Rozelle

  side effects, in all probability because the Soviets, like the East

  Germans who followed in their wake, didn’t care about the indi-

  vidual athletes. They cared about winning as an effective public-

  ity tool in the political and cultural Cold War. Later, this is why

  they kept the subjects of their experiments in isolation between

  competitions.

  The anonymous Soviet official had no trouble sharing a “state

  secret” with a man he considered a colleague. Ziegler returned

  home, determined to do something to help the American team.

  He developed an anabolic steroid called Dianabol with the financ-

  ing and assistance of a Swiss medicinal chemical firm then known

  as Ciba (later Ciba- Geigy).

  He had been motivated to level the international playing fields

  for America’s international athletes out of patriotism. In so doing,

  he had set up what would be the only perfect control group for

  testing. Off medical examinations of the group, he would discover

  that a large number of athletes were taking five and ten times the

  dosage he wanted them to take. He was horrified to learn two

  critical things.

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  At War with the Counterculture

  First, there were doctors out there (and, as we know, still are) who would write dangerous prescription dosages under the table

  for money. Second, those who availed themselves of this black

  market were prime candidates to wind up with testicular cancer;

  liver, kidney, or heart failure; and various forms of terminal cancer.

  He preached against these deadly dangers for years right up

  until his death. Unfortunately, there were few voices in his army.

  The loudest and most knowledgeable among them was Dr. Rob-

  ert Goldman, a medical doctor, a PhD, an athlete, and Ziegler’s

  protégé.

  The day before he died in 1983, Ziegler told Goldman: “I wish

  to God now I’d never invented it. I’d like to go back and take that

  whole chapter out of my life.” Then he charged Goldman with

  continuing the battle to shine a light on what had become a Pan-

  dora’s box of danger.

  “There were so few of us who understood the danger at the time,”

  Goldman told me. “So much of the criticism Rozelle received for

  being slow to act was unfair. It was easy to look back in hindsight

  and ask why it took him so long, but he was like most people who

  were just beginning to learn what this was all about. There is no

  question in my mind that among the major sports [baseball, foot-

  ball, basketball, and hockey], he was the first to act.”

  But back in 1963, not only were steroids not illegal, but the

  effects of taking them were completely unknown. Without warn-

  ing the genie slithered out of the bottle and into the locker room

  of the San Diego Chargers. It would be more than a decade before

  enough facts were on the table to trigger a strong reaction from

  the commissioner.

  In 1962 the Chargers were an embarrassment to their coach,

  Sid Gillman. After a 2- 12 finish the previous season, the coach

  vowed a new order of discipline would emerge for 1963. This was

  his twenty- ninth season in the game. He had long been recog-

  nized as a brilliant tactician and an architect of innovation in the

  passing game. He was a slave to perfection and an admirer of those

  of like personality.

  At War with the Counterculture

  217

  Gillman wanted to change the order starting with training camp, and he found it in Rough Acres, a failed dude ranch seventy miles

  east of San Diego, down a dirt road from the tiny town of Boule-

  vard, California. It featured ninety- degree heat and some inter-

  esting forms of wildlife.

  Each morning workmen swept the playing field for rattlesnakes.

  There, his players underwent the most physical drills they had ever

  experienced. And it was there that Gillman had introduced them

  to a man who would become pro football’s first strength coach. His

  name was Alvin Roy, and he brought with him a special “strength

  builder.” “This stuff is called Dianabol,” he told them, shaking a

  bottle of pink pills, “and it’s going to help assimilate protein and

  you’ll be taking it every day.” He distributed them at breakfast

  every morning. And when the team broke after practice sessions,

  the assistant coaches would remind them as they left the field to

  be sure and take their pink pills.

  They became the first steroid- fueled football team to win a

  championship, beating the Patriots, 51– 10, for the afl title. Ron

  Mix, a Chargers offensive lineman, would later tell Sports Illus-

  trated: “I still remember what the bottle said. It was in big red letters. It said, ‘Dangerous. Not to be taken over extended periods

  of time, will cause permanent bone damage, liver damage, heart

  damage, testicle shrinkage.’”

  Gillman is alleged to have told Walt Sweeney, “What do these

  guys know? They don’t know anything about football. They’re

  doctors.”

  “That [Houston Ridge] lawsuit may have been the triggering

  thing that told the vast majority of athletes that there might be

  something out there that is useful to you,” Mix also told Sports

  Illustrated. Still, it would take almost twenty years before the nfl could formalize a steroid policy.

