Interference (58 page)

The Frontieres were not the only NFL owners who were
having serious problems. Others were in such bad shape that they were being forced to sell or move their teams.

• Beset with financial difficulties resulting from the collapse of the world oil market, Clint Murchison, stricken with a degenerative disease that impaired his ability to walk and talk, sold his interest in the Dallas Cowboys and its stadium corporation in March 1984 to an eleven-member partnership headed by the chairman of Texas A & M's board of regents, Harvey R. “Bum” Bright—another right-wing, freewheeling but widely diversified Dallas oilman with a string of savings and loan banks—for $86 million.
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Bright and his syndicate had outbid car dealer W. O. Bankston, a longtime friend of both the Cowboys and Murchison.

Because Bright had only a 17 percent interest in the team, his purchasing group had to receive special permission from the other NFL owners, who had earlier ruled that one person from each NFL team had to own 51 percent of the franchise. The NFL owners agreed to the deal—with the proviso that Tex Schramm remain as the team president.
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Murchison died at sixty-three, two years after the sale.

However, in late February 1989, Bright, who had lost $29 million in the October 1987 stock market crash, and his partners sold the Cowboys and the stadium for over $126 million to Arkansas oilman Jerry Jones, who immediately fired Tom Landry, the Cowboys' head coach for twenty-nine years. Landry was replaced by Jimmy Johnson, the head coach of the University of Miami. Both Jones and Johnson had been the co-captains of the 1964 national championship team at the University of Arkansas. Schramm resigned as the president of the franchise in April 1989 and was immediately appointed by the NFL owners to chair a newly conceived International Football League, which is expected to begin league play in April 1990.

• Also in March 1984, Edgar Kaiser sold the Denver Broncos to Denver real estate executive Patrick D. Bowlen for $73 million. Bowlen owned the Canadian-based Bowlen Holding, Ltd. in Edmonton. Later, Bowlen created a small stir when he made a statement, indicating that his team needed players who exhibited the toughness of prison inmates.

• That same month, the Baltimore Colts became the Indianapolis Colts as team owner Robert Irsay moved his team out of Baltimore in the middle of the night. Irsay had wanted the
Colts to play in a bigger stadium. The NFL owners decided not to interfere—since Al Davis had won his antitrust suit against the league on May 7, 1982.

In January 1985, while Irsay was driving his car on Chicago's North Side, it was hit with two bullets fired by persons unknown. The Colts owner was shaken up but unharmed.

• On April 29, 1985, Leonard Tose, wracked with gambling debts, sold the Philadelphia Eagles to Florida automobile dealer Norman Braman for $70 million.
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The fifty-two-year-old Braman, a native Philadelphian, was one of the largest car dealers in south Florida, with sixteen dealerships for his big-ticket automobiles: Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs, Porsches, and BMWs, among others. Because of his business savvy, Braman earned the title “the Baron of the Biscayne Boulevard Auto Dealers.”

Heavy into Republican politics, Braman was nominated by President Reagan to be commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but Braman withdrew his name from consideration. Braman had made his fortune while still in Philadelphia with his drug store franchise company, Rite Aid, which he sold in 1968. He moved to Florida, opened his first auto dealership in Miami, and then moved into Tampa as well.

• On June 3, 1985, John Mecom, who was in his fourth year as the chairman of the Houston-based John W. Mecom Company, sold the New Orleans Saints to another car dealer Tom Benson, who became the team's managing general partner. The sale price for the team was $70.2 million.

A native of New Orleans who also invested heavily in real estate and banking in Texas, Benson outbid the A. N. Pritzker family of Chicago, the owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain, which has also been represented by Sidney Korshak. However, Benson was not the majority owner of the Saints. He had eleven partners. As with the sale of the Cowboys by Bum Bright's group, the syndicate had to receive special permission from the NFL to purchase the team without a majority owner.

• Billy Bidwill, the son of Charles Bidwill who had bought the Chicago Cardinals in 1933, made his plans to move the St. Louis Cardinals to Phoenix after years of demands for a new stadium. He finally did so after the 1987 season and renamed his team the Phoenix Cardinals.

