Rude Awakenings
When Detroit Lions defensive lineman Reggie Rogers awoke in the emergency room at Pontiac Osteopathic Hospital in the early morning hours of Thursday, October 20, 1988, he was unable to move. Tubes were running in and out of his body. The room seemed out of focus and he did not know how he got there. Doctors informed him that he sustained a fractured neck and multiple injuries in an automobile accident shortly after midnight. Weeks into his second season, Rogers’s career seemed finished.
That was the least of his problems. Toxicology tests revealed that Rogers was legally drunk at the time of his accident. All three occupants of the vehicle he collided with were dead. As soon as Rogers was well enough to be discharged from the hospital, the Oakland County district attorney planned to formally charge him with three counts of involuntary manslaughter with a motor vehicle. In Michigan, the offense was punishable by fifteen years in prison.
Before the accident, Rogers was out drinking with teammate Devon Mitchell at Big Art’s Paradise Lounge in Pontiac. At 1:30, the two players left together in separate vehicles. At 1:50, three young men in a 1987 Dodge Omni entered the intersection of University Drive and Wide Track Drive. Immediately struck on the passenger side by Rogers’s 1988 Jeep Cherokee, the Omni burst into flames. There were no skid marks at the accident scene. Mitchell, who was ten car lengths ahead of Rogers, returned to the intersection after hearing the crash.
The victims, all teenagers, were visiting the Pontiac area to attend the funeral of a relative. Kelly Ess, age eighteen, died at the scene. His brother Dale, age seventeen, died an hour later at Pontiac General Hospital. Their cousin Kenneth Willett, nineteen, was kept on a life-support system for nearly twelve hours before being declared dead the following afternoon. Beer cans were discovered in both vehicles. The Oakland County medical examiner later testified that the two passengers in the Omni had a higher blood alcohol level than Rogers, and the driver was probably legally drunk as well.
An All-America defensive star at the University of Washington, Rogers was the Lions’ first-round draft choice in 1987, the seventh overall pick in the draft. At six foot six, 285 pounds, he possessed tremendous speed and quickness. “I’m not saying drafting Reggie Rogers has made us the best team in the NFL, but it helps,” said then-Lions defensive coordinator Wayne Fontes on draft day.
While Rogers’s defensive skills left pro scouts salivating, his personal life was coming apart at the seams. On June 27, 1986, two months before his senior campaign at Washington began, Reggie’s older brother, Don, the starting free safety on the Cleveland Browns, died of a cocaine overdose. The circumstances around Don’s death triggered a series of events that left Reggie on a crash course to self-destruction.
Staying in a hotel only minutes from where Don overdosed, Reggie spoke to his brother by telephone just hours before emergency room doctors declared him dead. “I’ll see you in the morning,” was the last thing Reggie said to his brother before hanging up. “The next time I saw him he was dead. I had a major problem with ‘What if I would have went home? Maybe I could have stopped him.’”
Rogers, guilty and grieving, turned increasingly to the bottle. Within weeks of Don’s passing, alcohol abuse brought Reggie into contact with the law for the first time. He was arrested for driving under the influence in Seattle. Before finishing his senior year, he would be arrested again, this time for assault.
Teams that had pegged Rogers as a first-round pick grew leery of him after his brother’s cocaine-induced death. Some clubs invested substantial money and time checking into his background searching for evidence of drug abuse. One club admitted going as far as to hire a private investigator to follow him around Seattle.
Although no evidence of drug abuse was found, Rogers’s alcohol-related problems scared teams off. “Let’s say it was enough to convince us we shouldn’t draft him,” Green Bay Packers head of scouting Tom Braatz told a Wisconsin newspaper after extensively researching Rogers.
After Rogers’s fatal drunk driving accident, Lions officials downplayed their prior knowledge of Rogers’s alcohol abuse. “I’ve never heard of hiring a private investigator and I don’t believe it is true,” Lions coach Darryl Rogers told a Detroit reporter in response to the Packers’ admission.
