Alcohol: The No. 1 High in High School : Winning, Losing, Whenever, Some Athletes Take to Drink

Craig Rebeck, turning his head toward the competitors at the boys’ Orange County track and field championships last April, had this sobering observation:

“So many people have hangovers today.”

Rebeck, a senior discus thrower at Mission Viejo’s Capistrano Valley High School, knows what the statistics, and often other teen-agers, say: Alcohol, the “legal” way to get high, is the No. 1 abused drug on high school campuses in America.

Designer drugs are safer to blame with their sleek and mysterious street names such as blow, crack, smack and whack and their high profile in the media. But that can of beer, that wine cooler is causing more problems.

A 1986 California Attorney General’s survey found that more than 65% of the state’s 11th graders had been intoxicated on alcohol, and 85% said they had at least tried it.

Ron Heitzinger of Madison, Wis., who treats high school, college and professional athletes with drug problems, said nine out of 10 cases he sees are alcohol-related.

“I drink, I do,” said Preston Walrath, a senior football player also from Capistrano Valley High School. “I got influenced by the seniors, they were football players. I thought there was no way you could have fun without alcohol. You had to drink to get drunk and that’s when you’re having fun.”

Walrath’s indoctrination into the party scene four years ago had as much to do with teammates accepting him as a football player as blocking and tackling.

For some athletes, partying is a time to show their prowess off the field. They drink, but sometimes they drink in excess, says Ellen Morehouse, a New York clinical social worker. If they can throw farther, block harder or run faster, they may think they can drink more, Morehouse said.

She calls this the machismo of drinking.

Team parties don’t always come after the game, either. Deanna de St. Paer of Irvine’s University High School said her junior varsity softball team had a party before the last game of the season last year. She said the players skipped fifth and sixth periods to attend the party, which was held at a player’s home. The girl’s parents were at work.

“We knew the game was at 3 p.m.,” De St. Paer said. “We didn’t give much thought to that. There wasn’t anybody absolutely sloshed, (but) we had been partying enough so we could feel it. Believe it or not, it was one of the only games we won.”

The team was 3-18. De St. Paer said the pregame party was a one-time only get together. Steve Scoggin, University’s athletic director, said his softball coaches said they were unaware that their players had been drinking “if in fact they were.”

De St. Paer said many athletes she knows do not abstain even though they are in training.

“Most don’t party before a game,” she said. “Practice is another thing. I don’t think it’s as big a deal to go to practice drunk or to go to practice stoned. A lot of my friends who have been in sports, soccer or volleyball or anything, they still party a lot.”

The use of alcohol, even by minors, is a volatile issue in the community, said Judy Codding, principal of upscale Bronxville (N.Y.) High School in Westchester County.

After discovering that most of the football team had been drinking at a party last fall, Codding took controversial action. She canceled the community’s homecoming week festivities and forfeited the weekend football game for the area championship.

“Principals are scared to take on the mores of the community because they are so ill-defined,” she said. “Drinking is not so bad. Why? Parents are doing it.”

With considerable attention being placed on illicit drugs, the use of alcohol by teen-agers has become acceptable.

Dick Enright, Capistrano Valley football coach, said many parents think that their children are doing all right as long as they don’t smoke dope or use cocaine.

Also, alcohol deals are not made by silhouetted figures in dark alleys. Students don’t even wait by the neighborhood liquor store for a willing adult to make their score anymore.

They just walk in and buy it with fake identifications or have older brothers, sisters or friends make the purchase. Or they wait until their parents go away for the weekend to take what they want from the family liquor cabinet.

Alcohol’s prevalence is never more evident than after fall football games. Keggers, parties with beer on tap, are as much a part of the high school milieu as the junior-senior prom.

Many a coach has lectured parents about hosting parties where alcoholic beverages were served. Still, some parents would rather their sons and daughters drink under their supervision than drink and drive.

“A lot of parents think, ‘If I’m there, or if I take away the keys, or I get the kids to spend the night, or I make sure nobody drives home drunk, then everything is OK,” said De St. Paer, a senior.

“But is that OK? A lot of parents are willing to risk it just for the happiness of their kids. The Irvine parents want their kids to have such a good life, want them to love their parents so much they just do some things, you kind of wonder if they are really using any judgment there.”

Also, parents cannot control every party goer. Drinking and driving has long been the leading cause of teen-age death, a fact that hasn’t changed in the ‘80s.

Last March, a runner from St. Margaret’s High School in San Juan Capistrano and two passengers were killed in an auto accident in San Juan Capistrano when he was driving from a party to a school dance. Witnesses and police say he was drinking.

“They went out and killed themselves,” said Rebeck of the recent accident. “You can be sad about it, and I was. That happened close to where I live. But it’s their fault. A guy got in the car and tried to show off. And he couldn’t handle it.”

