Time to Tell Drug Users to Clean Up or Clear Out

Someone once said that being a professional athlete is the best of all possible jobs in the world, next to doing nothing.

Someone else said it’s a stupid bird that befouls its own nest.

The two points of view intersected on the graph, it seems to me, at the last Super Bowl game, when a group of young men with the best of all possible jobs, given their qualifications in society, were busy fouling it up.

The storm that rose over Super Bowl XX shook every newspaperman there. Were the Bears that good--or were the Patriots that high? Had we spent the week hyping a contest of hopheads who were laughing at us? Was this the gridiron equivalent of a fixed fight? Or was this an exaggerated case of sour grapes by a humiliated loser?

Reports began to circulate early Super Sunday that the New England coach, a man who had appeared all week to have something other than the game on his mind, was going to quit the team immediately after the game. It was a curious rumor about a man who appeared to be at the pinnacle of his career. Still, Raymond Berry appeared to have been a tormented man all week.

Next, it appeared as if a Boston newspaper had sat on the story for weeks, a surprising breach of trust for such a respected journal. Not so, protested its editors, they had had only tantalizing whiffs of the story. Even what they had was off the record, and the newspaper was caught between its obligation to its readers and its promises to its sources. It’s an age-old journalistic dilemma.

The next bombshell appeared not so ambiguous. An official for the NFL said that the league knew about it all along. Now, this is major league malfeasance. Networks were paying millions of dollars, fans were flying in from all quarters of the globe, media types were all poised to cover--what? A hoax? A tainted game? What the race track calls a boat race?

The league takes it upon itself to force disclosure of even a minor injury to a key player on the eve of even a regular-season game. It does this to play fair with the fan, the media and even to ensure that this information is not used to sinful advantage by the bookmakers.

If it has to disclose that a wide receiver has a sprained ankle or a cold in the nose, why not that he has symptoms of drug addiction?

Horrified higher-ups corrected that story--not too convincingly--when they realized what a damaging admission that was. If the league knew about it, why didn’t it let its constituency, the fans of America, in on it? Why did it let the “American Celebration,” Super Bowl XX, go on? Or why didn’t they at least issue it with the equivalent of a surgeon-general’s warning?

The New England Patriots next tried to cut their losses. The team psychiatrist issued a white paper listing the “almost negligible” problems of the affected players--seven in number.

But seven players are one-sixth of a squad, and maybe as many as a quarter of the starters.

If one-sixth of the population of the United States had a drug problem, that would come to 37 million people. So much for negligibility.

The psychiatrist’s report also sought to trivialize the problem by referring to it as “experience with recreational drugs.”

That’s a nice turn of phrase. Makes it sound like eating a box of chocolates. Equates drug use with ballroom dancing, swimming in the pond, bridge and croquet. It’s a “recreation.”

No, it isn’t. Not unless suicide is. Among other things, it’s against the law. And I never heard anybody mention “recreational bank-robbing.”

Well, the league, the press, the fans, even the victorious Chicago Bears must know what Oliver of Laurel and Hardy used to feel like when he said to Stan, “Another nice mess you got us into!”

Super Bowl XX probably never will be deodorized. It will go into public consciousness like one of Primo Carnera’s fights. Not a tank job, but the next best thing, a snow job.

What’s to be done about it? Well, the first thing to be done about it is to institute punishment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The civilization that shrinks from punishing its criminals is doomed.

You cannot decriminalize crime. You can’t repeal the Ten Commandments. To continue to see the lawbreaker as hero, the guy who let his family, friends, team, country and self down, is folly. In sports as well as the rest of life.

The solution is so simple that a schoolboy could come up with it: Find the users and clean them up or throw them out. Before you give a guy a million dollars a year, give him a specimen bottle. If he won’t use it, take back the million. Next case.

Something like 80% of the American people favor mandatory drug testing. Yet, when the New England Patriots agreed to voluntary drug testing, the players’ union filed an unfair-labor-practices charge against them and the league.

Somebody’s out of step. Somebody’s afraid to take a stand. The game needs a guy on a white horse. It needs guts, not understanding. As someone also said, compassion is an overrated virtue.

Who knows? We might even get a good Super Bowl game out of it.