Regardless of whether the Lions fully appreciated the depth of Rogers’s problems prior to drafting him, the coaching staff was nonetheless made aware of the situation long before the fatal crash. In a clear-as-day plea for help, Rogers went to the coaches before the start of the regular season and confessed to severely abusing alcohol. “I went in,” Rogers said, “and told them, ‘I’m having a major problem with my brother’s death. I’m drinking a hell of a lot. And I’m basically totally out of control. I need some help dealing with my brother’s death.’ I was letting them know that this was bigger than football.”
The Lions’ response to his admission convinced Rogers that in the NFL nothing is bigger than football—especially when you are the number one draft choice.
Rogers was admitted to a Detroit-area rehab center where he underwent emotional counseling for thirty days. He was released in time for the Lions’ annual Thanksgiving Day game. Despite receiving no treatment for his alcoholism during his thirty-day admittance, the Lions’ coaching staff never raised the issue with him again. “They forgot about it,” Rogers told the authors. “They didn’t want to know.”
According to Rogers, the two coaches most familiar with his problems were head coach Darryl Rogers and assistant Wayne Fontes. As the defensive coordinator, Fontes worked directly with the big lineman. Weeks after being present when Rogers confessed to abusing alcohol, Fontes was himself arrested and charged with two counts of drunk driving.
Like a dark omen, Fontes crashed his automobile while driving drunk after leaving a bar on October 21, 1987. Three hundred and sixty four nights later, police in the same county would respond to Rogers’s accident scene.
When Oakland County sheriff’s deputies discovered Fontes’s car in a ditch not far from his Rochester Hills home, the coach was nowhere to be found. He had walked to a nearby convenience store and placed a call from a pay phone to his wife requesting that she come pick him up. As fate would have it, ex-Lion Ken Fantetti—a linebacker who was coached by Fontes—was present when Fontes entered the convenience store. “He didn’t look like himself,” Fantetti later testified at Fontes’s preliminary hearing. “[Fontes made] an off-the-wall comment that who knows what else they might find [in the car].”
Investigators at the crash scene soon discovered Fontes driving his wife’s vehicle out of the nearby convenience store parking lot and pulled him over. Telling police he drank two or three vodkas on the rocks at a nearby bar, Fontes failed various roadside sobriety tests and a breath-alcohol analysis test.
In the process of towing Fontes’s vehicle from the ditch, police discovered a vial of cocaine on the floor after opening the driver’s side door. When confronted about the cocaine, Fontes insisted that his twenty-one-year-old son was the driver. But the 1986 Mercury was registered to the Lions organization and lent to Fontes for his personal use. More importantly, Fontes’s wife told authorities at the accident scene that their son was in Florida. After repeatedly asking the police, “Do you know who I am?” Fontes revised his story, saying that someone else was the driver.
The authorities added a cocaine possession charge to the two DUI charges, leaving the leading candidate to succeed Rogers as the Lions’ head coach in jeopardy of facing four years in prison if convicted on the felony drug offense.
Fontes’s attorneys fought vigorously to have the cocaine charges dismissed. Two weeks after the arrest, a Rochester Hills district judge ruled that the police conducted an illegal search of the car, saying they should have obtained a warrant first. Unable to introduce the cocaine into evidence, prosecutors dropped the felony charge. On December 21 Fontes pleaded guilty to one count of drunk driving and was sentenced to eighteen months’ probation. Less than a year later, the Lions promoted him to head coach.
“Certainly, anyone who consumes alcohol is subject to making mistakes,” said Lions GM Russ Thomas after the promotion. “But I don’t think he’s the kind of guy who has problems with that sort of thing. I look at him based on what he’s done for us on the field.”
Fontes too downplayed the seriousness of his substance-abuse-related arrest. “The organization stood behind me,” Fontes told the Detroit press on the day his promotion was announced. “They believed in me. I was innocent of all that BS, so that’s behind me.”
However, the Lions did not stand behind Rogers, who at the time of Fontes’s joyous press conference was lying in serious condition in the hospital recovering from an operation on two broken vertebrae in his neck. During his entire six-month hospital stay, no Lions official visited Rogers. “They turned their back on me,” Rogers said. “They wouldn’t even return phone calls made by me and my family from the hospital.”
