Suffering Side Effects : Drug Use Made Walt Sweeney’s Career and Ruined His Life; Now He Wants NFL to Pay, but His Lawsuit Faces Uphill Battle

SAN DIEGO — In 1963, Walt Sweeney became a star in the NFL.

He also became hooked on drugs: steroids to build bulk and endurance, amphetamines to harness anger and increase aggressiveness, codeine to mask pain, Seconal as a sleeping pill and an anti-depressant, and, later, marijuana to relieve competitive pressure.

In the beginning, Sweeney did not think of the little orange, red and white pills as wrong or dangerous. He thought of them as tools of his trade, tools whose use was encouraged by coaches and demanded by the crush of peer pressure from teammates and his own fear of failure.

In his first game with the San Diego Chargers, Sweeney startled and pleased the crowd by making four tackles as a special teams player and racing down the field ahead of normally much faster teammates on kickoffs.

Sweeney, currently embroiled in an unprecedented lawsuit against the NFL stemming from his drug use as a player, remembers he was so high on speed that his heart was still beating madly hours after the game.

He played 11 seasons as an offensive guard with the Chargers and two with the Washington Redskins and appeared in nine Pro Bowl games. He started 154 consecutive NFL games and ingested drugs before, during and after every one of them.

At 6 feet 4 and 256 pounds, he was so quick, aggressive and relentless that the Rams’ Merlin Olsen, only partly in jest, said that if he had to play against Sweeney every week, he would prefer to sell cars for a living.

Sweeney’s breakneck brand of football, and his cheerfulness about participating in the charity golf tournaments and other public relations events demanded of professional athletes, made him an instant favorite of fans and the media.

His football career ended in the last game of the 1975 season when, as a member of George Allen’s “Over the Hill Gang,” he was clipped and suffered a severe knee injury. Surgery, therapy and more drugs could not save his career.

The cheering of the crowd had stopped, but Sweeney’s craving for drugs continued. Nearly two decades later, Sweeney, now 54 and said by psychiatrists to be permanently unemployable and disabled because of drug dependence that began in the NFL, is making another attempt to cleanse his mind and body.

On Jan. 30, he checked himself into the $5,500-a-month drug rehabilitation center in rural Dulzura in the mountains east of San Diego. After 100 drug-free days, he left in May for a two-week binge of speed and Valium.

Now he is back and says he is determined that, this time, despite his many failures, he will beat the habit that stems from his earliest days in the NFL when he was an All-American from Syracuse, a first-round draft choice, and determined to do anything to make the team and not disappoint his coach, Sid Gillman, whom he idealized as a surrogate father.

Along with trying to regain his sobriety, Sweeney is also fighting in federal court to overturn a decision by the trustees of the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Retirement Plan denying him a $4,000-a-month disability pension.

The retirement plan trustees--three named by the players, three by the owners, and Commissioner Paul Tagliabue--do not dispute that drugs have rendered Sweeney incapable of supporting or caring for himself. There is too much psychiatric testimony to the contrary.

Rather, the trustees’ rejection of Sweeney’s claim is based on their conclusion that his disability did not occur within 12 years of his retirement, the period set by the retirement plan rules as a requisite for the full $4,000 monthly payment.

To Sweeney, that reasoning is factually incorrect and a continuation of a heartless NFL attitude that says players are commodities to be discarded when they are damaged or of no further use to the owners.

“I feel they ruined a good part of my life,” Sweeney said one recent night in Dulzura. “I lost my family. I became financially bankrupt as well as morally bankrupt. I lost my dignity, my self-respect and the respect of everybody else. How can you put a price on that?”

On July 31, Sweeney’s lawyers will ask U.S. District Court Judge Rudi Brewster to overrule the retirement plan board on grounds that it has abused its discretion, ignored medical testimony and did not give Sweeney ample opportunity to present his case. It is an uphill battle because the courts have traditionally given pension plans wide latitude in dispensing benefits.

Sweeney’s San Diego lawyers--Michael Thorsnes, who has represented several professional athletes in disputes with management, and Rhonda Thompson, who is married to Denver Bronco offensive tackle Broderick Thompson--say a victory for Sweeney would set a precedent requiring the NFL retirement plan to recognize the needs of older players, particularly from those days when drug usage was encouraged, or at least condoned, by teams.

“There are a lot of guys sitting on porches, in back yards and in bars who are physically crippled, emotionally crippled or psychologically crippled, all because of their moment of glory,” Thorsnes said. “The real purpose of those moments was to make a few rich men richer. We think the league would like this problem to go away, but we’re not going to let them.”

Gene Upshaw, executive director of the NFL Players Assn., does not number Sweeney among his friends and bristles at any suggestion that the association is not doing enough for retired players or that there are other players like Sweeney suffering drug problems from their playing days.

“I came out of that same era as Sweeney,” said Upshaw, his voice rising, “and I didn’t come out that way. That [idea that there are other drug-addicted retired players] is just so much supposition.”

Upshaw rejects an allegation by Thorsnes and Thompson that a personal animosity toward Sweeney remaining from their playing days has influenced his decision not to intervene on Sweeney’s behalf.

“Cases have to be decided on the facts,” he said. “I can’t wave a magic wand and make things happen. It doesn’t happen that way.”

Still, former Charger star and Hall of Fame player Lance Alworth, one of the few former teammates who have stuck by Sweeney, said he believes Upshaw’s discomfort with Sweeney’s lawsuit is shaped by his unwillingness to admit, even more than 20 years after the fact, just how widespread drug usage was among NFL players before mandatory drug-testing and a ban on steroids.