  The more he heard about steroids, the more Rozelle was deter-

  mined to act. And unlike his fight against player usage of cocaine

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  At War with the Counterculture

  and other illegal drugs, the commissioner welcomed a powerful ally into the battle. As hard as Gene Upshaw, head of the nfl Players Association, had fought against the commissioner’s efforts to

  fight cocaine and marijuana use by the players (a goal that Upshaw

  saw as an invasion of privacy), he was four- square in the commis-

  sioner’s camp in the battle against steroid.

  Upshaw had been a player. Hell, he had been a positively great

  player, and he saw steroids as a form of blatant cheating in order to

  gain an advantage. “Upshaw was very good on steroids as opposed

  to social drugs. And what he didn’t do was as important to Pete

  as what he did do,” says Jay Moyer, the league’s former in- house

  counsel. “After two years of testing he still did not raise hell. And

  that was a huge help. He and Gene shared the exact same feelings

  on that subject. The union didn’t fully cooperate but they abso-

  lutely never challenged us, and that was because both Gene and

  Pete were on the same page.”

  Finally, in 1989 with the players’ union temporarily decertified

  by its members as a bargaining ploy in player- management nego-

  tiations, Rozelle took advantage of the opening to act. At a league

  meeting in Palm Desert, California, he announced he would uni-

  laterally institute an antisteroid policy.

  The mechanism provided for game suspensions without pay

  for players found to use steroids, starting with the 1989 season.

  His remarks that day made him the first of all professional sports

  commissioners to speak out publicly against the use of steroids

  by
athletes. His concerns over the long- range dangers of steroid

  even surpassed his feeling about competitive advantages. “I’m con-

  vinced it’s bad for players. A lot of things can happen to them to

  keep them from enjoying the quality of life after football,” Rozelle

  said. That stamped him as the first sports official to understand

  that players had embarked on a regimen that might kill them in

  early retirement. “With that in mind,” he added, “we will imme-

  diately get into educating players while advising them they could

  be suspended beginning in 1989.”

  It is worth noting that he had personally tried to ban steroids

  At War with the Counterculture

  219

  in 1983, but until the union’s temporary decertification, he had no chance to put teeth into the ultimatum. There had always been

  the union’s threat to use the issue as a bargaining chip in negotia-

  tions over the collective bargaining agreement that got in the way.

  But when he had first acted six years earlier, he had set a signifi-

  cant tone by banning anabolic steroids before professional basket-

  ball, before professional hockey, well before Major League Baseball,

  and a full nine years before the U.S. government had declared it

  a Category 3 controlled substance, a drug known to have legiti-

  mate medical uses but one that has the potential for physical or

  psychological addiction.

  Rozelle’s change on steroid punishment was not subject to vote

  by the nfl owners. How did Rozelle get the program through so

  quickly? “I just told them,” Rozelle said.

  The following year he announced that thirteen players from

  eight teams were suspended for flunking that first official testing

  under the new program. Upshaw’s official response was to claim

  that just thirteen positives out of all those players indicated that

  the nfl had greatly exaggerated the extent of steroid use.

  Rozelle’s response as reported by the New York Times was a genuine restatement of why he had been so vocal on the subject: “We

  tried to educate the players for the past two years and at the same

  time learn more ourselves about [the dangers] of steroids. We now

  know that it gives a strong competitive advantage and has severe

  medical side effects. This is not a program designed simply to try

  to catch people but to get them off this harmful drug.”

  There was controversy both among the guilty and among the

  media, many of whom knew nothing or very little about the long-

  range effects of the drug. Not only were most of them ignorant

  about the dangerous long- term effects of it, but they failed to rec-

  ognize the primitive stage in which the testing was still mired.

  The one most prominent among the offenders who was caught

  in that first web was the Eagles’ Ron Solt, whose only explana-

  tion was “I would do whatever it takes to make a million dollars a

  year. Most people would.”

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  At War with the Counterculture

  Of course, he had no idea what the physical risks were. None of them did because there was still so much research to be done. But

  the bottom line with which Rozelle had to deal was best described

  by the Packers’ Mike Ariey, who said when he was suspended, “I

  think the league decided to pull these 13 guys as scapegoats because

  they had to come up with names to validate this big witch hunt

  for steroid users. Maybe I was naive, I’m not blaming anybody but

  myself but those other guys should have been accountable also.

  C’mon [just] 13 guys. It was ludicrous.”

  You have to wonder what they might have said twenty years later

  when they looked around and saw so many of them dying young,

  those who died before their time at forty- five and fifty and sixty.

  It remains an ongoing battle, but at least Rozelle, during his

  tenure, like Tagliabue who followed, was willing to fight it. A full

  decade after Rozelle’s retirement, Bud Selig and Major League

  Baseball were still afraid to ban the steroid Mark McGwire was

  using while he was attempting to break baseball’s home run record

  and bring back fans still angry over a players’ strike.

