A well-known professional athlete dying — accidentally killing himself is a better way of putting it — with a lethal dose of what our cynical society euphemistically likes to call “recreational drugs” isn’t, unfortunately, anything new. We’ve seen it before. Next week or next month, we’ll see it again. Though dead is, I guess, dead, the news that former Cowboy and All-Pro lineman Mark Tuinei died from mainlining heroin mixed with Ecstasy while on his way to a team party — with a current Cowboy player — packed the rare ingredient of shock. Heroin — not smoked or snorted, which seems a little less base to me, but with a needle. Tuinei, friendly media reports to the contrary, was likely not a novice to this “recreation drug.”
It strikes me that football is a sport singularly susceptible, for various complex, conflicting, and complementary reasons, to rampant drug use. Baseball and basketball, for example, are grueling games with long seasons that tear both physically and psychologically at the players. The athletes routinely suffer a multitude of painful, occasionally career-ending injuries. But even so, most of the injuries here are relatively benign: muscle tears, pulls, maybe broken fingers. Major body destruction, often caused intentionally by freakishly strong men trying their best to inflict the maximum amount of pain and injury possible, is all but unheard of.
Even in hockey, a game predicated on violence and high-speed collisions, the athletes don’t suffer anything remotely resembling the carnage considered normal for a football team. Want proof? Athletes in these sports play often — every other day not being unusual. Players don’t need a week to heal from injuries, and don’t have a week to get swacked out on painkilling drugs so they can play on Sunday. There’s a very good reason football is played only once a week. Even at that pace, almost all players are constantly “nicked up” to a degree incomprehensible to us mortals.
So there’s the ever-escalating, body-crushing violence inherent in the game, mixed in with the excessively macho attitudes of the hyper-aggressive participants, compounded by the small number of games. In basketball, the pressure on an athlete to “play hurt” in any single regular season game is nonexistent; it’s a long season. With only a 16-game season, every game is important to a football team. Two early losses can easily make the difference between the playoffs and going home. So the pressure to play — internal and external — is insanely high. Pills and shots are encouraged, if not overtly, then with lots of eye winking, as a way of football life — the way of the warrior. But the toxic concoction is still not complete. To all this, add the “die young and leave a pretty corpse” attitude of the invincible, 25-year-old, pampered and spoiled gladiator.
And then there’s the psychological price that must be paid when it’s all over. It’s been said athletes must all die twice: once, and for many most painfully, when their careers and first lives end at depressingly young ages. An “old” football player isn’t even middle-aged. What can a Jordan or a Tuinei possibly do for the rest of their lives that will come close to what’s already happened? Deep depression must be common among ex-jocks trying to adapt to the world after sports. Perhaps with Tuinei, an almost suicidal disregard for his life was present in that lonely car. When the game finally ends, many less dramatic personal tragedies, with devastating consequences for families and loved ones, are common.
Some books have addressed the subject of football and drugs: most of them, like ex-player Tim Green’s The Dark Side of the Game, are feeble whitewashes of the sick underbelly of pro football. When something more honest is printed, like Rob Huizenga’s You’re Okay, It’s Just a Bruise — an inside look at the drug culture within the 1983-90 Oakland Raiders — it’s roundly panned by the always disingenuous NFL public relations machine as fabrication and nonsense. Easily the finest piece of literature depicting the drug/party culture of the NFL is Pete Gent’s classic, North Dallas Forty. The former Dallas Cowboy wrote a novel firmly planted in his football career — and it was, of course, ridiculed as wild fiction by the NFL establishment.
This death, involving the never-spoken H word, hit me in the face with a grim reality. Mark Tuinei, about to start dull life number two as a high school coach in Hawaii, was by all accounts a friendly, popular-with-everybody athlete, untouched by all the nasty baggage so rampant in Dallas. Yet there he was, wiring up heroin, mixing it with X, in the obviously obliging presence of a current player, on the way to a player party.
The pernicious recreational drug culture within our favorite sport must be far, far more pervasive than any of us wants to imagine. Sadly for all, the league views this as a PR problem, paying lame lip service to a “problem” it’s loath to recognize. In truth, the league and drugs are deeply, tightly intertwined. Without so many players willing to “do whatever it takes” to play, the NFL would grind to a halt. To think its warriors will say no when the game finally ends is cynical hypocrisy to the nth degree.
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This article appears in May 21 • 1999 and May 21 • 1999 (Cover).