Pros and Cons (34 page)

“The initial questions were some psychological factors. Like: Would you describe yourself as a loner? Certainly compulsive gamblers are loners. Then we also took a number of gambling-specific questions. What do you gamble on? What’s the largest amount you ever won or lost? How frequently do you gamble? Do you chase your losses? Questions like that. Do you think you have a problem? Has anyone else ever told you you have a problem? And then summed up with, ‘If you think you have a problem, where would you turn for help?’ Because if we get a sense that they will turn to their coach or their manager or to their team doctor or something, then that’s something that can be developed. But then we also asked the question, ‘Who would you not turn to?’ It was almost unanimous that they would not turn to anyone within the NFL. From our standpoint, that is of incredible importance to the NFL because it certainly tells what the relationship is. These high-priced and highly publicized players—they don’t get a sense that if they’re in any kind of difficulty with a psychiatric illness that they can get support from their company.”

Lorenz shipped the results to the NFL. Ten months later, nothing was being done. “We have never been able to connect with the NFL to follow up as to what the NFL is going to do about it. Certainly there are any number—a surprisingly high percentage—of rookies who are at risk. Not even all the rookies answered, which is kind of suspect.”

Lorenz agreed with Schlichter that the NFL’s position on gambling is “hypocritical. It’s shortsighted. I think it’s a rather naive policy. It also makes the assumption that every compulsive gambler is going to throw a game. And of course, that’s the fear of the NFL management—that an addicted gambler will throw a game. I think that’s more television hype than reality. Does anybody not think that a drug-addicted athlete might do the same thing—throw a game—to pay off his drug dealer? The irony of it is, in supporting athletes who have a drug addiction, they’re giving them supervision and random testing or even regular testing and getting them into treatment programs for use of a substance that’s basically illegal. Whereas, most of the athletes that we deal with go to a legal gambling establishment—like Art went to horse races. So, to come down harder on athletes because they resort to legal gambling, which is highly touted and often supported by professional sports in one way or another—and then not follow through with giving someone some mental health treatment and education within their own ranks, to me, just doesn’t make any economic sense. You can take an athlete, he can be charged with sexual abuse against a woman and you get slapped on the wrist. He may get fined. But somebody like an Art Schlichter, who is treatable, who has never physically injured someone—who has respect for humans—they just totally turn their backs on people like him.”

Trim, healthy, and thirty-eight, Art Schlichter might be correct in believing he could be playing in the NFL today—if it weren’t for his addiction. “It is incredible that this could happen to someone who had all that I had going for me,” Schlichter said. “I’m talking with you in prison.
Prison!
It shows you the power of the addiction, the power of gambling. I don’t want sympathy. I just want people to understand what this disease—and it is a disease—does to people. It ate me alive. It chewed me up and spit me out. How many guys out there are ready to kill themselves because of gambling? A lot more than you can imagine.

“All the conning that I did, I didn’t do all this so I could have fancy cars, big houses, mink coats, or eat at expensive restaurants. I did it to feed an addiction. I could have bought 100 Mercedes with the money I’ve blown.

“I would never argue that the NFL was wrong for banning me,” Schlichter said. “But the NFL needs gambling to survive. Without gambling, how many people really care about St. Louis vs. Seattle? Who, other than gamblers, cares about the NFL injury reports? If the league is so set against gambling, why do they fine teams that don’t release those injury reports on time? The league says one thing, but its actions say another.

“And their argument that gambling allows the wrong people to get their hooks into you isn’t the end of the story. Athletes with drug habits are just as susceptible. Athletes with gang backgrounds are just as likely to be pulled down by the outside. Gambling, especially to an addict like me, is bad. But I find it hard to believe I was the worst guy in the last twenty years of the NFL, that I deserved a ban when so many others—”

Schlichter was cut off again. The recorded voice began: “This call is from an inmate …”

15

Rude Awakenings

When Detroit Lions defensive lineman Reggie Rogers awoke in the emergency room at Pontiac Osteopathic Hospital in the early morning hours of Thursday, October 20, 1988, he was unable to move. Tubes were running in and out of his body. The room seemed out of focus and he did not know how he got there. Doctors informed him that he sustained a fractured neck and multiple injuries in an automobile accident shortly after midnight. Weeks into his second season, Rogers’s career seemed finished.