• In August 1988, the Seattle Seahawks franchise was purchased
from the Nordstrom family by Ken Behring and Ken Hofmann, two east Bay Area developers in San Francisco, for $80 million. Another former car dealer and a native of Wisconsin, Behring controls 75 percent of the Seattle team and is worth an estimated $600 million. He was featured on a segment of Robin Leach's
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
.

Behring owns one of the largest car collections in the world. It includes Adolf Hitler's limousine. The University of California at Berkeley created a controversial tax-exempt charity, the Behring Educational Institute, to help obtain tax exemptions for Behring's car museum. Consequently, Behring's tax write-offs were in the millions of dollars. As part of the arrangement, the university agreed to purchase the collection after Behring's death. The institute had been created by the university's vice chancellor, who was also a director of the museum, and who had purchased two houses in one of Behring's developments—with the help of a Behring loan.

Hofmann, who specializes in building huge moderate-income housing projects and owns 25 percent of the Seahawks, was investigated by state law-enforcement agencies after he engaged in a local shopping center partnership with a state assemblyman who received $300,000 worth of stock for only $24,000. Citizens groups charged that Hofmann had made the deal because he needed the legislator to help rezone the land. No wrongdoing was ever proven. Hofmann is said to be worth over $500 million.

• In another team purchase, financially strapped Billy Sullivan,
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after watching seventeen offers come and go, sold the majority control of the New England Patriots to Victor Kiam, who since 1979 has owned Remington Products, Inc., the Bridgeport-based electric shaver company. Sullivan retained a small percentage of the team while Kiam's partner, Philadelphia businessman Fran Murray, also became a minority owner. The sale price was $85 million.

50 Rozelle Gets Tough on Players

IN MID-DECEMBER 1985 six unnamed New England Patriots players were described by
The Boston Globe
as having drug problems. The disclosure about the six players came after a December 16, 1985, team party in Miami. According to team officials, it had been suspected that the players had been regularly using cocaine for over a year. Nevertheless, the team was 11-5 for the 1985 regular season and heading for the Super Bowl.

With the drama building for Super Bowl XX on January 26, 1986, the Patriots brushed off reporters questions about cocaine abuse and appeared to be fired up for the big game. The ten-point-underdog New England team came out swinging, scoring first on a thirty-six-yard field goal. But then that was it. After that, the Bears defense demolished the Patriots offense, forcing a safety and six turnovers, including a twenty-eight-yard interception streak for a touchdown. At halftime, the score was 23-3; when it was all over the Patriots had been fried, 46-10.

While the Bears' quarterback Jim McMahon, the game's most valuable player, began collecting his $3 million for endorsing everything from tacos to motor scooters, the Patriots returned to Foxboro, Massachusetts, to deal with their drug problems.

New England head coach Raymond Berry threatened to quit his job if the team did not agree to a voluntary drug-testing program, which would have established a precedent in the NFL. Team members agreed to go along with the program in a vote
by secret ballot, with the proviso that the names of those with the drug problems not be revealed—unless they became repeat offenders. Agreements made, the Patriots' front office announced the historic deal to the public without mentioning any names.

Ron Borges, the
Globe
reporter who had broken the original story in December, had already obtained the names of the six players during an off-the-record interview with a member of the Patriots staff. After the Super Bowl loss, Borges looked for a second source to confirm the identities of the six players. He went to Patrick Sullivan, the club's general manager, and recited the list to him. Sullivan had already confirmed the names before the team vote was taken.

On January 29, 1986, the
Globe
published the names of the six players: Raymond Clayborn, Tony Collins, Irving Fryar, Roland James, Kenneth Sims, and Stephen Starring.

As soon as the names were released, the Patriots players, feeling double-crossed, canceled their participation in the voluntary drug-testing program. The NFLPA immediately filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of the Patriots players.

