Coke and No Smile

By Tom Callahan

For the N.F.L., it is already a season of pervasive discontent

What should be the best of times for the National Football League, considering its new $2 billion television contract, is not only the worst of times but the most unsettling of times, the most unsavory of times. Training camps are just opening for the coming season, but the sport is already festooned with black eyes.

Last month former New Orleans Defensive End and convicted Cocaine Dealer Don Reese sold his story to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, depicting widespread drug abuse in the N.F.L. and implicating ex-Saints Teammate Chuck Muncie, now with the San Diego Chargers. Cocaine "controls and corrupts the game" was Reese's chilling theme. Chargers Owner Gene Klein said he could not see how a man who rushed for 19 touchdowns, as Muncie did last season, could possibly be on anything. Shortly thereafter Muncie checked into a detoxification center, confessing "a small problem with alcohol, cocaine and marijuana."

This is neither a small problem nor a new one in the N.F.L. The common disclaimer used to be: "Football players are part of society, and the drug problem in football is no greater than in society." Only lately has Commissioner Pete Rozelle acknowledged it "could be a larger problem for us." Since the Reese report, other woozy-headed players have stumbled forward, and several teams have volunteered the information that they have been arranging treatment for their user athletes for some time. Sports editors in the 28 league cities sent their reporters out after the local angle, and the story dripped, dripped, dripped. This summer, drugs got more ink than draft choices.

Unpleasantness pervades. The cranky voices of labor and management have started up again. Of the major games, football pays the players the least ($82,000 average salary, say the players; $90,000, say the owners), though it is probably the most punishing sport and definitely the most profitable. Each team will gather $14 million in TV revenue alone this season, if there is a season. According to the "we are the game" game plan, the union is demanding 55% of gross revenues, to be distributed basically by seniority.

The few N.F.L. Players Association members who have objected have not merely been shouted down but threatened. "We get to see you on the field next year," N.F.L.P.A. President Gene Upshaw of the Oakland Raiders wrote to Denver Quarterback Craig Morton, after Morton had spoken out against the "55% solution." When asked later about the letter, Upshaw said, "If you want to look at it as a threat, that's just the way I meant it."

Such is the talk and the style around this game now. The owners are no less strident, chewing over the idea of a lockout, professing to be negotiating while mailing the players how-to instructions on quitting a union. In football, owners can still regard the athletes lightly, confident they will never find a truly competitive market for their services. Jack Donlan, executive director of the management

council, jogs in a NO FREEDOM, NO FOOTBALL T shirt, the familiar slogan of players on the picket line eight years ago. Less a strike than a student demonstration, that action amounted to marching around the quadrangle a while and then going back to class. The owners are still grinning. As for drugs, the owners favor urinalysis of the sort routine to boxers and Olympians. The players' association calls such tests dehumanizing. Only Detroit Lions Tackle Doug English has been heard to say out loud: "When you think about it, almost all of football is dehumanizing." If the players suddenly announced that they were agreeable to testing in the interest of protecting the integrity of their game, not to mention saving a few souls, it would be the first public relations point scored anywhere in the sport in a long time. Rozelle, the former p.r. man, the "boy commissioner" at 33, is 56 now and looking his age.

The mean personal quarrel between Rozelle and Al Davis, who were opposing commissioners before the National and American Football Leagues agreed to merge in 1966, has been as unseemly as the rest. Davis appears to have won his fight to relocate the Oakland Raiders in Los Angeles, though there remain one or two legal shots to be fired. Under an unusual interpretation of eminent domain, Oakland is busily trying to "nationalize" the Raiders, while Davis is hurriedly selling tickets in Los Angeles.

At the same time that Rozelle has been ramming his head straight into Davis and the Sherman Antitrust Act, he has also been trying end-around plays. Political football is not just an expression. The N.F.L.'s All-Stars lobbying team, featuring former Democratic National Committee Chairman Bob Strauss, is wheedling Congress to exempt the league from antitrust laws and make the exemption retroactive in Oakland's case. A slightly troubling side to this is that two new expansion franchises may soon be handed out, perhaps to Phoenix or Memphis or Birmingham or Jacksonville or Indianapolis, and Rozelle has made it pretty plain that he will wait to see how the congressional votes fall before he bestows any prizes. In a similar spirit, the 1985 Super Bowl site will not be named for a while. Ten cities have applied.

The jingling of all that television money had a Utopian ring a couple of months ago, but there has not been a sweet sound heard around football since. To complete the N.F.L.'s funk, there is even another pro league, a spring league, mustering on the horizon. What does a football fan have to look forward to? On Aug. 29 the Los Angeles Raiders might debut in the Los Angeles Coliseum. On Sept. 12 the 1982 season might begin. On Aug. 30 Mike Strachan, the Saints Most Valuable Player of 1975, will stand trial on a cocaine-trafficking charge. The number of other New Orleans players called to court may amount to a procession, led by George Rogers, the top rusher in the N.F.L. last year. Rogers has admitted to federal investigators that he spent more than $10,000 on cocaine during the 1981 season. Not much more than a year ago, Rogers won the Heisman trophy. --By Tom Callahan

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