Klein Says Chargers Lost Title Game Because of Drugs

Some members of the San Diego Chargers were in a drug-induced “stupor” when the team lost to the Cincinnati Bengals in the so-called Ice Bowl playoff game of 1982, former Charger owner Gene Klein claims in a magazine interview.

Players and coaches from that team denied Klein’s charges, made in Sports Illustrated.

The Bengals beat the Chargers, 27-7, on Jan. 10, 1982, in the AFC Championship game, played in temperatures that reached 9 degrees below zero with a wind-chill factor of 59 below at Cincinnati.

“That team was in a stupor that day,” Klein told the magazine, “and I thought it was the cold. A lot of them had a lot of cocaine in them.” He didn’t identify any players.

Klein said a federal investigator told him several months later that one of the Charger players purchased a kilogram of cocaine in Florida, where the Chargers played the Miami Dolphins the week before the Bengal game.

The Chargers defeated Miami, 41-38, in overtime to advance to the championship game. The player allegedly smuggled the cocaine back to San Diego on the team’s charter flight and shared it with teammates in the days before the Cincinnati game.

Klein sold the Chargers to Alex Spanos in 1984 and is now active in horse racing.

“I haven’t read what Mr. Klein said, but it seems unfair,” former offensive lineman Ed White told the San Diego Tribune. “This team played in Miami what I consider the finest game I’ve been associated with in my career, and then we had to go and play in conditions that were worse than any I experienced in my nine years in Minnesota, and we played outdoors there.”

Tight end Kellen Winslow, still with the Chargers, caught 13 passes against Miami.

“It’s news to me,” he said. “All I remember about the flight home was taking a DC-10 United charter and I sat up in coach class. . . . I don’t know anything about this.”

Said Ernie Zampese, San Diego’s former offensive coordinator now with the Rams: “I never heard anything about it. They (the Bengals) kicked our butts (20-17) in the heat of San Diego earlier that year and they kicked them in the cold.”

Former special teams player Hank Bauer blamed the Chargers’ poor performance against Cincinnati on the weather conditions.

“How can you tell if it’s true?” Bauer said of Klein’s allegations. “It was 59 below, and people were just trying to survive.”