At the end of the season, Fontes left Rogers unprotected. Recovering from neck surgery and awaiting trial, Rogers was not picked up. The Lions then let him go altogether, kissing off a first-round draft choice and setting their sights on Barry Sanders, whom they took in the 1989 draft.
Meanwhile, on January 16, 1990, a jury found Rogers guilty on three counts of negligent homicide and he spent the next sixteen months incarcerated in a Michigan state penitentiary. “When I was at the University of Washington, it was like a family there and coaches were like your dad,” said Rogers. “That’s where I made the mistake in trying to tie that to the NFL. Because they don’t give a damn. I had a rude awakening.”
The tragic consequences of Rogers’s drinking were extraordinary, but his conduct leading up to them was terribly routine among NFL players. According to the authors’ research, drunk driving was second only to domestic violence as the crime NFL players were most likely to be arrested for. And the league’s most celebrated players are by no means immune to alcohol abuse. Consider one four-month stretch during 1997 which resulted in the arrests of: Redskins All-Pro running back Terry Allen (charged after driving 133 miles per hour while attempting to elude police), the NFL’s 1996 Defensive Player of the Year, Bruce Smith (found slumped over the wheel of his car at an intersection at 6:21 in the morning, the motor still running), and the NFL’s 1997 Defensive Player of the Year, Dana Stubblefield (observed speeding down the median strip by the California Highway Patrol), were all arrested for driving under the influence.
Alcohol abuse can also have the most unpredictable, even deadly ramifications. In December 1993, their team in the midst of an eight-game winning streak, Houston Oilers players and coaches were stunned by the suicide of starting defensive tackle Jeff Alm. Killed after inserting a shotgun into his mouth and pulling the trigger, Alm’s death was largely viewed as an example of the dangers that can accompany gun ownership. “That’s the bad thing about having a gun handy sometimes,” said then-Oilers defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan. “Because … all at once you make a decision that you wouldn’t have, probably, if you had thought about it a little longer.”
True enough. But alcohol, much more than guns, was the culprit behind Aim’s death. On December 14, Alm lost control of his 1993 Cadillac Eldorado while trying to negotiate a curve on an exit ramp off Interstate 610 in Houston. In the crash, passenger Sean Lynch, Aim’s best friend since childhood, was thrown from the car. His body went over a guardrail and plunged twenty feet down an embankment, landing underneath the overpass. His friend lying motionless and failing to respond to his pleas, Alm placed a frantic 911 call from his cell phone.
“I have a buddy dying!” he yelled at the operator.
The operator’s attempts to communicate with Alm then went unanswered.
“Sean, are you all right?” the operator could hear Alm screaming.
“Hello, hello.”
The 911 operator then heard three gunshots. Drunk and guilt-ridden over the sight of his best friend’s lifeless body lying beneath him on a service road, Alm retrieved a shotgun from his car and fired three shots into the air. He then sat down on the ground, stuck the barrel in his mouth, and blew his head off. Autopsies on both bodies confirmed both men were drunk at the time of the accident. Aim’s blood alcohol content level was three times the legal limit for drivers in Texas.
League-wide, reaction to Aim’s manner of death was one of profound shock. Nowhere in his background or personality, it was widely reported, was there any hint that he possessed the potential to kill himself. But alcohol alters personality, arrests free will, produces risky decisions and sometimes fatal results. Alcohol is a factor in 30 percent of the suicides, 50 percent of the homicides, and 30 percent of the accidental deaths in the United States. It played a major role in the accidental shooting death of Charles Blades by his cousin, Seahawks wide receiver Brian Blades. And other NFL players killed in auto fatalities while legally drunk include Miami Dolphins running back David Overstreet (1984), Los Angeles Raiders defensive back Stacey Toran (1989), and Atlanta Falcons tight end Brad Beckman (1990).
