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The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/DarkPriestScorpius on 2024-05-30 16:28:22+00:00.
Original Title: In 1986, the Bucs used Sodium Pentothal on running back Joe McCall in order to get him to admit that he was faking his knee injury which would allow them to get rid of his contract. When that didn’t work, they placed hidden cameras in his hotel rooms and hired people to follow him.
This has always been one of the most fascinating and insane story I have ever read about the NFL.
It also let you know what the Hugh Culverhouse’s era was like for the Bucs.
“Joe McCall was drafted in the third round of the 1984 NFL Draft by the Los Angeles Raiders. However, a lingering knee injury would keep him mostly on the sidelines, and with the Raiders already stocked up at running back, they saw no point in keeping McCall on the roster and released him the following season. He was then claimed off waivers by the Indianapolis Colts, but the injury still kept him off the field and he was once again released.
McCall took an entire year off to rehabilitate his knee before giving it one last try with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Tampa knew what they were getting with McCall’s injury issues, but they hoped that he could stay healthy enough to contribute at least a little bit.
After grueling two-a-days and preseason, McCall’s knee wore down again and he was unable to play. The Buccaneers were now stuck with McCall on the roster. The NFL labor laws restricted a team from releasing an injured player. Tampa didn’t want to pay out his contract (which was only for about league minimum) or spend the money for his treatments.
So, the Buccaneers tried to find a loophole out of paying him. This loophole involved truth serum.
Their idea was to get McCall talking enough to say something that would help prove the fact that he was faking his injury. If they could prove that, they could release McCall and his contract with no penalty.
McCall was brought into the examination room thinking he was just going to be examined by team doctors, instead they gave him sodium pentothol, better known as truth serum. Sodium pentothal is good for getting people talking, but it is not necessarily truthful all the time. The doctors started asking McCall about his knee. ‘Where does it hurt? Does it hurt when I do this? What about that? When did you get hurt? How long have you been hurt?’
The Doctors tried to trip him up, but McCall wasn’t faking about the injury. “Once you push the sodium pentothal, you don’t feel anything,” McCall says. “But [the knee pain] was still that bad, that I still felt a little bit.”
After McCall told the Buccaneers everything they didn’t want to hear, they went and released him anyway. McCall’s feelings toward the situation are still a bit raw, saying “That is no way to treat a human being” and recalling the doctor who administered the treatment, Dr. Joseph Diaco.
McCall added that he had learned later that the Buccaneers had installed hidden cameras in his hotel room and hired people to follow him in an attempt to find out if he was faking his injury. That seems way too overboard, and way too expensive, to simply try to get a player who was making league minimum off the roster.”
“When McCall spoke to the Washington Post’s Bill Brubaker in 1993 about his treatment by the Bucs, his emotions were still raw. “That was no way to treat a human being,” he said. Today, he’s more inclined to laugh. Which is what he did when reminded of the name of the team’s longtime physician, Joseph Diaco. “That’s his name,” he says, guffawing like a guy being reminded of the class brownnoser. “That’s his name.”
“He was a real team doctor,” McCall says, with an attention to wordplay befitting a guy who taught high school English after retiring. “He didn’t care about the players whatsoever.”
Diaco, who was the Bucs’ chief physician from 1976 to 2012, declined a VICE Sports request for comment, but he told the Washington Post in 1993 that the sodium pentothal wasn’t his idea—rather, it was the brainchild of an orthopedist who was no longer with the team. Diaco merely watched. And it was just that one time.
Why all that for Joe McCall? Surely, McCall says, it wasn’t just him. “Why would you do that for one guy?” he asks. “Who had a contract worth peanuts?” McCall certainly wasn’t the only guy who ever got tailed. In the 1993 Post story, teams freely admitted hiring investigators to shadow players, a common tactic to check on workers’ comp claims. McCall said his union rep told him that the Bucs had even installed cameras in his hotel room. “I couldn’t believe this was a NFL team that was doing this,” McCall says. “They had people following us day and night,”—him and a lot of other walking pay stubs NFL teams would rather part with. But apparently his piddling contract was the only one a team was so desperate to get rid of that it would drive them to drugs.
“I don’t know about that,” McCall says.
Not that he thinks much about the whole affair anymore. He sued the Bucs to get the money he was owed while he worked as a teacher for the next seven years. He finally won a claim to $30,000 and some severance in 1992. Not long after, he became a fireman, which he’s still doing in his hometown of Miami.
In a drug-soaked environment where the ends almost always justified the means, is it really shocking that an NFL team doctor would shoot a player full of a substance that was used by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a top-secret mind control program? As McCall emphasized about Diaco, when a player enters a team’s training facility, he’s not dealing with his doctor but “their doctor.” There’s a difference. When McCall finally went to his own doctor back in 1986—make that his mom’s doctor; McCall was still on her insurance, because players back then weren’t paid like they are today—he was told in simple terms that he had an arthritic, degenerative condition in his knee.
Does it still hurt?
“Yes,” McCall says with a laugh. “I have [pain] right now. On certain days it swells up. If I go out dancing, it swells up…but you live with it.”
The weather in Miami is usually kind to the knee that kept McCall from the success he wanted in football. If his claim to fame is being the one player an NFL team interrogated under sodium pentothal, he’ll take it. But from what McCall knows of the league, he has a hard time believing that’s the truth.”