Pros and Cons (35 page)

The tragic consequences of Rogers’s drinking were extraordinary, but his conduct leading up to them was terribly routine among NFL players. According to the authors’ research, drunk driving was second only to domestic violence as the crime NFL players were most likely to be arrested for. And the league’s most celebrated players are by no means immune to alcohol abuse. Consider one four-month stretch during 1997 which resulted in the arrests of: Redskins All-Pro running back Terry Allen (charged after driving 133 miles per hour while attempting to elude police), the NFL’s 1996 Defensive Player of the Year, Bruce Smith (found slumped over the wheel of his car at an intersection at 6:21 in the morning, the motor still running), and the NFL’s 1997 Defensive Player of the Year, Dana Stubblefield (observed speeding down the median strip by the California Highway Patrol), were all arrested for driving under the influence.

Alcohol abuse can also have the most unpredictable, even deadly ramifications. In December 1993, their team in the midst of an eight-game winning streak, Houston Oilers players and coaches were stunned by the suicide of starting defensive tackle Jeff Alm. Killed after inserting a shotgun into his mouth and pulling the trigger, Alm’s death was largely viewed as an example of the dangers that can accompany gun ownership. “That’s the bad thing about having a gun handy sometimes,” said then-Oilers defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan. “Because … all at once you make a decision that you wouldn’t have, probably, if you had thought about it a little longer.”

True enough. But alcohol, much more than guns, was the culprit behind Aim’s death. On December 14, Alm lost control of his 1993 Cadillac Eldorado while trying to negotiate a curve on an exit ramp off Interstate 610 in Houston. In the crash, passenger Sean Lynch, Aim’s best friend since childhood, was thrown from the car. His body went over a guardrail and plunged twenty feet down an embankment, landing underneath the overpass. His friend lying motionless and failing to respond to his pleas, Alm placed a frantic 911 call from his cell phone.

“I have a buddy dying!” he yelled at the operator.

The operator’s attempts to communicate with Alm then went unanswered.

“Sean, are you all right?” the operator could hear Alm screaming.

“Hello, hello.”

The 911 operator then heard three gunshots. Drunk and guilt-ridden over the sight of his best friend’s lifeless body lying beneath him on a service road, Alm retrieved a shotgun from his car and fired three shots into the air. He then sat down on the ground, stuck the barrel in his mouth, and blew his head off. Autopsies on both bodies confirmed both men were drunk at the time of the accident. Aim’s blood alcohol content level was three times the legal limit for drivers in Texas.

League-wide, reaction to Aim’s manner of death was one of profound shock. Nowhere in his background or personality, it was widely reported, was there any hint that he possessed the potential to kill himself. But alcohol alters personality, arrests free will, produces risky decisions and sometimes fatal results. Alcohol is a factor in 30 percent of the suicides, 50 percent of the homicides, and 30 percent of the accidental deaths in the United States. It played a major role in the accidental shooting death of Charles Blades by his cousin, Seahawks wide receiver Brian Blades. And other NFL players killed in auto fatalities while legally drunk include Miami Dolphins running back David Overstreet (1984), Los Angeles Raiders defensive back Stacey Toran (1989), and Atlanta Falcons tight end Brad Beckman (1990).

Despite recurring high-profile tragedies, frequent player arrests for driving drunk, and stepped-up provisions in the collective bargaining agreement allowing the commissioner to discipline players for abusing alcohol, the tide of alcohol abuse in the league shows no sign of dropping.

December 27, 1997

His big-screen television tuned to the Denver Broncos–Jacksonville Jaguars playoff game, ex–Seattle Seahawks defensive lineman Mike Frier positions his wheelchair between the sofa and the soft-back chair. His feet, inside of large, loosely tied high-top sneakers, rest motionless on the chair’s metal footpads. Underneath green cutoff shorts, his once powerful legs, now a reflection of deteriorated muscle mass, twitch on occasion. With hands too feeble to operate the remote control, Frier directs his father, Ulysses, an ex-Marine who now lives with his son and cares for him twenty-four hours a day, to lower the volume.

Once a six-foot-five, 300-pound run-stopper, Frier watches a lot more football then he ever did when he played the game. Rendered a quadriplegic weeks after signing with the Seahawks, there is little else he can do. On December 1, 1994, then-twenty-five-year-old Frier joined Seahawks All-Pro running back Chris Warren and rookie running back Lamar Smith for his first “boys’ night out” since coming over from the Cincinnati Bengals. For Frier, it ended up being his last night out when an intoxicated Smith drove his car into a utility pole.