Despite recurring high-profile tragedies, frequent player arrests for driving drunk, and stepped-up provisions in the collective bargaining agreement allowing the commissioner to discipline players for abusing alcohol, the tide of alcohol abuse in the league shows no sign of dropping.
December 27, 1997
His big-screen television tuned to the Denver Broncos–Jacksonville Jaguars playoff game, ex–Seattle Seahawks defensive lineman Mike Frier positions his wheelchair between the sofa and the soft-back chair. His feet, inside of large, loosely tied high-top sneakers, rest motionless on the chair’s metal footpads. Underneath green cutoff shorts, his once powerful legs, now a reflection of deteriorated muscle mass, twitch on occasion. With hands too feeble to operate the remote control, Frier directs his father, Ulysses, an ex-Marine who now lives with his son and cares for him twenty-four hours a day, to lower the volume.
Once a six-foot-five, 300-pound run-stopper, Frier watches a lot more football then he ever did when he played the game. Rendered a quadriplegic weeks after signing with the Seahawks, there is little else he can do. On December 1, 1994, then-twenty-five-year-old Frier joined Seahawks All-Pro running back Chris Warren and rookie running back Lamar Smith for his first “boys’ night out” since coming over from the Cincinnati Bengals. For Frier, it ended up being his last night out when an intoxicated Smith drove his car into a utility pole.
“The experience is hard to deal with,” Frier reflected two years after the fact. “One day you’re working out, doing all the things you do. Now it’s just taken away from me.”
Four weeks after signing with the Seahawks, Frier finally decided to go out with the boys for a night of drinking. “Where’s the hangout spot?” Frier asked Warren after practice.
“Couple guys be hangin’ out at Shark’s,” Warren told him.
Shark’s, the bar formally known as the Kirkland Shark Klub, is located near the Seahawks’ practice facility. Frier began the evening of December 1 at the club with four of his teammates drinking and playing pool. After drinking eleven fourteen-ounce glasses of beer and two twelve-ounce bottles of beer, Warren, Frier, and Smith left Shark’s at 8:00. Warren would later tell authorities that he and Smith split the eleven glasses of beer.
Planning to get drunk before going out, Frier prearranged for his girlfriend to pick him up at Shark’s to insure his safe arrival home. “I never wanted to get a DWI and end up on ESPN or in USA Today,” Frier said. “So I always made sure someone else was driving.”
However, when Smith and Warren unexpectedly decided to go to a different bar after spending only an hour and a half at Shark’s, Frier went along. Shortly after 8:00, the three arrived at T.G.I. Friday’s where they ordered a round of double Crown Royal whiskey drinks. Smith downed two double Crown Royals and one single, the equivalent of six and one quarter ounces of straight alcohol. The tab, which police later requested, confirms that no food was ordered.
From T.G.I. Friday’s they drove to a convenience store and purchased a twelve-pack of beer and two cigars. En route to Warren’s house, Smith took a detour to the Seahawks’ nearby practice facility to pick up Warren’s keys.
Driving in a light rain, Smith cruised at nearly twice the posted speed limit. With Warren in the passenger’s seat and Frier reclined across the back seat, rap music pulsated from a 200-pound over-sized speaker in the rear dash of Smith’s car. Witnesses in cars passed by Smith would later tell police of being able to hear the music inside their cars, despite their windows being up and rain falling outside.
His newly born daughter and girlfriend back at their small apartment, Frier’s first night out was momentarily perfect—brews, smokes, tunes, and speed.
At 8:40 Smith attempted to pass a car in a no-passing zone, and lost control of his Oldsmobile Bravada. Unable to regain control, he crashed head-on into a utility pole with such force that the rear of the car went airborn, rotated to the right, and smashed into a nearby tree. Smith’s shatterproof windshield busted completely out. Flames from atop the utility pole illuminated the wooded area, the damaged electrical boxes ultimately exploding three times while witnesses and emergency personnel began responding to the crash site.
Warren broke two ribs and Smith sustained injuries requiring hospital treatment, but both climbed out of the car on their own. Frier, with a fractured spine, was crushed underneath the 200-pound speaker, which landed on him.