Coaches such as Enright can harp all they want about the ills of alcoholism, but the difficulty of combating society’s acceptance of drinking is increased when booster club parents host beer parties and celebrities regularly appear in alcohol commercials.

Some coaches become unsuspecting accomplices to alcohol advertising. Dan Hirsch, cross-country coach at Buena Park High School, has professional sports schedules on his office walls that are nothing more than glorified beer advertisements. Hirsch, of course, does not advocate drinking.

Alcohol and sporting events have become entwined with beer-sponsored marathons, triathlons, bicycle races and beach volleyball tournaments. Beer and alcohol posters are draped on the walls of football and baseball stadiums. In Milwaukee, they call the baseball team the Brewers. The St. Louis Cardinals baseball team is owned by Anheuser-Busch Companies.

Many sports stars are in beer commercials such as “Two American Legends: Danny Sullivan and Miller Beer.” The sports pages glamorize hard-drinking, fun-loving athletes from Bobby Layne, the NFL Hall of Fame quarterback who suffered from a chronic liver ailment when he died last December, to golfer Roger Maltbie and his Michelob visor. They pay homage to Dennis Boyd’s nickname--Oil Can--that was given to him because of his propensity to drink beer. Would sports journalists glorify a cocaine-related nickname?

“Pros have to take responsibility,” said Enright, a former professional football coach. “The beer commercials, they are for the birds. The kids follow these guys. We need help from the top.”

Peter V. Ueberroth, commissioner of major league baseball, agrees.

“They have a responsibility to young people in America,” he said. “Should they? Maybe not. But it is unavoidable. There are those who say they are just ordinary citizens, but society today and in the past does not classify them as ordinary citizens. They have more impact on youth in this country than almost any other point of influence.”

With more than $1 billion being spent annually on advertising alcoholic products, Enright and others are taking on big business.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Lou Gorman, Boston Red Sox general manager, told Alcoholism & Addiction magazine. “I wish somebody else would do it, but somebody has to pick up the tab for the big TV contracts.”

Said Ueberroth: “It’s OK that the breweries are involved (with baseball) as long as they are doing what they’re doing, being at the forefront of moderation and responsible use.”

Dr. Max Schneider, a Santa Ana physician who speaks nationally on the effects of alcoholism, says drinking is depicted as the reward for a good athletic performance.

To wit: A recent Times’ article on the 216th career victory for pitcher Joe Niekro of the New York Yankees said a cooler full of champagne was waiting in his locker for an after-game celebration.

Such locker room frivolities are common. Schneider said those who run pro sports fail to address the alcohol issue when campaigning against player drug use.

“In my opinion, the government and Peter Ueberroth are two-faced,” he said, referring to the attention given cocaine, but not alcoholism. “We have to get these (beer) advertisements out of the ballpark.”

Ueberroth said major league baseball will have public service announcements within two years on alcoholism directed at baseball fans, youth and driving.

The pros need only to look to themselves to see the problem vividly. Most recently, John Candelaria, a pitcher for the California Angels, has been arrested twice within a month for driving under the influence of alcohol. The second arrest came after he was served alcohol on a team-chartered airplane.

Craig McTavish, a member of the Edmonton Oilers National Hockey League team, served a year in prison for vehicular manslaughter after a 1984 drunk driving accident that resulted in the death of a young woman. Pelle Lindbergh, a goalie for the Philadelphia Flyers, died in an alcohol-related traffic accident in 1985.

Schneider and others are concerned with such behavior because they view alcoholism as a disease that is not easily overcome. And the disease can come on quickly for teen-age drinkers.

Tim Allen, executive director of Costa Mesa’s Break Through Clinic, said a 15-year-old taking the same amount of chemicals as a 35-year-old would feel the effects within 6 to 13 months, whereas it would take the adult seven years to experience the same mental and physiological disorders.

“The tissue is softer and developing so that the attack of the drug can damage those tissues much more readily,” Allen said. “And alcohol is the worst. The earlier they become involved with chemicals, the more physiological damage we can see.”

Allen’s fears are fostered by the fact that scientists now believe alcoholism is hereditary.

Children from alcoholic parents have a four-fold chance of getting the disease, said Dr. Marc A. Schuckit, a physician from the University of California, San Diego. Research also shows that the genetic link can skip a generation, he said.

David Larson of the National Council on Alcoholism says anti-alcohol education must start in kindergarten. Larson says that by the time a child turns 8 years old, he or she already will have decided to drink or not. Allen says studies show that as many as 40% of America’s 11-year-olds have been drunk.

Scientists use age 14, not 21, however, as the statistical drinking age because social drinking usually starts with the teen-ager’s passage into manhood or womanhood.

When 14-year-olds knock back that first can of beer, they don’t think about the fact that drinking and driving is the leading cause of teen-age death. They don’t think about alcohol affecting their soft tissue. They don’t think about becoming dependent on the drug within a year.

And they certainly don’t think about tomorrow’s hangover.