211

  about pot because it had already been detected in at least one nfl locker room. This is what she recounted:

  I was so much younger than him, and he knew that pot was a big thing

  with my generation. That afternoon a friend and I scored some Aca- />
  pulco gold on the beach and brought it home. There was a big drink-

  ing scene at dinner that night, but here I must tell you that for all the years my family and I were around Pete, I never saw him drunk and

  he wasn’t that night.

  He loved Acapulco. He loved to fish, and every time I saw him

  down there he was tanned and totally relaxed because he was away

  from the tremendous stress of the commissioner’s job.

  So it was late at night and my mom and dad had gone to bed, and

  it was just me and Pete, and my brother Steve, and his houseguest.

  It was a beautiful night, and we were sitting on the porch when Pete

  asked me what the big deal was about pot because he knew I smoked it.

  As I recall he had said, “Someday I am going to have to deal with

  a lot of players over this.” He was a cigarette chain- smoker anyway,

  as we all knew, and I said if he wanted to find out, he ought to try it and see for himself. I remember laughing and telling him that since

  he was so stoic, it probably wouldn’t have any effect on him anyway.

  So he did. He kept puffing and exhaling and saying over and over,

  “This does nothing for me . . . I don’t feel a thing . . . nothing at all . . .

  absolutely nothing,” and then he started to laugh and we started to

  laugh and it went on that way for a while, and then he got very quiet.

  Thinking back, he probably was stoned.

  The next day, I recall he said something like, “I still don’t know

  what the big deal is, but I feel like this [pot] could be a problem for my guys.”

  And in terms of public image it would be.

  In the matters of both pot and cocaine, Gene Upshaw, the exec-

  utive director of the nfl Players Association (1983– 2008), felt that

  any attempt to test the players would be an invasion of privacy.

  He repeatedly fought Rozelle’s attempt to get a joint agreement

  about policing drugs.

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  At War with the Counterculture

  This was a battle that exasperated Rozelle for years because the standard player contract and the league constitution both seemed to

  give the commissioner power to protect the image of the game. In

  1973 and again in 1975 he notified the players that the league would

  test for marijuana and cocaine. Disciplinary action would follow,

  he told them, but for the most part there was little or no progress

  because he had no green light from the nfl Players Association.

  But even the Players Association began to feel the weight of

  public opinion when Sports Illustrated ran a cover story in June 1982 about cocaine and marijuana problems in the nfl. To compound the image problem, the entry of two players, Chuck Mun-

  cie and Rick Upchurch, into rehab about that time became public

  knowledge.

  That same year a new collective bargaining agreement gave

  Rozelle the right to test only in preseason camp for drugs and

  further confidential testing of those whom the league had suspi-

  cions as a result of the first set of tests. But an nlrb arbiter ruled out spot- testing because it was not covered by the cba.

  Rozelle had the mechanism he wanted but no ability to enforce

  it. And, as expected, one voice emerged to blame him for that.

  Al Davis, who despite his later claims never liked or accepted

  Rozelle, returned to his ongoing vendetta, telling Sports Illus-

  trated that Rozelle’s attempt to control drug abuse had failed, and the league still needed “a strong program and someone with the

  guts to enforce it.”

  Having fired that personal broadside against the man he for-

  ever viewed as a public relations specialist who never should have

  survived the war between the leagues at the expense of a football

  man like him, he neglected to point out that the union, led by

  one of his former players, Gene Upshaw, had derailed every sin-

  gle attempt at an enforceable agreement.

  In 1991, two years after his retirement, looking back over the

  difficulty he had in trying to do what he felt was right in relation

  to cocaine and marijuana, Rozelle said in an interview later run

  by the Academy of Achievement:

  At War with the Counterculture

  213

  It’s tough when you’re supposed to be the guardian of the sport. You’re repulsed by that [drug abuse], you know, you hate it. But people are

  people, and you just do the best you can.

  I wanted to be sure that we were clean, so I set up a testing pro-

  gram. Their union took it to arbitration, and got it softened a great

  deal. So now I will be criticized in the future for drug incidents, yet I was unable to execute a testing program that could stop it.