“I didn’t want to show weakness,” Frier’s father said, explaining the stiff upper lip he had to show Mike when he first walked into Mike’s room at Overlake Hospital after the accident. “I knew I needed to be strong for him. We made eye contact. He recognized me.”
Exposed to his share of senseless violence during his military career, Ulysses Frier faced his son’s forever-changed condition with dignity. “You say, ‘Well, I hid in the jungle with these two guys and I got the worst of it,’” reasoned Ulysses, comparing soldiers in Vietnam to football teammates. “If Mike had been in the front seat, things would have been different. But you don’t want to question what the Lord does.”
The first witnesses to arrive at the accident scene said they could hear Frier screaming from inside the car after his teammates had climbed out. His spine severed, Frier lay trapped and bleeding in the crumpled car. By the time paramedics transported him to the hospital, his life was in the balance. “I was close to death,” Frier recalled. “On a ventilator. I couldn’t breathe on my own. They were just trying to keep me alive.”
S--t,” Smith said to Warren, the two of them looking at the wreckage as police and firefighters sped to the scene. Within minutes the two were separately answering questions from investigators. Smith, his breath reeking of alcohol and his eyes bloodshot and watery, confirmed to Officer Greg Hicks, who ticketed him weeks earlier for speeding, that Warren, not he, was the driver. Smith provided a more than one-page statement to that effect, then repeated the claim to a firefighter at the scene and a nurse at the hospital where he was later examined. But when officers placed handcuffs on Warren at the hospital, Smith interjected, “No man, no. I was the driver. I’m the driver.” Smith was indicted on a felony charge of vehicular assault on January 26, 1995.
While Smith continued to practice and play with the team, therapists finally attempted to introduce Frier to rehabilitation exercises. Having regained some motion in his arms, Frier was first asked to raise his arms while one-pound plates rested in his hands. “I’d been lifting weights for ten years,” he said. “Big old forty-five-pound plates. Suddenly I could not lift my arms up with one-pound plates.” Once able to bench-press 450 pounds, one-pound rings now proved too much.
The image of a once-mighty NFL lineman confined to a wheelchair generated a great deal of dialogue in the media regarding alcohol abuse among Seahawks players. “A lot of us are getting tired of alcohol abuse among the Seahawks,” wrote Seattle Times columnist Steve Kelley. “We’re sick of reading in the newspaper about another DWI, or a tragic car wreck that didn’t need to happen.”
Months before Smith crashed his car, paralyzing Frier, Seahawks defensive back Patrick Hunter was sentenced to jail in Seattle after committing his second drunk driving offense since joining the team.
Then just fifteen days after the accident, Seahawks defensive back Orlando Watters, who was caught driving without a license, registration, or proof of insurance, was arrested for drunk driving in Seattle. Police also discovered marijuana and a knife in his vehicle. Seahawks head coach Tom Flores dismissed the seriousness of Watters’s arrest. “All I can say is that he messed up,” said Flores, who played Watters the following Sunday. “We will handle it in-house.”
Downplaying the severity of the problem, then circling the wagons is a typical response to players’ alcohol-related arrests. But if arrests are any gauge of the scope of the driving-under-the-influence problem within the NFL, the players are not merely slipping up and getting caught the first time they drive drunk. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission, the average drunk driver operates his car between 200 and 2,000 times before being caught once.
Amidst heightened awareness of Seahawk players’ drunk driving problems, newly hired head coach Dennis Erickson was arrested for driving under the influence on April 15, just two months before Frier’s June 21, 1995, release from the hospital. A motorist on Washington’s Interstate 5 called 911 from his cellular phone and reported that a 1995 BMW was being driven erratically. A Washington state patrolman then observed Erickson force three drivers to swerve or brake hard in order to avoid being hit. A breathalyzer test revealed that his blood alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit in Washington.
