Football clubs are finally talking tough about illicit-drug use by players. But with results and reputations to protect, critics argue that the only scoring they really care about is on the field. By Julie-Anne Davies.
“Seventy-five percent [of AFL footballers] have done some sort of recreational drug ... You’d have to have your head in the sand to think that it doesn’t exist.” — DALE LEWIS, Sydney Swans player, March 2002
It had been a big night. So big, in fact, that by the time Laurence Angwin (pictured left) and his team-mate Karl Norman sauntered onto Kerford Road beach for a training session with AFL side Carlton one morning in April last year, neither had slept. High on ecstasy, sleep was the last thing on their minds. Along with the ability to make sound decisions.
The two young players had partied for much of the night with team-mates in a Melbourne bar. There was much to celebrate. Their side had just scored a surprising victory. They were young men in a city that fetes and coddles its footballers like rock stars. And both, including Angwin, a player attempting to overcome a troubled past, were on the cusp of careers that could set them up financially for the rest of their lives.
“In hindsight it wasn’t such a smart move to go to training but we didn’t think not to,” says Angwin. “We were too switched on, we were still buzzing.”
The image of Australia’s professional football codes has been significantly hurt in recent years by a succession of sex and drug scandals. A combination of rocketing salaries, ego and a culture that pampers and protects its stars has seen football organisations around the country struggle to cope with heightened public expectations of behaviour, along with meeting their own self-proclaimed standards as providers of role models.
Only last weekend former Manly and Brumbies player Andrew Walker spoke candidly about his problems with alcohol and cocaine that led to his demise from a lucrative career in league and union. In Angwin’s case, what followed that decision to attend training became an unedifying spectacle for the club and a code that insists illicit drug use among its players is only “an emerging issue”. Having witnessed the condition of the pair, club officials ordered private drug tests. Once the results were known, the “easily led” Norman was suspended for a match and fined $5000.
But Angwin had already exhausted the patience of the club after being convicted the year before for theft. “In releasing Laurence Angwin from his contract, we will continue to work with him and endeavour to find him meaningful employment and assimilate him back into the community,” said Carlton president Ian Collins at the time. “It will be an ongoing process that we will have with Laurence.”
Some process. Angwin now says he was cut adrift by the system without any drug counselling or assistance to help him rebuild his life.
It has taken Angwin more than a year to agree speak about his case. Immediately after the scandal broke several media organisations approached him, some prepared to pay. “But I had no answers and I knew I would have looked like a fool.” His past, he knew, would prejudice anything he said. His previous misdemeanours included a drink-driving charge and involvement in a car accident. But it was his pleading guilty to four charges of burglary and theft that cemented his troubled reputation. Bizarrely, one of the robberies involved the home of his co-accused team-mate, Karl Norman. Angwin told police he stole DVDs, a TV and DVD player because he needed the money. “I would have broken down in tears on national television and that would have been even worse.”
First, he decided he had to rebuild his life before the way he lived it consumed him. He is now playing for Broadford in Victoria’s Heathcote and District Football league, a long fall for a man who at 18 had been targeted by the Adelaide Crows as their number-one draft selection. Angwin is no lagger; if he was, he might not be playing footy in the bush. And he says he doesn’t want to come across as a whinger; there are so many reminders of his own stupidity, including from current team-mates. “They can’t believe I was offered a chance at the big time and blew it in such spectacular fashion.”
And, Angwin says, he does not want to sound as if he is complaining. Yet he can’t help but note that if he’d been caught this season instead of last season, he would in all likelihood still be playing AFL. Under the AFL’s new illicit-drug code introduced this year, he could never have been privately tested by Carlton. He may have been targeted by the AFL for Australian Sports Drug Agency testing. But if he had returned a positive test, it would have been kept confidential, even from the club. He would then have received counselling. None of that happened. Instead Angwin says he was simply shut out.
“They needed to make an example of me and I deserved it, I guess, because I stuffed up, but it is hard, realising that today I would have been helped,” Angwin says.
What he has to say about his experience in the big time should be required reading for every new draft pick. Angwin says he was first offered drugs by another Carlton player two months after joining the club. “There were two guys there, both players who could get you whatever you wanted.”
He claims that drug use is common in the AFL, saying he could name plenty of players who “used drugs, usually ecstasy, every two weeks or so”.