“Upshaw just doesn’t like to talk about drugs,” said Alworth, now a real estate developer in Del Mar. “He wants to forget what went on back then, but you can’t forget. You have to do something for the guys, not just Walt but a lot of guys who were using drugs because they didn’t know any better.”

At issue in the case before Brewster are a series of jobs that Sweeney held after he left football. For the first four years he was unemployed, “I couldn’t keep a thought in my head,” he said.

Then he worked briefly as a teacher in his native Massachusetts, a commercial fisherman, a drug counselor for a manufacturing plant, and for three years as a counselor and recruiter for the drug rehabilitation program at Sharp-Cabrillo Hospital in San Diego.

Sweeney says that he was fired from each of the jobs after his bosses discovered he was still using drugs. His drug use while in the NFL had been no secret. He was among eight Chargers fined for drug use in 1973 in a scandal later recounted by the team psychiatrist, Arnold Mandell, in his book “The Nightmare Season.”

As a former football star, Sweeney was a public relations bonanza for Sharp-Cabrillo and the anti-drug movement. He appeared on television with Nancy Reagan, toured 30 elementary schools with then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis and had the “story” of his recovery recounted frequently by the media.

The problem was that the story was bogus. Sweeney was on drugs while posing as an anti-drug crusader.

“I got a lot of people into treatment programs, and some are still sober,” Sweeney said. “I could talk a good game, but I couldn’t do it myself.”

The retirement fund trustees, in rejecting Sweeney’s claim in May, said that the jobs he held, particularly at Sharp-Cabrillo where he made $48,000 in 1988, are proof that he was not disabled within 12 years of leaving football.

“The objective evidence just doesn’t support the claim that he has been unemployable,” said Washington lawyer William Hanrahan, who represents the NFL retirement plan. “You can’t decide cases like this on sympathy. You have to follow the rules.”

Thorsnes and Thompson counter that Sweeney’s being fired from these jobs is proof that he was disabled and unable to function. Further, they assert that the jobs were the kind of sham jobs that ex-athletes often get from employers eager to squeeze some publicity from their lingering fame, what the retirement plan calls “jobs of beneficence.”

“The NFL would like to use the pencil test,” Thorsnes said. “As long as you can sell pencils, you’re not disabled.”

Drugs cost Sweeney two marriages and periods of estrangement from his two children. He was arrested seven times for drunk driving, hospitalized 23 times for drug abuse and fined $20,000 for failing to pay income tax for five years. He attempted suicide in 1980.

His third wife, Nanci, whom he married in 1982, has suffered the torment common in marriages where one partner is an alcoholic or drug abuser: brief periods of happiness punctuated with long spells of substance abuse, followed by heartfelt promises to reform but, finally, by relapses into addictive behavior.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Nanci Sweeney, 50, who has multiple sclerosis. “Walt can’t help himself. When he starts using, it’s like someone has taken over his body, like he’s an alien. Drugs have cost him his life.”

Psychiatrists have noted that Sweeney was a classic candidate to develop a drug dependency. He came from a large, low-income Irish-Catholic family in which fighting and drinking were common. His father was killed by a drunk driver when Sweeney was 2, and he had little or no family guidance in avoiding lifestyle excesses.

Although he says he had never taken drugs until he joined the NFL, he consumed enough beer while at Syracuse to earn the nickname “Suds.” He remembers being tipsy when he signed his first Charger contract just before he helped the College All-Stars defeat Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers.

The pressure to succeed as a Charger, and not disappoint Gillman or Al Davis, who had signed him, was overpowering.

“I was full of fear,” Sweeney said. “I didn’t want anybody to hurt the quarterback. Fear is a good motivator, but it stresses you out.”

Pills were easily available through prescription, although there is disagreement over whether the team forced or merely heavily encouraged their use. A court in 1980 found that Mandell, for example, had only prescribed drugs for players already hooked on their use, and then only in accordance with accepted medical standards.

Traded to the Redskins after the 1973 scandal, Sweeney found drug usage just as prevalent as on the Chargers. His lawsuit quotes Allen, who died in 1990, as telling players, “If it takes amphetamines to win, I will bring it in by the truckload.”

When he was released from the Redskins, he fired several rounds from his gun into his bed at training camp in what psychiatrists call a “drug-induced paranoiac state.” The team immediately decided on a settlement for his knee injury.

As he awaits the court decision and recuperates from knee replacement surgery, Sweeney spends his days in group therapy, individual counseling and light exercise at Rancho L’Abri, the same rehabilitation center where ex-Padre pitcher Eric Show died of an overdose in March 1994. Judge Brewster has ordered the retirement plan to pay for Sweeney’s treatment while the case is pending.

In support of Sweeney’s pension bid, Dr. Calvin Colarusso, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego, wrote that Sweeney’s addiction is a direct result of the drugs he took in the NFL and that even with extensive treatment and rehabilitation, “the prognosis is not good” that he will be able to avoid relapsing. He warned of the increasing risk of suicide.

The retirement trustees have approved Sweeney for a $1,800 monthly disability pension based on a conclusion that he did not become disabled until 1990, two years after being fired from Sharp-Cabrillo and 14 years after leaving the NFL. In his court action, Sweeney is asking for the full $4,000 and nearly $900,000 in back payments from 1976 when he retired.

“If a guy breaks his back in the NFL, they’ll pay him,” Sweeney said. “That didn’t happen to me. Instead, these guys broke my mind.”