Drug Deals and Lockouts: Looking Back at a Banner Year
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

This is the time of the year when press outlets like to give out awards like the sportsperson of the year or the sports event of the year. You’ll hear a lot about Lance Armstrong, the White Sox, and plenty of other uplifting stories. In all likelihood, no one will name Jose Canseco as Sportsman of the Year or the NHL’s yearlong lockout as the event of the year – but make no mistake, Canseco’s whistle-blowing on steroid use in baseball with the February 14 release of “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big” and the NHL freeze out will have a profound impact on the sports world for the foreseeable future – certainly more so than Pat Riley.
It was Canseco, after all, who ignited a burner beneath the seats of MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and players union head Donald Fehr, helped crack the heroic facades of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and ultimately brought about a new era of drug awareness in American sports by dragging it to Congress.
In December 2004, Senator McCain, a Republican of Arizona, knew that a San Francisco federal grand jury was already following the law and looking into charges that the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (Balco) was supplying athletes with banned substances and that Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, and others had testified before that grand jury. But Congress was already under fire from the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency about steroid use in baseball. The IOC even threatened not to award future Olympics to countries that didn’t enforce the IOC anti-doping doctrine, which was a threat to New York’s bid for the 2012 summer games.
The first House committee hearing was held on March 17 and featured a who’s who of baseball’s biggest names, including McGwire, Sosa, and Rafael Palmiero. Ironically, Palmiero, who told, panel members that he had never taken steroids, was slapped with a 10-game suspension six weeks later after testing positive for stanozolol, a banned substance.
At one point this fall, there were five professional sports drug-testing bills floating around Washington. There was an absurdity in all of this. Back in 1990, Congress passed a law that made possession of steroids illegal without a physician’s approval. The bill was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.
The congressional hearings pleased IOC President Jacques Rogge and IOC delegate Richard Pound, the Montreal lawyer who heads the World Anti-Doping Agency. Presumably, Rogge and Pound had no problem with New York’s 2012 Olympic Bid once both houses of Congress decided last March that steroids was as big an issue as the Iraq war and the war on terrorism.
For the record, none of the five bills ever made it out of committee. In November, Selig and Fehr caved into relentless congressional pressure and devised an improved drug-testing and punishment policy. It remains unclear, though, if Congress ever had the authority to impose any kind of drug-testing laws on a private industry such as MLB.
If MLB’s reluctance to address steroids properly didn’t kill New York’s shot at the 2012 Olympics, the Jets’ failure to build a combination football facility/Olympic stadium on Manhattan’s West Side in the summer did. Jets owner Woody Johnson pledged $800 million of the $1.4 billion that was required to build the facility, but in June, Manhattan Assemblyman Sheldon Silver voted against state funding for the project, thereby killing the stadium idea and New York’s 2012 Summer Olympic chances.
By late fall, Johnson and the Jets rebounded by cutting a deal with Giants owner John Mara and the state of New Jersey to build a football stadium in the Meadowlands that will be owned by both football franchises.
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While Congress was sticking its nose into MLB’s collective bargaining agreement, Capitol Hill refrained from getting involved in the NHL lockout that began on September 15, 2004. In fact, the NHL lockout seem to play out in a vacuum, unlike the 1994-95 baseball strike that included Federal mediation, a visit to Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, and finally, a date with a federal district judge, who ordered the two sides to the bargaining table and effectively saved the 1995 season.
At the end of the 2003-04 NHL season, owners were claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in red ink, and Commissioner Gary Bettman painted a dire picture of a league fighting for survival. The owners, who over the past decade had squandered hundreds of millions of dollars in expansion fees from San Jose, Ottawa, Tampa Bay, Anaheim, Nashville, Columbus, Atlanta, and St. Paul, asked the players to protect the industry by not asking for more money. Most of the owners got a bump in finances when teams moved into new facilities and the league signed a new over-the-air TV deal from FOX, along with revenue from new technologies. But by 2004, the new money was being eaten up by players’ demands that were met by the owners. The NHL hit a financial wall and locked out the players.
In July, after a protracted war of words, the players gave up a year’s salary and accepted a league wide salary cap after vowing never to agree to a ceiling on salaries. They also gave up about a quarter of their 2005-06 salaries as part of the deal.
NHL players and owners became business partners as a result of July’s collective bargaining agreement. The NHL came out of the lockout in better shape than imagined, getting a new and better cable TV deal from Comcast Cable’s OLN channel and a huge deal from XM satellite radio. The league’s corporate partners returned and so did its paying customers in the stands.
The NHL lockout weighed heavily on the NBA Players Association, whose members watched the NHL owners – many of whom also own NBA franchises – play hardball. Consequently, NBA players took a guarantee of NBA revenues and signed a new deal with the owners before the old collective bargaining agreement expired.
But that doesn’t mean the lesson has permeated the entire American sports landscape. As 2005 draws to a close, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue is wrestling with two significant problems: What to do with the New Orleans Saints franchise, and how to get five owners – Dallas’s Jerry Jones, Washington’s Daniel Snyder, New England’s Robert Kraft, Houston’s Robert McNair, and Philadelphia’s Jeffrey Lurie – to share more of their local revenue with the other 27 owners. Without an owners revenue sharing deal, the NFL could lock out its players in 2008.
In baseball land, MLB’s Collective Bargaining Agreement is done in December 2006, and those negotiations may be tumultuous. Thanks to the success of the NHL in its own labor strife, more owners in every major sport will threaten to lock out players and move their franchises without new stadiums or arenas.
You won’t see any trophies handed out for labor agreements or congressional hearings, but the past year has left an indelible imprint on sports. The only constant has been the fans, who will always come out to the stadium because, in the end, they love their sports no matter what is thrown their way.