“And it wasn’t just Carlton where this was happening, it was just commonplace especially amongst the younger blokes because it only cost you $25-$40, you didn’t put on weight and you didn’t feel sick at training.”
Angwin claims that the night he was out partying before being pinged at training, he and Norman were not alone. “We were with three other Carlton players, higher profile players than us, who were also doing it but they weren’t tested and we didn’t dob them in. No one at Carlton asked us if other players were involved because, I guess, they didn’t want to hear the answer.”
According to Carlton CEO Michael Malouf, the club investigated the claims fully and found no evidence other players were involved. “You have to understand Angwin was denying he had even taken drugs until the results proved otherwise,” Malouf says.
He also says that in a deal worked out without the club, Angwin agreed to undergo counselling, “but my understanding is that, for whatever reasons, Laurence did not take up the opportunity.”
Malouf says if a similar incident occurred the result would be the same. “If a player is under the influence of drugs in his workplace, it is a dangerous situation and one we would not put up with.”
AVOIDING DETECTION
Do our football codes have an illicit-drug problem? In a sport that zealously guards its image and markets itself to families and women, the AFL says its statistics show that its players use drugs less often than the rest of the their demographic group – young men aged 20 to 29. According to the National Drug Strategy Household Survey released this year, 24% of men in this group admitted using amphetamines, 25% said they had used ecstasy and 57% cannabis. The National Rugby League says cannabis is not an issue among its players.
All the same, the AFL has introduced its own drug code this season, in part because of the fallout from the Angwin case. The AFL’s Football Operations Manager, Adrian Anderson, says: “Recreational drug use is a potential problem. The statistics we have collected for the past two seasons show it is an emerging issue. The numbers of positive tests increased slightly last year.”
But as drug experts like Paul Dillon from the National Alcohol and Drug research Centre explain, testing doesn’t necessarily prove anything except how adept athletes can be at avoiding detection. “Testing is about how many they catch, not about how many are actually doing drugs,” he says. “I think these professional sporting bodies do get there is a problem but for obvious reasons want to downplay its significance in their particular patch.”
Even so, it still comes as a surprise when Angwin says he never once in the four years he was contracted to AFL clubs considered he might get caught taking drugs. “It never occurred to me and I know it never occurred to anyone else either,” he says. “You have to remember there was no penalty until this year if you were caught, unless it was on match day and none of us were silly enough to take drugs the night before a game. We all understood the risks about steroids but not recreational drugs. It was just something you did to relax and celebrate.”
Angwin also points out that he was only drug tested once by ASDA in four years, when he was first drafted. And he repeats something that the AFL has heard before: players are savvy about masking recreational drugs, using liver-flushing supplements from health-food shops and chemists.
By the time his career ended a year ago, Angwin says, he was taking ecstasy and sometimes cocaine every weekend after matches. “I just thought I was having fun and doing what everyone else was doing.”
LOOMING SHOWDOWN
Drugs in sport have become a political issue. A showdown is looming between the federal government and the AFL, NRL and Cricket Australia over their failure to comply with the World Anti-Doping Association code. The government is insisting that all professional sports that receive federal funding must comply with the association’s code by June 30. So far 68 organisations, including all the Olympic bodies, have signed. The AFL, NRL and Cricket Australia remain defiant.
The WADA prohibited list is a thick document. It includes drugs such as glucocortico steroids, which are powerful anti-inflammatories used to treat arthritis, asthma, joint inflammation and allergic reactions. They are common in football and cricket.
It is understood the Australian Sports Commission is sympathetic to the three codes on this issue and has been arguing for changes to the list. WADA met Australian government officials in Switzerland last weekend to discuss compliance.
Further, the AFL and Cricket Australia are very unhappy with the tough WADA penalties for athletes who test positive to cannabis. Cannabis is not prohibited under Cricket Australia’s anti-doping code and its players are not tested for it.
But federal sports minister Rod Kemp will not blink on this. With an eye to Australia’s anti-drugs reputation, he has warned the three codes that they will lose all federal funding if they fail to sign. “Why should a high-profile Aussie rules player be subject to different sanctions to Ian Thorpe or Lleyton Hewitt?” Kemp told The Bulletin.
The timing couldn’t be worse for the AFL. This season it became the first professional sporting body in the world to introduce a separate drugs code. For all but eight weeks of the year Australian Sports Drug Agency officials can turn up at training, club functions or players’ homes and ask for a urine sample. Olympic athletes don’t face this – they are tested year-round for performance-enhancing drugs, as are NRL and AFL players, but are left alone out of competition.