Soon after, in response to yet another
Globe
story, the NFL confirmed that Fryar, an all-pro wide receiver, was also under investigation for gambling on NFL games during the 1985 season. Several of his teammates were also suspected of gambling, but Fryar was the only player named. The Patriots' front office, already dealing with an avalanche of press inquiries about the team's drug problems, replied curtly, “There is and continues to be no hard evidence that Irving Fryar has gambled on a pro football game. The only fact is that the league is checking out this unsubstantiated rumor, as we asked them to do.”
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The results of Fryar's polygraph test—in which he was asked whether he was gambling on NFL games—were not made public. However, Warren Welsh told me that Fryar is still under investigation.

The NFL had taken action against the league's mounting drug problems after the 1983 suspensions of five players. Stanley Wilson of the Cincinnati Bengals was suspended by his own team in 1984, reinstated in 1986, and then suspended again in 1987 indefinitely until being reinstated in April 1988. Chuck Muncie of the Minnesota Vikings, who had had previous bouts with cocaine while with the New Orleans Saints and the San Diego
Chargers, became the seventh player suspended over illegal drugs in 1985, his final season.
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Rozelle suspended Muncie for one game after he missed drug-counseling sessions. Muncie was later indicted for and pleaded innocent to selling cocaine to undercover agents. In unrelated cases, Mike Bell of the Kansas City Chiefs and New Orleans Saints running back Barry Word were also disciplined.
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In May 1988, Pete Rozelle personally assumed control over the monitoring of the NFL's drug epidemic because the team owners were not properly monitoring and disciplining their players.
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Jan Van Duser, the NFL's director of operations told
Washington Post
reporter Bill Brubaker, “There were clubs that did not address their drug problems as well as they might have, either through putting football considerations first or just not knowing enough about the problem.

“What we heard from some clubs was this: ‘We would be happy to do everything that's needed in a drug program provided we know that the team we're playing next week is doing the same thing.'”

Few believed that the drug problem within the NFL had truly subsided. According to Brubaker, Rozelle had held a “closed-door hearing” in New York on reports “that as many as 40 percent of the players on some NFL teams were using illegal drugs.” Hearing testimony from Dr. Forest Tennant, the NFL's drug adviser, Rozelle learned that “half of the NFL's twenty-eight franchises had told him [Tennant] that between five and twenty players on each of their teams were ‘known drug users.'

“Tennant went on to testify that some clubs had ‘swept' their drug problems ‘under the carpet' and that one player had informed him that cocaine was being sold in his team's training room.”

Consequently, Rozelle augmented the NFL's drug program with a new $1.5 million random drug-testing program, which was administered by the league office.

Mike Strachan, formerly of the New Orleans Saints, whose cocaine use and 1981 conviction cost him his professional football career, told me, “Cocaine takes a toll on you, and you really can't perform when you're strung out. The game is so intense and so competitive that you can't stay up all night doing cocaine and then expect to get up and perform well. You're just going to point a finger at yourself.

“Random drug testing will change the complexion of the
game. The guys I know who are still in the league are scared of getting caught and won't do drugs. That's the deterrent. If the NFL strictly enforces its drug-testing program, there won't be a drug problem in the league.

“If they had had that kind of program when I was in the NFL, I probably never would have gotten into the trouble I got into. Back then, it just got out of hand, and there was nothing to stop it.”

During the 1988 preseason, the NFL finally got tough—in accordance with the league's three-step policy. Several NFL players were suspended for violating the league's substance-abuse policy, including: Dexter Manley of the Washington Redskins, Doug DuBose of the San Francisco 49ers, Kevin Gogan of the Dallas Cowboys, Richard Reed of the Denver Broncos, Robb Riddick of the Buffalo Bills, Pat Saindon of the Atlanta Falcons, Greg Townsend of the Los Angeles Raiders, and Tony Collins of the Indianapolis Colts. All received thirty-day suspensions except former Patriots player Collins, who was suspended indefinitely after his third violation.

The NFLPA complained that Rozelle and the NFL did not have the right to suspend players without a collective-bargaining agreement between the players' union and NFL's management council. The three-step league policy had resulted from the 1982 contract, which had since expired. The NFLPA threatened to take the NFL to court if the suspensions did not cease.
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