ONCE upon a time, it was Gene Upshaw who was on the Senate hot seat, the head of a recalcitrant union, the primary defendant in a political show and tell.þþÿBoth sides ought to get on this issue,ÿ Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, told Upshaw, the executive director of the National Football League Players Association, on the subject of stricter steroid testing in May 1989.þþUpshaw's early position on random testing conducted year-round was articulated months before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing and amounted to what we might describe today as Fehr and loathing. ÿIn the N.F.L. or N.B.A. or baseball, just because you have a God-given ability, you still don't have to give up your rights in this country,ÿ Upshaw said in 1988.þþNearly 15 years after changing his mind and days after chiding baseball's glacial movement on performance-enhancing drugs in another Senate hearing, Upshaw said in a telephone interview, ÿPrivacy and the Fourth Amendment are nice arguments, but they don't fit in what we're doing.ÿþþSo what convinced Upshaw to change his mind, to line up on the other side of the ball in 1990 with the former commissioner Pete Rozelle?þþÿWhen your players tell you they don't want steroids in the game, then you go and negotiate a policy that's serious,ÿ he said.þþThose cracking sounds you may be hearing are the smirks contorting the stone faces of Donald Fehr and Gene Orza, who run baseball's players union and who seem to believe that being mentored by Marvin Miller makes them the most devout union men in the United States.þþThe football players, they would argue, caved on steroids the way they succumbed to a hard salary cap. They acquiesced, as always, because they were never willing to consolidate their power by holding a picket line together.þþOn those issues related to financial governance and job security, Fehr and Orza would be largely correct, but in defining a tough steroid policy as a collective bargaining concession as opposed to a benefit, they demonstrate how badly they miss the enhancement mark.þþDid you notice last week how Fehr indicated in carefully crafted sentences and through a variety of reliable mouthpieces how he might be willing to toughen baseball's puny steroid policy if the owners are prepared to reopen the collective bargaining agreement? There you go: give us something in return, enhanced earning potential, and we will agree to rules that create a safer work environment, reduce cheating and the possibility of criminal involvement and public shame.þþSteroid use in baseball is now a fact, based on last season's survey testing that produced 5 to 7 percent positive results. No drug-testing expert worth his lab coat believes these mostly announced tests weren't circumvented by many more players, but let's make the conservative assumption that at least 51 percent do not use performance-enhancing drugs. How, then, is a stricter program that aims to protect the majority from the cheaters a bargaining concession?þþThis is a question more players should be asking, Upshaw said, adding, ÿThe minute enough of them say they want steroids out, there will be a change.ÿþþThose who have spoken out, intelligently, not hysterically, are the heroes so far. John Smoltz and Todd Zeile, to name two, but most baseball players, not unlike the owners, have been conditioned by a decade of indifference to believe they could operate in a parallel sports universe.þþÿThe world has changed dramatically over the last 18 months,ÿ Bob DuPuy, baseball's chief operating officer, said last week. No, it hasn't. It woke up to baseball's exploitation of a scourge others began fighting a long time ago.þþIn 1986, Rozelle unilaterally implemented steroid testing in the N.F.L. Yet it took a player — Bill Fralic, a Pro Bowl offensive lineman for the Falcons — to say at the 1989 Senate hearing that steroid use was widespread and that the early tests were ÿdesigned to catch stupid people.ÿ Fralic, an admitted steroid user in college, went on to rally players to the enlightened position that giving more urine was no labor give-back.þþFor those who didn't want to choose between risking their careers and their health, it was a benefit, a blessing, a rare industry-wide bonding. ÿWhatever other issues management and labor may disagree upon, there is complete agreement between us on this,ÿ Upshaw said in a statement with Commissioner Paul Tagliabue at this month's Senate baseball hearing, at which Fehr did more stonewalling.þþIs the N.F.L.'s policy that tests year-round and suspends a player for four games, or a quarter of the season, for a first offense punitive enough? That's debatable, but it is superior to a baseball plan that was years late, cynically designed to disappear and would have had the first two years of testing come in less than 5 percent positive.þþNow Fehr and Orza are undoubtedly counting on the start of the season to quell the steroid furor. Home runs will fly. Ballparks will fill. The mouthpieces will parrot the party line that the controversy has been way overblown.þþUsing that logic, Woodward and Bernstein would have walked away from Watergate. Closer to home, the few journalists who decried an old baseball outrage known as the reserve clause would have noted the public's overwhelming opposition to granting the players their contractual freedom and written nothing.þþIn the end, change must come from within. ÿWhen players tell you, `If you don't stop it, I'll have to start using them,' you know you have to do something,ÿ Upshaw said.þþThat's because the story of steroid use that must be rigorously pursued is simply about the choice between right and wrong, more about those who don't than those who do.þþþþ
Source: NY Times