The new policy is significant because players are now being tested for recreational drugs like cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy out of competition. It is also controversial because of its perceived soft line on illegal drugs – especially cannabis. Players can test positive twice before facing any penalty and clubs are not told until a third breach is detected.
The AFL is treating marijuana more leniently than other drugs. (The NRL imposes no penalty for positive cannabis tests.) Players who test positive will only have to serve a maximum six-week suspension compared with a possible 12 weeks for other positive results.
Dr Harry Unglik, the AFL’s chief medical officer, says this is because the league accepts that the dangers posed by its use are less severe than substances like cocaine and ecstasy. “Marijuana is a drug that has real medical problems but by comparison with ecstasy or cocaine, these are not as severe. There are reported sudden deaths associated with those two drugs and that’s not so with marijuana,” Unglik says. Olympic athletes testing positive for cannabis face a two-year ban, although they can argue they weren’t taking it to improve their performance.
“We’ve taken a very, very realistic attitude. Instead of being punitive we are looking at it from a player welfare perspective,” says Adrian Anderson. “I think we deserve a pat on the back, we’re tackling the issue and let’s face it, most sporting codes don’t at all.” Three AFL executives have been tested this season by ASDA for illicit drugs after AFL boss Andrew Demetriou agreed to the players’ union request that administrators also comply.
Clubs and coaches are sceptical about aspects of policy, especially the confidentiality clause, but as Melbourne coach and president of AFL Coaches Association, Neal Danaher says: “They [AFL] don’t trust us. We’ll see how it goes and if there are too many positives coming back then we’ll tell them it’s not working.”
Collingwood president Eddie McGuire says the policy is already redundant. “In Victoria we now have police testing drivers for drugs and so if a player gets done for drugs by the police, then it doesn’t matter what the AFL says about confidentiality and drug education and counselling, the story will blow sky high.”
What concerns McGuire – who believes it is wrong to keep the first and second positive tests from clubs – is the phone call he and other club presidents will get from sponsors if the worst happens. “If the TAC [a road safety organisation and sponsor] rings me and demands to know why the club didn’t know about a certain player’s drug problem and it emerges the player has been done once or twice, well they’ll tear up our contract. It’s a joke.”
The NRL says there’s nothing so special about what the AFL is doing. They say they’ve been testing in and out of competition for years. But there are differences. In the NRL, a first offence attracts a minimum three-month ban. AFL clubs are not allowed to test their players whereas NRL clubs routinely do. But the dual system also leaves the NRL open to the accusation that a two-tiered, inconsistent system is operating in the competition.
Bulldogs player Willie Mason tested positive to an illicit drug midway through the 2003 season and was fined $25,000 by the club. He went on to play for NSW and the Kangaroos. Had the NRL picked up the test through their ASDA regime, Mason would have faced a minimum 12-week suspension and been ineligible to play state of origin.
Talks are underway to get the clubs to agree to uniform standards and penalties but the NRL concedes it will take some doing. “Unless we get a common policy across all clubs, it may be possible that clubs won’t treat everyone equally. A top player may get a lesser penalty than a fringe player,” says the NRL’s chief medical officer, Dr Hugh Hazard. “The vast majority of out-of-competition testing is half-screen tests which don’t detect these recreational drugs in any case.
“In an ideal world we would have a list that includes only drugs that are performance enhancing. If players are using stimulants like cocaine and ecstasy out of competition, one options is to nail them to a wall for two years or help them. I know what I prefer. But if they are caught in competition they have no excuses – they get two years.”
It’s of little comfort to Laurence Angwin to know that his experience is now cited as exhibit A by the AFL and the players’ union on how not to run a drugs policy. Brendan Gale, a former Richmond star, admits the Angwin episode was “at the forefront of our minds” when the union was negotiating with the AFL over the drugs code. “The fallout from his case was disastrous for the league and irredeemable for Angwin,” Gale says.
Angwin, however, believes things are starting to look up. His father, Brendan, played more than 200 games for the Glen Huntly amateurs wearing number nine. When his son joined Broadford and began rebuilding his life, his new club presented him with a number-nine jumper. Angwin is happy to take any omen that comes his way.
Testing times
Shame and disgrace
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