TV Report in 1990 Zeroed In on Drugs

Three years ago in New Orleans, the good times on Bourbon Street slowed appreciably a few days before Super Bowl XXIV when a consumer-affairs reporter from a Washington, D.C., television station aired an expose of the NFL’s drug-testing program.

The report by Roberta Baskin, now with CBS’ “Street Stories,” was one of the NFL’s biggest scandals in recent years. Six months earlier, Sports Illustrated had published a special report detailing an assortment of alleged irregularities in the league’s drug-testing program.

The magazine report did not have the impact of Baskin’s telecast, even though both focused on the NFL’s drug adviser at the time, Dr. Forest Tennant of West Covina, and questionable drug-testing practices.

Perhaps it was the timing, as NFL officials claimed. The magazine’s report was published in July and was forgotten by the time the regular season started. Furthermore, Baskin alleged that three of the NFL’s leading white quarterbacks had tested positive for cocaine in the previous 10 years but were not punished by the league.

Although that report was a small part of the overall series, it got the most attention days before the San Francisco 49ers were to play the Denver Broncos.

The NFL challenged Baskin to name the players.

She responded: “We did not want to put the spotlight on those quarterbacks. We wanted to put the spotlight on the NFL and Dr. Tennant.”

After the telecasts, many in the American sports media debated whether Baskin’s report was accurate, and whether it was fair to target all white quarterbacks by failing to name the three.

Paul Tagliabue, the newly appointed NFL commissioner, said at a New Orleans news conference that the TV report was a “journalistic Molotov cocktail.”

“It’s absolute utter nonsense,” he said. “I don’t care what they say about the drug policy. I know enough about it, and how it’s been administered under Pete Rozelle and how it’ll be administered by me to stand by it in any form.”

Nonetheless, by early March, Tennant had tendered his resignation and Tagliabue had appointed two drug experts--Dr. Lawrence Brown and Dr. John Lombardo--to replace him. Within a year, the NFL’s drug policy was revised to address some of the basic criticisms of the reports.

Baskin continued reporting on alleged flaws in the drug policy for the next two years. She used documents and sources to show that some results from Tennant’s laboratory were still being used to penalize players, even though the accuracy of those results was questionable.

“I was lampooned for continuing to care about it or follow it,” Baskin said. “This story was treated as a joke. I remember Tagliabue said to someone that I didn’t even know how to play football, which still is the case, but had nothing to do with the story.

“I did understand a lot more about drug testing, apparently, than he did. And about his own policy, because what the policy said on paper and how it was acted upon were completely different.”

Officials have never admitted flaws in the program. Three months after Super Bowl XXIV, Tagliabue, speaking to a group from the Associated Press Sports Editors, said Tennant’s problem was that he talked too much.

“I still don’t think there were major problems in the way the program was administered,” he said.

In discussing the NFL program this month, Jay Moyer, league executive director, characterized the reports as sensationalism.

Baskin said her story was “written about through the filter of the NFL’s spin control. Everybody was supposed to be very critical and suspicious of the timing of it, as if we are supposed to sit on it until after the Super Bowl.”