While disturbing, the arrest of Seattle’s head coach is not unusual. From the mid-1980s to 1997, Seattle-area police arrested at least thirty Seahawks players and coaches for driving under the influence. The Seattle law firm Cowan, Hayne & Fox, which limits its practice to DUI defense, has represented approximately twenty-five Seahawks players and coaches charged with driving drunk during that period. “My impression is that professional athletes, particularly football players, drink substantially more than the rest of the population,” said Douglas Cowan, the firm’s founding lawyer, who has personally represented thirteen Seahawks coaches and players, among them receiver Brian Blades, defensive back Patrick Hunter, and All-Pro lineman Bob “Fig” Newton.
A former assistant district attorney in Seattle who began representing drunk driving offenders in 1978, Cowan has handled over 2,000 drunk driving cases in his thirty-year legal career. He has made a practice of talking to every one of his clients about the extent of their alcohol use. In arriving at his impression that NFL players abuse alcohol at higher rates than the general population, Cowan suggested that the mind-set required to play in the NFL can have a direct correlation to some players’ abusive drinking habits. More specifically, he identified four factors that are associated with alcohol use and abuse among NFL players.
Reckless Abandon. According to Cowan, one out of four players he represented were diagnosed alcoholics. The rest he described as alcohol abusers who would drink socially, sometimes to excess. Cowan insisted that the problems he observed were not unique to the Seahawks. “Professional football players have to be people who can invoke a tremendous amount of emotion to do what they do,” he said. “They have to be somewhat fearless. That requires a personality that does not fear consequences to the same extent that other people do. Not many people will throw themselves at 300-pound bodies running as fast as they can. You’ve got to have a certain amount of reckless abandonment in your personality to do that sort of thing. Because of that they live life to the fullest, pressing the edge at all times. This includes their social activities as well as their professional activities. NFL players don’t think much about consequences, or they could not do what they do.”
Manhood and Drinking. Even the casual observer recognizes the association between beer drinking and manhood that is promoted during televised football games. Cowan referred to it as “the testosterone factor.” Masculinity, beer, and football go together. “There is an image of masculinity that many of them feel they have to project,” said Cowan. “You talk about a man’s man. Pro football players epitomize that. They are very masculine, very aggressive. There is an image factor that goes into that—’Real men drink. And real men drink as much as they want to.’ There’s an element to that that differentiates them from the general population. There’s an image aspect.”
Denial. “Football players are the paragon of health,” said Cowan. And as a result, they are particularly resistant to admitting weakness. Cowan pointed to the questions that a player abusing alcohol will frequently ask. “How could I be an alcoholic and continue to achieve on such a high physical level? If I was an alcoholic I would be weak, wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning, wouldn’t be sober for my games, wouldn’t have the strength that I do, I’d be dissipated, etc.”
The NFL’s Promotion of Alcohol. On February 14, 1997, new provisions went into effect under the National Football League Policy and Program for Substances of Abuse. While recognizing that “alcoholic beverages are legal substances,” the policy prohibits the abuse of alcohol, declaring that “such conduct is detrimental to the integrity of the public confidence in the NFL and professional football.”
Yet, as Cowan pointed out, there is an “extraordinary” amount of alcohol sold at NFL stadiums, not to mention the massive promotion of alcohol consumption on television during the broadcast of NFL games. “It’s not just a mixed message,” Cowan pointed out. “It is hypocritical as hell. You think of football, you think of beer. They have the Bud Bowl on Super Bowl Sunday every year.”
Alcohol abuse is out of control in the NFL,” said Frier. “If alcohol is there, it’s going to be abused by the players. Simple as that. I had a friend when I played for the Bengals, Reggie Rembert—he had to take piss tests two or three times every week. But he was still out there taking chances.” Rembert was arrested three times for driving under the influence while playing for the Bengals and ultimately sentenced to a year in jail.
“If you’ve got an alcoholic, there’s only one way to stop them from driving drunk,” said Cowan. “That is to stop them from drinking. Period. You can take away their cars, family, jobs, anything. But until you sober them up, they’re not going to stop driving drunk.”