That was the least of his problems. Toxicology tests revealed that Rogers was legally drunk at the time of his accident. All three occupants of the vehicle he collided with were dead. As soon as Rogers was well enough to be discharged from the hospital, the Oakland County district attorney planned to formally charge him with three counts of involuntary manslaughter with a motor vehicle. In Michigan, the offense was punishable by fifteen years in prison.

Before the accident, Rogers was out drinking with teammate Devon Mitchell at Big Art’s Paradise Lounge in Pontiac. At 1:30, the two players left together in separate vehicles. At 1:50, three young men in a 1987 Dodge Omni entered the intersection of University Drive and Wide Track Drive. Immediately struck on the passenger side by Rogers’s 1988 Jeep Cherokee, the Omni burst into flames. There were no skid marks at the accident scene. Mitchell, who was ten car lengths ahead of Rogers, returned to the intersection after hearing the crash.

The victims, all teenagers, were visiting the Pontiac area to attend the funeral of a relative. Kelly Ess, age eighteen, died at the scene. His brother Dale, age seventeen, died an hour later at Pontiac General Hospital. Their cousin Kenneth Willett, nineteen, was kept on a life-support system for nearly twelve hours before being declared dead the following afternoon. Beer cans were discovered in both vehicles. The Oakland County medical examiner later testified that the two passengers in the Omni had a higher blood alcohol level than Rogers, and the driver was probably legally drunk as well.

An All-America defensive star at the University of Washington, Rogers was the Lions’ first-round draft choice in 1987, the seventh overall pick in the draft. At six foot six, 285 pounds, he possessed tremendous speed and quickness. “I’m not saying drafting Reggie Rogers has made us the best team in the NFL, but it helps,” said then-Lions defensive coordinator Wayne Fontes on draft day.

While Rogers’s defensive skills left pro scouts salivating, his personal life was coming apart at the seams. On June 27, 1986, two months before his senior campaign at Washington began, Reggie’s older brother, Don, the starting free safety on the Cleveland Browns, died of a cocaine overdose. The circumstances around Don’s death triggered a series of events that left Reggie on a crash course to self-destruction.

Staying in a hotel only minutes from where Don overdosed, Reggie spoke to his brother by telephone just hours before emergency room doctors declared him dead. “I’ll see you in the morning,” was the last thing Reggie said to his brother before hanging up. “The next time I saw him he was dead. I had a major problem with ‘What if I would have went home? Maybe I could have stopped him.’”

Rogers, guilty and grieving, turned increasingly to the bottle. Within weeks of Don’s passing, alcohol abuse brought Reggie into contact with the law for the first time. He was arrested for driving under the influence in Seattle. Before finishing his senior year, he would be arrested again, this time for assault.

Teams that had pegged Rogers as a first-round pick grew leery of him after his brother’s cocaine-induced death. Some clubs invested substantial money and time checking into his background searching for evidence of drug abuse. One club admitted going as far as to hire a private investigator to follow him around Seattle.

Although no evidence of drug abuse was found, Rogers’s alcohol-related problems scared teams off. “Let’s say it was enough to convince us we shouldn’t draft him,” Green Bay Packers head of scouting Tom Braatz told a Wisconsin newspaper after extensively researching Rogers.

After Rogers’s fatal drunk driving accident, Lions officials downplayed their prior knowledge of Rogers’s alcohol abuse. “I’ve never heard of hiring a private investigator and I don’t believe it is true,” Lions coach Darryl Rogers told a Detroit reporter in response to the Packers’ admission.

Regardless of whether the Lions fully appreciated the depth of Rogers’s problems prior to drafting him, the coaching staff was nonetheless made aware of the situation long before the fatal crash. In a clear-as-day plea for help, Rogers went to the coaches before the start of the regular season and confessed to severely abusing alcohol. “I went in,” Rogers said, “and told them, ‘I’m having a major problem with my brother’s death. I’m drinking a hell of a lot. And I’m basically totally out of control. I need some help dealing with my brother’s death.’ I was letting them know that this was bigger than football.”

The Lions’ response to his admission convinced Rogers that in the NFL nothing is bigger than football—especially when you are the number one draft choice.