  Of course, Rozelle might have made more progress if he had

  adopted George Young’s antisteroid plan. Young, then general man-

  ager of the New York Football Giants, said when I asked how his

  club dealt with warning players of steroids: “We did pretty well. I

  really respect Pete, but he might have done better if he did what

  I did. Whenever the subject came up, I would tell them that what

  they did would be entirely up to them, but, personally, I wouldn’t

  like it if my dick fell off.” Rest assured his analysis did not fall on deaf ears that day.

  At War with the Counterculture

  221

  15

  Davis Again: Feud without End

  One day he asked me if I had a choice did I want money, love, respect, or power, and I told him respect, and he said, “Wrong choice. With power, you get all the others.”

  —Writer Ron Borges, recalling a conversation with Al Davis

  Think of Tunney and Dempsey. Pete Rozelle was Tunney, boxing your

  head off, and Al Davis was Dempsey, throwing bombs from every angle.

  Pete wanted to fight you in the boardroom. Al wanted to fight you in the street.

  —Writer Dave Newhouse on the Rozelle- Davis 100- yard vendetta

  They were as different as champagne and malt liquor— the urbane

  commissioner who wanted to be respected more than feared and

  the renegade who wanted to be feared more than respected. They

  fought from coast to coast all through the nfl- afl wars and beyond.

  When Davis became afl commissioner, they fought from sepa-

  rate but equal Park Avenue command posts. They fought in the

  media. They fought to gain favor with twenty- one- year- old line-

  backers on campuses all across the continental landmass.

  Year after year they continued to battle. They were, in every

  aspect, Ali and Frazier at high noon in Manila, and the word armi-

  stice was not in their vocabulary. Eventually, their endless feud would take them to their final battlegrounds before judges and juries.

  But never before in the history of professional sports— not even

  in Baseball’s Curt Flood Supreme Court case— was the authority

  of a commissioner challenged as relentlessly and at times as suc-

  cessfully as in the personal crusade continually mounted by Al

  222

  Davis. Even after his Raiders- to— Los Angeles move was upheld by the courts, Al Davis persisted. Incredibly, he would actually

  testify against his own league in the usfl antitrust suit.

  Money was not the overriding fuel in this strange vendetta. Nor

  was it public animosity. The strongest thing Rozelle had ever pub-

  licly said about Davis was to call him “a charming rogue.” Much

  later, in private, of course, he would use other adjectives.

  And to my knowledge, outside of testifying for the plaintiff

  (usfl) against the league Rozelle ran, Davis never publicly resorted

  to name- calling. Sporadic sniping was more his public style. But

  the intensity of what each man felt about the other never abated.

  “I think,” Fran
k Gifford says, “each man lost a lot physically by

  what he had to put into this personal battle. It was like watching

  two gladiators, and it took a toll on all the owners. It made them

  have to choose, and they didn’t want that. There was no neutral-

  ity. Al wouldn’t permit it. Davis made you take sides. You heard

  him say, ‘Just win, baby, win,’ but what he meant was just win for

  Al. They were both powerful men in their own way, but it was Al

  who kept the feud alive.”

  There was no doubt on whose side most of the league’s old-

  timers came down. Looking back years later when I asked him

  his feelings about Davis, Art Modell said with great emotion: “Al

  Davis . . . don’t ask . . . For me, the day I learned about Al Davis

  was a day that will live forever in infamy. There were things about

  him I admired, like his love for his ailing wife, but when it came to

  football wheeling and dealing . . . forget about it. When it comes

  to football and Al Davis and the good of the league, I don’t even

  want to talk about it.”

  The split between Rozelle and Davis dealt primarily with an

  irreconcilable difference in agendas. “There was a reason that

  my father stood with Pete in those battles,” John Mara, the pres-

  ident and co- owner of the Giants, says. “Like Pete, he believed

  that what was good for the league was more important than what

  was good for us or any one team. Al saw it the other way around.”

  “There was no mystery about Al Davis,” said Paul Tagliabue,

  Davis Again: Feud without End

  223

  Rozelle’s major legal adviser and the man who succeeded him as commissioner. “I don’t think Pete had any expectations about Al

  being loyal to anyone except Al Davis. He showed his colors when

  he stole the [Oakland] franchise from Wayne Valley.”

  Valley had been the owner who first brought order out of chaos

  to a franchise that had been a disaster. And he was the man who

  gave Al Davis his big chance, according to Dave Newhouse, a

  respected Bay Area columnist.

  Valley was an old- school, tough construction guy out of San Leandro.

  Out here he was to construction millionaires what Bill Walsh was to

  future nfl head coaches. They personally mentored a hell of a lot of

  them. Valley was a tough guy who hated to lose, and in Davis he saw