Many teams do not understand this concept. After cutting Rembert following his third DUI arrest, the Bengals drafted the University of Miami’s outstanding defensive back Tremain Mack in 1997. Prior to the draft, Mack had been arrested six times, three of those for driving under the influence. “He’s in terrible shape,” said Frier, familiar with Mack’s situation through his friends still on the Bengals squad. “He’s lucky to be in the NFL. Cincinnati would cut him if he was a regular rookie free agent making no money. But they try and help out their top players, and try to hide problems.”
Mack was arrested on October 25 for driving eighty-two miles per hour while under the influence. He was sentenced to thirty days in jail. “We hire people as players,” said Bengals president and general manager Mike Brown following Mack’s admission to the Clermont County Jail. “You have to realize that these are human beings who are not perfect and some of them will at times run up against a wall.” Brown, though, could only hope that a “person” with Mack’s record of DUI would not run into a wall.
As was the case with Rembert, the Bengals stated they would give Mack more chances after undergoing counseling. “We hope we can help him but if we can’t, if he fails two more times, then he’s out, done,” said Brown. “That’s the way it works.”
Despite being an advocate for treatment and rehabilitation, Cowan concluded that NFL teams don’t always act in players’ best interest. “There should be a line of accountability,” he said. “The greatest enablers in the world are the NFL, or have been historically. At some point in time you have to say, ‘We’re not going to put up with this anymore. We’re not going to continue to support you in your path to self-destruction.’ That’s part of recovery. If they did that with some players, maybe some players would get the point and take care of themselves and then have a chance to reenter the league.”
While awaiting the outcome of Lamar Smith’s pending retrial on vehicular assault charges, the Seahawks signed Broncos wide receiver Mike Pritchard on June 19, 1996. Pritchard had been arrested for vehicular assault and drunk driving after he hit two pedestrians on October 29, 1995. He later pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges and was put on eighteen months’ probation and ordered to attend an alcohol rehabilitation program.
Meanwhile, Lamar Smith and Mike Frier agreed to an out-of-court settlement in August of 1997, where Smith would pay at least $1 million to Frier.
On January 9, 1998, after over three years of legal wrangling that included a trial that ended in a hung jury and an appeal to the Washington Supreme Court, Smith pleaded guilty to vehicular assault and was sentenced to four months in prison. When entering his plea, Smith admitted to making “a horrible mistake.”
Smith’s mistake was not learned from, however, not even by teammate Chris Warren, who barely escaped the accident intact. On April 4, 1997, Warren was again at Sharky’s in Kirkland drinking with teammates. And again he climbed into the passenger’s side of a car being driven by a drunk teammate who drove away from the bar at excessive speeds.
This time it was fellow running back Mack Strong. Strong sped out of the parking lot and ran a stop sign at approximately twenty miles per hour. An officer then observed Strong’s car straddling the lane divider and veering into the lane of oncoming traffic. After driving one block on the right-hand shoulder and then swaying back to the center lane and nearly missing an island, Strong was pulled over and arrested.
An open bottle of beer was found in the car and Strong was unable to perform simple sobriety tests such as accurately repeating the alphabet or standing on one foot for more than two seconds. After being booked at the police station, Strong was released into the custody of Chris Warren. On September 30, 1997, Strong pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of negligent driving. He was fined and received a suspended ninety-day jail sentence. Warren escaped again without life-threatening injury.
“My God,” said Cowan when he learned of Warren riding in Strong’s car after his experience in the Smith case. “Amazing. That is amazing. It sure as hell makes me shake my head.”
Tragedy as a behavior-changing tool has a very short shelf life, especially in the NFL. “I’m just another casualty,” Frier said. “Life goes on. To tell you the truth, if this happened to someone else, I wouldn’t be hangin’ out drinkin’ all the time. But it wouldn’t stop me from drinkin’ because a guy’s career was cut short.”
In March of 1998, Smith was furloughed from a Seattle jail so he could fly to New Orleans to sign a four-year, $7.1 million contract >with the Saints. “All I can say is, ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’” said Saints head coach Mike Ditka, referring to Smith’s conviction. “We’ve all done it. We’ve used bad judgment with alcohol and a vehicle. Most people who do it get away with it. Some people get caught.”