Finally, inevitably, unscrupulous agents appear, and the athlete–who is now a bona fide pro prospect, at least in his own mind–begins getting $1,000 here, $5,000 there as his eligibility draws to a close. Those agents delude him with visions of grandeur, entice him with loans and drugs, and hope to sign him up before his college career is over. That is patently illegal–which both sides know–but Madden recalls the first-round draft choice who joined his Raiders with three agents: ”When he was still in school, each of `em told him, `Sign here and I`ll give you $10,000.` That`s all he heard.”
”I saw the other day where every (potential NFL) No. 1 one pick has an agent,” says the Bulls` Albeck. ”That`s been going on a long time. Someone will subsidize a player`s senior year so he can represent him.”
”Some agents are colossal butt suckers,” says Stanford`s Johnson.
”There`s egotism involved, `I got to sign up this guy.` He bribes the kid with coke, women to sign him up, says he`ll get him set up for life. What kind of deal he gets for the player becomes a minor concern. He`s setting him up for life, all right. He encourages him to break rules by signing early, and to do that he gives him everything he wants. It`s the same pattern that was set up from the start; athletes become dependent on amoral and immoral people. At best, amoral, but more likely immoral. They attach themselves to athletes, and it`s a very sick thing.”
”When you`re talking about the problems of the professional athlete, you`re talking about the end result of the whole process,” says former Notre Dame captain Oriard. ”It`s all along the line, and they`re brought along through the system without any kind of larger awareness.”
”The guy who enters pro sports hasn`t run scared from the 7th grade on,” says Jim Finks, former president of the Bears and Cubs. ”Until he enters the pros, it`s been nothing but roses.”
”What I`ve found is when a player comes in as a No. 1 draft pick, he`s usually been the biggest person in his conference, on his team, and has had it pretty much his own way,” concludes Albeck. ”Now he comes into the NBA, and he`s not the biggest, not the strongest, not the best rebounder, and it`s a very rude awakening. Now he has to sit back and say, `Hey, someone is better than I am. How do I stay in this business?` They have to have the wherewithal to make the adjustment. Those who do stay a long time. Those who don`t, they`re the problems.
”He (that top pick) has a preconceived idea that he`s the best, which is not all bad from a self-confidence standpoint. But all of a sudden he takes a tremendous fall, and that`s when you can have a basket case on your hands. That`s when you`ve got to go to them and say, `Yes, you do have talent. You just have to go through a learning process.` That`s where they bottom out, a lot of them. They`ve been made into gods in high school and college, but there are what, 276 jobs in this league? It`s the epitome of the basketball world. That`s why you have so many people become distraught, psychologically damaged, and sometimes you have kids adopt the attitude, `I`ll only be in the league three years, and I`m going to have a hell of a time while I last.` ”
There was the story of former Raider defensive end Charles Philyaw, whose teammate Skip Thomas was nicknamed Dr. Death. Philyaw got his bell rung one afternoon in practice, and the coaches told him to go see the doctor; Philyaw collected himself and walked across the field to see Thomas. There was the story of former Browns` defensive end Joe Jones, whose nickname was
”Turkey.” In the NFL, a traditional Thanksgiving prank has the veterans telling rookies to go to a phantom grocery store to collect an equally phantom free turkey; Jones fell for the ruse not only in his first year but in his second as well. There was the story of the former Kansas City Chief, who misspelled his name when he scripted his autograph for a stamp the team would use during the season. A team official noticed the error after a few weeks and called the player in to tell him about it; when he heard of his mistake, the player slapped himself in the forehead and exclaimed, ”Oh, no. Not again.”
There was Gary Fencik recalling that the Bears` defensive team took turns reading aloud from its manual during a meeting at training camp, and that
”players had definite problems reading the text. A group of grown men come to a fairly common word and can`t pronounce it. What do you do? You can`t laugh. We`re all fairly thick-skinned in football, but in that situation, a moment of embarrassment, all you can do is empathize. They must live in constant fear of having that problem exposed at any time. You feel very sorry for them.”
And there was the local baseball hero who walked into his team`s public relations office and said, ”I want you to make a long distance phone call for me.”
”There`s a phone. Just call the operator,” he was told.
”But I don`t know how to make a long distance phone call.”
”Just call the operator and give her the number.”
”No, no. Here`s the number. Do it and transfer it down to the lockerroom for me.”
The player finally enters Disneyland if he makes it as a pro, and now, very often, he perceives that preferential treatment he is used to as nothing less than his due. Many (especially in baseball) feel their team`s public relations department is there to serve them, and the requests they make range from the routine to the ridiculous. Get me good tickets to the theater, or let me use your phone to make a long distance call so I can save a dime. Get the tuxes for my wedding party, or find me tickets for tonight`s Black Hawks playoff game. Make me a plane reservation, or find an aerobics studio where my wife–an aerobics teacher–can get a job.
When he goes out of town on his own job, he is spared the hassles that inevitably bedevil less privileged travelers. He arrives at the airport and drops off his bag for someone else to check. He is handed his ticket and boards his flight without waiting in line. He debarks and goes directly to the waiting bus that will deliver him to his hotel, where he is pre-registered. He picks up his key and rides his elevator to his room, where someone will deliver his bags. ”The first time I went on a business trip after retiring, I got to the hotel, and I didn`t have a room,” recalls former Bull Mengelt with a soft chuckle. ”I thought, `Should I get mad? Should I be nice?` I had to walk away from the desk and figure out what to do. I finally figured sweet talk would get me a room, and it did. But that life experience is taken away from you when you`re a pro.”
