US lawmakers say NBA's steroid-testing policy highly ineffective

With Congress poised to move forward on legislation to standardize steroid testing in professional sports, lawmakers at a House committee hearing Thursday lashed out at the National Basketball Association's steroid-testing policy, calling the league's program the weakest of the four major professional sports leagues.

In their second straight day on Capitol Hill, NBA Commissioner David Stern and Billy Hunter, the executive director of the NBA players union, appeared before the House Committee on government Reform.

On Wednesday, in testimony before the consumer protection subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Stern told the panel that during recent negotiations with the players union, he had proposed tougher sanctions for players who test positive for steroids.

But lawmakers heaped scorn on the NBA's testing program, calling it inadequate and a joke.

"It is, in my opinion, rather pathetic," said Representative Stephen F. Lynch, D-Massachusets.

The most heated exchange occurred after Lynch suggested that last November's melee in a game between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers might have been fueled by players who were hyper-aggressive because they had used steroids.

"You don't know -- you don't test the players," Lynch said of the NBA's failure to test those involved in the brawl.

Hunter called Lynch's assertion "a quantum leap," but Stern told Lynch that just because the league did not know for sure if the players involved in the brawl had used steroids, that did not mean that they were guilty of taking them.

"And the reality is," Stern added, "it worries me greatly if the absence of testing for anybody -- including the members of Congress -- would somehow be used to say, `Well, if you don't have it, that's proof that it must exist,' and then referring to a policy as pathetic.

"On behalf of the players of the National Basketball Association, I would like to say that the guilt you seek to attribute to them on the basis of this policy is ill-taken and very unfair."

Stern and Hunter said that while the testing program would be addressed in negotiations for a new collective-bargaining agreement -- the current one expires June 30 -- Stern also said Thursday that he had lost confidence that an agreement could be reached anytime soon, after talks broke down Wednesday.

Stern said that he had thought the sides were close to an agreement last month, but he described his mood Thursday as "despairing."

The legislation being proposed in Congress reflects intense interest in drug-testing policies in professional sports since lawmakers first heard testimony from baseball officials two months ago.

On Thursday, Representative Tom Davis, R-Virginia, and the government reform committee's chairman, said that a bill he was co-sponsoring with Representative Henry A. Waxman, D-California, and Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, would be ready for introduction next week.

That measure would join proposals like the one co-sponsored by Representative Cliff Stearns, R-Florida, and another introduced Thursday by Representative Tom Sweeney, R-New York.

At the same time Stern appeared before the committee, the commissioner of the NFL, Paul Tagliabue, appeared before the consumer protection subcommittee and urged its members, including Stearns, the chairman, to reconsider proposed provisions that would uniformly punish athletes who test positive. In particular, Tagliabuecalled a two-year ban for first-time offenders too harsh.