Fins’ ‘King of Pain’ deserves a little relief
Dan Johnson was surprised to hear that hundreds of former players are suing the NFL for turning them into painkiller freaks. Surprised because he could be Exhibit A.
“Nobody did more than I did,” he said of the injections.
Johnson played tight end for the Miami Dolphins from 1982-88. Those years can be summed up by Johnson’s nickname: King of Pain. He was a major player in a massive game of NFL Make Believe. Broken bodies would recover overnight, and everybody from players to coaches to team doctors could pretend that was normal.
The charade was great until all those tears and fractures and internal organs stopped playing along. Then the bill comes due and you find yourself all but bedridden in a small Minnesota town.
“When you first quit football, yeah, it’s worth it,” Johnson said. And now? Johnson lives in St. Michael, Minn. His days are mostly spent on his back, since it’s too painful to sit up.
The question is how much pain was caused by the NFL, team doctors, coaches — and the players themselves.
Now that the game is up, they are the only ones who can’t pretend it never happened.
“The less you can do,” Johnson said, “the more it sucks.”
He is 55 going on 103. Johnson wasn’t initially aware of the lawsuit filed May 22, but he said he might join with hundreds of plaintiffs.
They claim NFL team doctors were more like pushers, dispensing painnumbing drugs with no regard to the long-term damage they would do.
The suit also claims coaches like Mike Holmgren, Howard Schnellenberger and Mike Tice threatened players with demotion if they didn’t drug up. The headline-grabber is the NFL’s all-time winningest coach.
“He’s St. Shula,” said Roxanna Collins, Johnson’s ex-wife.
Unlike many in South Florida, she doesn’t exactly consider Don Shula a deity.
“Dan was like a piece of meat to him,” she said.
Shula’s attorney Robert Zarco said his 85-year-old client never told Johnson or anyone else to take painkillers.
“We find the assertions against coach Shula to be ridiculous, outrageous and completely baseless,” Zarco said.
Johnson backs that up, to a point.
“He never made threats,” Johnson said. “If anybody says that, it’s not true.”
So why would he join the lawsuit?
There may have been no direct threats from Shula, Johnson said, but they weren’t needed to get the message across.
“It was kind of a fear,” he said.
So they played their roles in the game of Make Believe.
Johnson’s first miraculous recovery came in his rookie year. He sprained his ankle in the first half against the Rams and hobbled to the bench. His father and brother looked from the stands in fear.
When Miami emerged from the locker room for the second half, Johnson bounded onto the field like a deer.
You didn’t have to watch “CSI: Miami” to know what happened.
“He shot up,” his brother said.
As a relative nobody from Iowa State, Johnson felt he had no choice. The seventhround pick quickly became one of Dan Marino’s favorite red-zone targets, catching 16 touchdown passes in his career.
Teammates endearingly called him “Bomber.” He played despite broken ribs almost the entire 1984 season. The keys were grit, a flak jacket and a steady supply of Xylocaine.
Johnson’s enduring memory wasn’t catching a TD pass in Super Bowl XIX. It came earlier that year in the locker room.
He said Dr. Charles Virgin, the team physician, tried to inject him as newlyacquired fullback Pete Johnson waited his turn for a syringe. The needle went deep into his ribcage and snapped off as Virgin tried to remove it.
“[Bleep] this!” Pete Johnson said.
On it went, through muscle pulls, shin splints, a chronically stiff neck, a broken foot and a broken toe that was so black-and-blue the King of Pain could not take the agony of one more shot.
Johnson usually shot up before games, at halftime and sometimes on the sideline. The worst part came after the game when the medication wore off. “It was brutal,” he said. The NFL would argue that nobody forced Johnson to become a human pin cushion. The league got a similar lawsuit thrown out last year, when the judge ruled the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and the NFL Players Association should resolve the claims.
This second lawsuit comes less than a year after the league was ordered to pay $765 million for concussion-related claims by thousands of former players.
As with that lawsuit, no coach should be singled out as a super villain. Sports medicine wasn’t nearly as evolved 30 years ago, and playing hurt was far more part of the football culture.
Like every coach, Shula simply went by what the doctors told him.
“I’m certain that no player played under coach Shula’s watch without being first evaluated by the medical staff and having been given clearance,” Zarco said.
The problem was the doctors worked for the team. Everybody’s goal was to put the best product on the field, even if it got there in narcotic haze.
With concussions, NFL teams could at least plead ignorance. There were no CT scans to show how repetitive blows were turning brains to mush.
A broken bone, however, has pretty much been recognized as a broken bone since Hippocrates first set up shop. The prescribed treatment has never been to run on it.
When it came to warning players of long-term damage, the Hippocratic Oath was replaced by silence.
“They told you absolutely nothing,” Johnson said.
Rob Huizenga was Oakland’s team doctor and wrote this in his book “You’re Okay, It’s Just a Bruise”:
“I thought I could be a team doctor and risk the potential game-day pressures and conflict of interest. I took away the candy jar (of painkillers), explained risks, encouraged second opinions, talked openly about steroids, speed and growth hormone, discouraged numbing shots, and preached priorities. I thought I could medically treat the Raiders players like my other private patients and still please management. “I was wrong.” Stories abound about jars full of pills for players to take as they pleased, of diagnosis that were fudged to keep players in the dark. On plane rides home after games, trainers would go down the aisle handing out pain medication that was washed down with beer.
Again, the NFL would argue that players weren’t idiots. They knew continually injecting Novocain into a torn triceps might ruin their golf swing in retirement.
They knew, but there were more immediate concerns.
“I had to keep my starting job,” Johnson said.
He said the closest he got to a direct order from Shula came in 1987. Johnson was struggling after breaking a bone in his foot.
He was on crutches the day before a game. Shula asked him if it was time for the Dolphins to bring in another tight end.
“No,” Johnson said, “I’m playing.”
He did, and Shula never asked how.
He didn’t have to. Coaches knew they were dealing with men who were often too competitive or paranoid or foolish to simply say “Bleep this!” It added up to a grand exercise in willful ignorance by everyone.
Johnson played that game until he blew out two discs in his back and needed a spinal fusion. That was hardly the end of the story.
Years of abuse had built a dangerous tolerance to pain medication. The more he took, the more he needed.
“I was taking 50 to 100 Percocets a day,” he said. “There were never enough.”
He got them off the black market and the Internet. He’d send his teenage daughters out to find them on the street.
“It destroyed our family and our marriage,” Collins said. “There’s definitely an effect on the player, but there’s a trickle-down effect on the family and nobody cares. Nobody cares.”
Johnson says he’s kicked his addiction to painkillers. Compared to those dark days, life isn’t that bad.
He got engaged last Christmas and lives with his fiancé, Sarah, and her daughter, Stevie, and a new golden retriever puppy.
Some mornings he feels good enough to go to the gym. All he can lift is 15-pound weights, but that helps keep his body func- tioning. Then he goes home, plops down stays there.
The King of Pain’s throne is a king-sized bed.
“It’s best for me just to lay down and be still,” Johnson said.
He has plenty of time to ponder the biggest question of all. Was it worth it? “I’ve been asked that for 20 years,” he said. “It’s changed over time.”
At first, you bet. He was a strapping 6-foot-5 kid happily caught up in a game of Make Believe. And now? “[Bleep] no,” Johnson said.
The game is up and the lawsuits have arrived. But do we really need a jury to render a verdict?
The truth is everybody was guilty.
The travesty is that only the players are paying the price.