COCAINE AND A SUPER BOWL TEAM: THE LAST STRAW : Cinderella Team Has Lost Its Innocence, and So Has the Game

This is the last straw. Now they have even filled a Super Bowl with dope dust.

Now some of us no longer will look back upon the New England Patriots as a pack of grinning, winning wild cards. Instead we will picture them on their knees, nose down, trying to snort a Superdome hash mark.

The poor public pays 75 bucks--or 10 times that--for a ticket to a football game, only to discover that much of the money goes directly from pockets to nostrils.

The poor slobs in the stands are expected to believe in the concept of honest mistakes, but they watch athletes muff perfect passes, have mental lapses, lose 46-10, then hear the next morning that the coach has known about their drug habits for months.

Worse, what if the Patriots had won? Nothing any of them sniffed, smoked or swallowed in the month leading up to Super Bowl XX kept them from defeating the Jets, Raiders and Dolphins. Had they beaten the Bears, would we have heard about any of this?

Probably. Coach Raymond Berry obviously was having some sort of personal crisis. When word leaked Sunday that he had called a team meeting for sometime after the game, it seemed clear that he did not want to discuss NFL pension benefits.

There was speculation that Berry would resign. Some Bostonians suspected that he might quit immediately after the Super Bowl, win or lose, because he had dropped a lot of hints about being unhappy.

It turns out that at least one Boston newspaper got a whiff of the Patriot dope problem long before the game. Berry had been asked about it. He was trying to keep it in the family. He was trying to give guys time to clean up their acts. After a three-point defeat at Miami in December, the coach had confronted as many as a dozen players about a party at which drugs had been used.

Berry told the Boston Globe what was going on, or some of it, anyway, apparently with the understanding that it could not be used before the last game. An editor at the Globe says the paper had a choice of carrying a story that would have been filled with anonymous quotes and unattributed information--journalism that might would have been hooted at and colored yellow--or waiting for the season to end for Berry and others to go on the record.

The final game was played. The Patriots got busted flat. And two days later, the news nuked New England that this team was so riddled with druggies, and so willing to fess up to that fact, that from now on--or at least as long as Berry is coach--every theoretically able body on the roster will submit to voluntary drug testing. No NFL team has ever done that.

“Most of us were shocked to learn the extent of the problem,” one Patriot player, Ron Wooten, said. “We all thought it was just a very few players.”

Yet even if he knew the problem was widespread and serious, Wooten would have had a terrible time doing anything about it during the season. Nobody wants a lecture. Nobody likes a squealer. Nobody cares to have a shot at wealth and fame go out the window because a do-gooder suddenly decided, on his own, to do some good.

Pro football players, usually through their unions, have been opposing urinalysis and other such tests on constitutional and personal grounds. Baseball and basketball players are in similar boats. Some fear the worst. Others fear the damage that can be done to them professionally by a simple lab mistake.

It has been snowing in sports land for several years. There are players in the National Basketball Assn. who have gone beyond second chances to thirds and fourths. John Drew has been banished until the 1987-88 season, but Micheal Ray Richardson, John Lucas, Quintin Dailey and others are still hanging in there, and even as solid a citizen as Walter Davis turned out to have caught the disease.

Cries for tougher laws, even “lifetime suspensions,” have grown in volume ever since the national pastime, baseball, started rolling along the white lines. The summertime drug trials in Pittsburgh brought shame to dozens of players. It was a new low.

Now, this.

All the Americana, the flag-waving, the--you should ignore the irony--patriotism that came attached to Sunday’s 20th Super Bowl was designed to provide a different kind of high. It was a “have a nice day” kind of day. Even the halftime show was presented by “Up With People.”

There also were millions of Americans, Super Bowl MVP Richard Dent among them, who rejoiced, rather than grieved, in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, addressing not the way he died but the way he lived.

It was a feel-good experience. Even the most devoted followers of the Patriots could not be too disappointed with the outcome of the game, since their heroes already had done quite well.

And those Chicago Bears, well, they were just so good. Except which free thinker among us has not yet entertained the thought that maybe some of the Bears themselves have gone out for a snort or two? Raymond Berry, after all, says the Patriots may rank 28th in the league in the dope department.

Simple to say, murder to prove. Are interviews needed, or inquisitions even, so that individuals can publicly declare what they do with their private lives? Would the threat of lifetime suspensions erase drug abuse or scare off any athlete who wanted to come clean?

People are sick of this subject, there is no question about that. They are sick of hearing about it and tired of being unable to do anything about it. Imagine the arguments that must be raging in New England right now; should a true, red-white-and-blue Patriot fan be proud of the team, or ashamed?

It is not the saddest story in the world--a glance at the front page will tell you that--but it is possibly the most pathetic. Another unwanted scandal. The Boston coke party.

Raymond Berry will have to live with the knowledge that winning the Super Bowl seemed more important than revealing what was wrong with his team. Had the Patriots become champions, their coach would have faced the unpleasant choice of lying about the extent of their drug problems or admitting how the finest football team in the world had gotten up for the game.

Those of us who watched their latest effort are left only with suspicion and sarcasm.

The Patriots probably weren’t stoned during the Super Bowl, we say.

But they sure played like it.