“The experience is hard to deal with,” Frier reflected two years after the fact. “One day you’re working out, doing all the things you do. Now it’s just taken away from me.”

F
our weeks after signing with the Seahawks, Frier finally decided to go out with the boys for a night of drinking. “Where’s the hangout spot?” Frier asked Warren after practice.

“Couple guys be hangin’ out at Shark’s,” Warren told him.

Shark’s, the bar formally known as the Kirkland Shark Klub, is located near the Seahawks’ practice facility. Frier began the evening of December 1 at the club with four of his teammates drinking and playing pool. After drinking eleven fourteen-ounce glasses of beer and two twelve-ounce bottles of beer, Warren, Frier, and Smith left Shark’s at 8:00. Warren would later tell authorities that he and Smith split the eleven glasses of beer.

Planning to get drunk before going out, Frier prearranged for his girlfriend to pick him up at Shark’s to insure his safe arrival home. “I never wanted to get a DWI and end up on ESPN or in
USA Today,
” Frier said. “So I always made sure someone else was driving.”

However, when Smith and Warren unexpectedly decided to go to a different bar after spending only an hour and a half at Shark’s, Frier went along. Shortly after 8:00, the three arrived at T.G.I. Friday’s where they ordered a round of double Crown Royal whiskey drinks. Smith downed two double Crown Royals and one single, the equivalent of six and one quarter ounces of straight alcohol. The tab, which police later requested, confirms that no food was ordered.

From T.G.I. Friday’s they drove to a convenience store and purchased a twelve-pack of beer and two cigars. En route to Warren’s house, Smith took a detour to the Seahawks’ nearby practice facility to pick up Warren’s keys.

Driving in a light rain, Smith cruised at nearly twice the posted speed limit. With Warren in the passenger’s seat and Frier reclined across the back seat, rap music pulsated from a 200-pound over-sized speaker in the rear dash of Smith’s car. Witnesses in cars passed by Smith would later tell police of being able to hear the music inside their cars, despite their windows being up and rain falling outside.

His newly born daughter and girlfriend back at their small apartment, Frier’s first night out was momentarily perfect—brews, smokes, tunes, and speed.

At 8:40 Smith attempted to pass a car in a no-passing zone, and lost control of his Oldsmobile Bravada. Unable to regain control, he crashed head-on into a utility pole with such force that the rear of the car went airborn, rotated to the right, and smashed into a nearby tree. Smith’s shatterproof windshield busted completely out. Flames from atop the utility pole illuminated the wooded area, the damaged electrical boxes ultimately exploding three times while witnesses and emergency personnel began responding to the crash site.

Warren broke two ribs and Smith sustained injuries requiring hospital treatment, but both climbed out of the car on their own. Frier, with a fractured spine, was crushed underneath the 200-pound speaker, which landed on him.

“I didn’t want to show weakness,” Frier’s father said, explaining the stiff upper lip he had to show Mike when he first walked into Mike’s room at Overlake Hospital after the accident. “I knew I needed to be strong for him. We made eye contact. He recognized me.”

Exposed to his share of senseless violence during his military career, Ulysses Frier faced his son’s forever-changed condition with dignity. “You say, ‘Well, I hid in the jungle with these two guys and I got the worst of it,’” reasoned Ulysses, comparing soldiers in Vietnam to football teammates. “If Mike had been in the front seat, things would have been different. But you don’t want to question what the Lord does.”

The first witnesses to arrive at the accident scene said they could hear Frier screaming from inside the car after his teammates had climbed out. His spine severed, Frier lay trapped and bleeding in the crumpled car. By the time paramedics transported him to the hospital, his life was in the balance. “I was close to death,” Frier recalled. “On a ventilator. I couldn’t breathe on my own. They were just trying to keep me alive.”

S
--t,” Smith said to Warren, the two of them looking at the wreckage as police and firefighters sped to the scene. Within minutes the two were separately answering questions from investigators. Smith, his breath reeking of alcohol and his eyes bloodshot and watery, confirmed to Officer Greg Hicks, who ticketed him weeks earlier for speeding, that Warren, not he, was the driver. Smith provided a more than one-page statement to that effect, then repeated the claim to a firefighter at the scene and a nurse at the hospital where he was later examined. But when officers placed handcuffs on Warren at the hospital, Smith interjected, “No man, no. I was the driver. I’m the driver.” Smith was indicted on a felony charge of vehicular assault on January 26, 1995.