”There are always people hanging around professional athletes wanting to do something for them,” adds Finks. ” `I can get you a deal on clothes. I can get you a deal on a car. I can get you a deal on a house.` Then it`s,
`Come to this great party I know about,` and when they get there, it`s,
`Try a little bit of this.` `Wow. This is great. How much? I got some whipout (money) here.` That`s the way it goes.”
”A lot of athletes want something for nothing, and a classic case is drugs,” says Bear tight end Emery Moorehead. ”They get it for free at the start, then they start paying, finally they`ve got a habit. A good dealer knows all that. He`ll seek you right out–and then he`ll help you all the way out.”
”Why take it at all?” he is asked.
”To escape the pressure; we all look for an alternative. Cocaine is the ultimate escape from reality.”
”You have to remember,” says Finks, ”that the one thing everyone lives with in sports–players, coaches, management–is a fear of failure and that there are more failures as society perceives things than there are winners. That puts a lot of pressure on people and makes them do funny things. The adulation they receive–remember, people think they`re supermen–puts undue pressure on them. They have to live up to that image, and if they don`t, they don`t feel good about themselves. So if they can find something that makes them feel good, that goes against their true feelings, it`s, `Hey, let me have it.`
”They live a life of incredible peaks and valleys. Their self-esteem is very high when they win–and pretty low when they lose. But they have money, so they can buy something that will help them through those bad moments and mask their true feelings. Everything seems all right when it isn`t, and all of a sudden they`re out of touch with reality. They`re not aware that they`re abusing their bodies; they`re not aware they`re destroying their bodies. They`re told about the dangers, but it rolls off `em like water off a duck. They feel it could happen to someone else but not to them.”
”One of the biggest mistakes players make–they`re taught to equate their personal self worth with their performance on the field. So you drop a pass and you`re not a good person,” says Adamle. ”That`s ridiculous. . . but something like that leads you to want to escape. For Walter Payton, it`s riding his dirt bike with his son. For someone else, it`s drugs. People escape in different ways.”
”Everyone`s susceptible. But when you have a high profile, you make headlines,” says Moorehead. ”Everyone around says the same thing is going on with doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers. But I think the high-profile athlete
–especially when he`s young–is tempted early. Especially when you`re young. You got money coming in and you think it`s always going to be there. That makes the fall easier.”
Emery Moorehead, of course, has not fallen, and he remains removed from celebrity`s underbelly even though he enjoys the exalted status of a Bear. He was taught responsibility and the value of an education early, at Evanston Township High School, and when he went off to play football at the University of Colorado, he saw that ”There were so many political things going on, you knew you could never count on anything. So many things happen, you just can`t say you`re going to be a pro athlete and make a million bucks. You have to be lucky. You have to be in the right place at the right time.”
He himself stopped in New York with the Giants and in Denver with the Broncos before finding a place in Chicago, and his hard-scrabble scramble to the top helped him maintain the perspective so many lose. He was talking about that after doing a radio show at the Ultimate Sports Bar & Grill, and, between sips of a beer, he divided Disneyland`s inhabitants into two classes. There were those who had always been pampered successes and so looked at their sport as an end, not a means; those, he felt, were the ones susceptible to straying. But then there were those others, like him, who came up the hard way, counted on nothing and always viewed their game simply as a means to an end; that group, he opined, ”will not be easily swayed to drug abuse and that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the only ones the public is exposed to are those doing wrong. That`s unfortunate. A lot don`t do wrong. A lot don`t make headlines. Therefore, no story. . . .
”I think athletes are becoming more and more aware from what they`re seeing coming down. Chuck Muncie (once an All Pro running back now out of the NFL because of drug-related problems). Pittsburgh (where last summer`s baseball drug trial made headlines). The strict rules in the NBA. Look at the Bears. I don`t think we have any problems now. We all see what we see in the papers. We see the bad news. Drugs have been around a long time, but now kids are seeing them right away. They`re either impressed by them, or they see it as a downfall. That comes from environment, too. Sometimes you have to separate yourself from your environment.
Athletes realize it`s a problem,” Moorehead continues. ”You see people throwing away careers and money because they can`t leave drugs alone. We`re talking about money most people work a lifetime to attain; they`re throwing that away for a high. It`s ridiculous. Ridiculous. I can`t understand why, and I`m sure that`s why the public can`t understand. But you watch someone throw that away, as well as his future earnings; that shows you how tough drugs are.”
”Have you ever had a teammate with that problem?”
”Yes,” says Moorehead, who adds that it wasn`t in Chicago. ”You know because the guy`s late for meetings, because he doesn`t care about his appearance. You know because he`s meeting the same guy for lunch or right outside the training facility. We`re not talking about a guy in a business suit either but some guy with long dreadlocks. You know who he is.”
”What do you do?”
”You look after your teammate. It`s the same as if you had a friend writing on the paper who had the problem. You try to talk to him about it, but you`re certainly not going to expose him. You`re in a situation where you don`t want to hurt him or the team.”
”Did you talk to him?”
”Yes. He said he didn`t have a problem, but everyone knew it was just a matter of time.”
”What happened to him?”
”He`s out of the league and everything. There are too many good players, so a team can get rid of players with habits. He had played eight, nine years and he could have played a lot more, but he got involved. And in that kind of case, as soon as a team can find someone so it can do without you, it`s,
`Bye.` They just kept him around until they could find a substitute.”
”So they used him until he could be replaced?”
”Exactly.”