Rogers was admitted to a Detroit-area rehab center where he underwent emotional counseling for thirty days. He was released in time for the Lions’ annual Thanksgiving Day game. Despite receiving no treatment for his alcoholism during his thirty-day admittance, the Lions’ coaching staff never raised the issue with him again. “They forgot about it,” Rogers told the authors. “They didn’t want to know.”

According to Rogers, the two coaches most familiar with his problems were head coach Darryl Rogers and assistant Wayne Fontes. As the defensive coordinator, Fontes worked directly with the big lineman. Weeks after being present when Rogers confessed to abusing alcohol, Fontes was himself arrested and charged with two counts of drunk driving.

Like a dark omen, Fontes crashed his automobile while driving drunk after leaving a bar on October 21, 1987. Three hundred and sixty four nights later, police in the same county would respond to Rogers’s accident scene.

When Oakland County sheriff’s deputies discovered Fontes’s car in a ditch not far from his Rochester Hills home, the coach was nowhere to be found. He had walked to a nearby convenience store and placed a call from a pay phone to his wife requesting that she come pick him up. As fate would have it, ex-Lion Ken Fantetti—a linebacker who was coached by Fontes—was present when Fontes entered the convenience store. “He didn’t look like himself,” Fantetti later testified at Fontes’s preliminary hearing. “[Fontes made] an off-the-wall comment that who knows what else they might find [in the car].”

Investigators at the crash scene soon discovered Fontes driving his wife’s vehicle out of the nearby convenience store parking lot and pulled him over. Telling police he drank two or three vodkas on the rocks at a nearby bar, Fontes failed various roadside sobriety tests and a breath-alcohol analysis test.

In the process of towing Fontes’s vehicle from the ditch, police discovered a vial of cocaine on the floor after opening the driver’s side door. When confronted about the cocaine, Fontes insisted that his twenty-one-year-old son was the driver. But the 1986 Mercury was registered to the Lions organization and lent to Fontes for his personal use. More importantly, Fontes’s wife told authorities at the accident scene that their son was in Florida. After repeatedly asking the police, “Do you know who I am?” Fontes revised his story, saying that someone else was the driver.

The authorities added a cocaine possession charge to the two DUI charges, leaving the leading candidate to succeed Rogers as the Lions’ head coach in jeopardy of facing four years in prison if convicted on the felony drug offense.

Fontes’s attorneys fought vigorously to have the cocaine charges dismissed. Two weeks after the arrest, a Rochester Hills district judge ruled that the police conducted an illegal search of the car, saying they should have obtained a warrant first. Unable to introduce the cocaine into evidence, prosecutors dropped the felony charge. On December 21 Fontes pleaded guilty to one count of drunk driving and was sentenced to eighteen months’ probation. Less than a year later, the Lions promoted him to head coach.

“Certainly, anyone who consumes alcohol is subject to making mistakes,” said Lions GM Russ Thomas after the promotion. “But I don’t think he’s the kind of guy who has problems with that sort of thing. I look at him based on what he’s done for us on the field.”

Fontes too downplayed the seriousness of his substance-abuse-related arrest. “The organization stood behind me,” Fontes told the Detroit press on the day his promotion was announced. “They believed in me. I was innocent of all that BS, so that’s behind me.”

However, the Lions did not stand behind Rogers, who at the time of Fontes’s joyous press conference was lying in serious condition in the hospital recovering from an operation on two broken vertebrae in his neck. During his entire six-month hospital stay, no Lions official visited Rogers. “They turned their back on me,” Rogers said. “They wouldn’t even return phone calls made by me and my family from the hospital.”

At the end of the season, Fontes left Rogers unprotected. Recovering from neck surgery and awaiting trial, Rogers was not picked up. The Lions then let him go altogether, kissing off a first-round draft choice and setting their sights on Barry Sanders, whom they took in the 1989 draft.

Meanwhile, on January 16, 1990, a jury found Rogers guilty on three counts of negligent homicide and he spent the next sixteen months incarcerated in a Michigan state penitentiary. “When I was at the University of Washington, it was like a family there and coaches were like your dad,” said Rogers. “That’s where I made the mistake in trying to tie that to the NFL. Because they don’t give a damn. I had a rude awakening.”