While Smith continued to practice and play with the team, therapists finally attempted to introduce Frier to rehabilitation exercises. Having regained some motion in his arms, Frier was first asked to raise his arms while one-pound plates rested in his hands. “I’d been lifting weights for ten years,” he said. “Big old forty-five-pound plates. Suddenly I could not lift my arms up with one-pound plates.” Once able to bench-press 450 pounds, one-pound rings now proved too much.

The image of a once-mighty NFL lineman confined to a wheelchair generated a great deal of dialogue in the media regarding alcohol abuse among Seahawks players. “A lot of us are getting tired of alcohol abuse among the Seahawks,” wrote
Seattle Times
columnist Steve Kelley. “We’re sick of reading in the newspaper about another DWI, or a tragic car wreck that didn’t need to happen.”

Months before Smith crashed his car, paralyzing Frier, Seahawks defensive back Patrick Hunter was sentenced to jail in Seattle after committing his second drunk driving offense since joining the team.

Then just fifteen days after the accident, Seahawks defensive back Orlando Watters, who was caught driving without a license, registration, or proof of insurance, was arrested for drunk driving in Seattle. Police also discovered marijuana and a knife in his vehicle. Seahawks head coach Tom Flores dismissed the seriousness of Watters’s arrest. “All I can say is that he messed up,” said Flores, who played Watters the following Sunday. “We will handle it in-house.”

Downplaying the severity of the problem, then circling the wagons is a typical response to players’ alcohol-related arrests. But if arrests are any gauge of the scope of the driving-under-the-influence problem within the NFL, the players are not merely slipping up and getting caught the first time they drive drunk. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission, the average drunk driver operates his car between 200 and 2,000 times before being caught once.

A
midst heightened awareness of Seahawk players’ drunk driving problems, newly hired head coach Dennis Erickson was arrested for driving under the influence on April 15, just two months before Frier’s June 21, 1995, release from the hospital. A motorist on Washington’s Interstate 5 called 911 from his cellular phone and reported that a 1995 BMW was being driven erratically. A Washington state patrolman then observed Erickson force three drivers to swerve or brake hard in order to avoid being hit. A breathalyzer test revealed that his blood alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit in Washington.

While disturbing, the arrest of Seattle’s head coach is not unusual. From the mid-1980s to 1997, Seattle-area police arrested at least thirty Seahawks players and coaches for driving under the influence. The Seattle law firm Cowan, Hayne & Fox, which limits its practice to DUI defense, has represented approximately twenty-five Seahawks players and coaches charged with driving drunk during that period. “My impression is that professional athletes, particularly football players, drink substantially more than the rest of the population,” said Douglas Cowan, the firm’s founding lawyer, who has personally represented thirteen Seahawks coaches and players, among them receiver Brian Blades, defensive back Patrick Hunter, and All-Pro lineman Bob “Fig” Newton.

A former assistant district attorney in Seattle who began representing drunk driving offenders in 1978, Cowan has handled over 2,000 drunk driving cases in his thirty-year legal career. He has made a practice of talking to every one of his clients about the extent of their alcohol use. In arriving at his impression that NFL players abuse alcohol at higher rates than the general population, Cowan suggested that the mind-set required to play in the NFL can have a direct correlation to some players’ abusive drinking habits. More specifically, he identified four factors that are associated with alcohol use and abuse among NFL players.

Reckless Abandon.
According to Cowan, one out of four players he represented were diagnosed alcoholics. The rest he described as alcohol abusers who would drink socially, sometimes to excess. Cowan insisted that the problems he observed were not unique to the Seahawks. “Professional football players have to be people who can invoke a tremendous amount of emotion to do what they do,” he said. “They have to be somewhat fearless. That requires a personality that does not fear consequences to the same extent that other people do. Not many people will throw themselves at 300-pound bodies running as fast as they can. You’ve got to have a certain amount of reckless abandonment in your personality to do that sort of thing. Because of that they live life to the fullest, pressing the edge at all times. This includes their social activities as well as their professional activities. NFL players don’t think much about consequences, or they could not do what they do.”