  I personally feel that drugs constitute the biggest major problem

  we have in this country, forgetting sports, because drugs create the

  medical problems that cause the increase in all our medical costs.

  They contribute to the homeless, that’s a big problem many people

  see today, and a lot of that stems from drugs.

  Unfortunately, during the period that I attempted to develop a

  stronger program, the players protested, and they felt that should

  be individual rights and so forth, and they wanted to slow it down.

  And they were able to get an arbitrator to rule that there was only so many things you could do.

  But in 1987 and 1988 when negotiations with the players’ union

  for a new collective bargaining agreement bogged down, Rozelle’s

  determination to slow down drugs in the nfl caught a break. Dur-

  ing negotiations for a new cba, the players decertified their union in order to institute a tidal wave of individual suits against the league and its owners. Now there was no agreement for a mediator to cite,

  and Rozelle stepped in. He imposed the best drug- testing program

  in all sports. The nba had one that protected secrecy at the time,

  but it contained forgiveness clause after forgiveness clause, accord-

  ing to George Young, then gm of the Giants. “Read the damned

  thing,” he told me, “and then read ours. The nba rule is based on

  hand- holding and encouragement. Ours is genuine tough love . . .

  a kind of crime- and- punishment type of thing.”

  “I think the drug thing really hurt Rozelle,” Jay Moyer, the for-

  mer in- house nfl counsel, told me. “It wore him down over and

  over because we were constantly catching people, and it really

  hurt him deep down.”

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  At War with the Counterculture

  Rozelle did, in fact, make serious inroads into the problem. But there already was yet another chemical challenge, and that one

  struck at the heart of Rozelle’s obsession with public perception.

  Before he got it under reasonable control, it almost branded the

  league as a band of cheaters. It began with pills and then morphed

  into a full- blown national steroid scandal.

  On October 11, 1969, a man named Houston Ridge of the San

  Diego Chargers played what would be his last game of professional

  football against the Miami Dolphins. Ridge, coached by Sid Gill-

  man, was in his fifth season with San Diego.

  Injured earlier in the season and treated by team doctors before

  that game, he later insisted that he had so many drugs inside him

  that he thought he was seeing visions. He said that in one game


  he had played while under the influence of nine separate drugs,

  including three different amphetamines and three different mus-

  cle relaxers.

  The drugs he was given for that game by a doctor associated

  with that team included amphetamines and pain killers. He tore

  the inside of his kneecap into chopped liver and never even felt it.

  His injuries were career ending. When the doctor’s name became

  public in the media, an interesting thing happened— which is to

  say nothing at all. Neither the county nor the state medical asso-

  ciation investigated the doctor.

  It was a national scandal. Sworn affidavits by the players that were

  never repudiated talked of the delivery system where “uppers” and

  “downers” were actually delivered to the right players’ lockers. The

  Chargers settled with Ridge for $265,000. Back in New York there

  was both a sigh of relief at the settlement and an element of horror

  at the revelation that the Chargers had been ordering as many as

  ten thousand pills a year. Almost overlooked in the media coverage,

  the league office and in the public perception was the emergence of

  anabolic steroids in that very case. Since the early 1960s, the Char-

  gers had been handing out steroids to players in training camp.

  At War with the Counterculture

  215

  Nobody seemed to understand that there was something a lot more damaging than “uppers” and “downers” already finding a

  home in the Chargers’ dressing room. It would later spread to a

  league- wide head- on potential disaster that Rozelle would soon

  have to fight like hell to bring under control. It began as anabolic

  steroids, a label with which few in the nfl headquarters, includ-

  ing the commissioner, back then were familiar.

  A man who was, however, was named Dr. John Ziegler. As a

  doctor for the U.S. weightlifting team, he was well aware of why

  the Russian state- controlled national athlete machine was success-

  fully kicking ass worldwide.

  In pursuit of an insight into that, he met for drinks with a Soviet

  team doctor after a 1954 world championship meet in Vienna that

  was dominated by the Soviets. The doctor confided in him that

  their athletes were using various forms of testosterone to become

  bigger, stronger, and possibly even faster. He did not mention any