Pros and Cons (11 page)

For Sumrow, Morris’s arrest triggered vivid memories of another case with striking similarities. On January 30, 1972, Dallas Cowboys running back Duane Thomas was stopped along the same Route 30, within miles of where Morris was pulled over. Like Morris, Thomas was arrested for possession of marijuana right after playing in the Super Bowl.

“It happened right after the 1972 Super Bowl,” said Sumrow. “When he was booked into jail, he still had his Super Bowl bonus check in his property. He had never cashed it.”

On January 30, 1972, one week after Thomas graced the cover of
Sports Illustrated
following his ninety-five-yard rushing performance against the Miami Dolphins, Texas authorities pulled him over for driving a car matching the description of one reported stolen earlier that day.

Thomas’s car, it turned out, was a loaner from a Dallas dealership. But he was arrested after the patrolman noticed a strong odor of marijuana coming from the car window. A joint was found in the ashtray, along with a package of Zig Zag papers in the seat. “Probably less than an ounce,” Sumrow said. “He was charged with possession of marijuana. At that time,
any
quantity of marijuana was a felony in Texas.”

Facing two to ten years in the state penitentiary, Thomas pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana just twenty-one days after his arrest.

“He was placed on probation for five years and immediately traded by the Cowboys,” said Sumrow. “In those days, Tom Landry and Tex Schramm didn’t tolerate anyone who brought dishonor to the Dallas Cowboys.”

As a former police officer, Sumrow conceded that arrests of professional football players were rare in the early 1970s. He recalled how professional football players were often afforded preferential treatment in that era. Much like fellow police officers, players pulled over for routine violations such as speeding, or even drunk driving, were rarely issued citations.

Jay Ethington, Bam Morris’s Dallas-based criminal defense attorney, was a prosecutor in Dallas between 1972 and 1982. “In the old days, it was like a courtesy,” said Ethington. “Players would be pulled over for violations and let go when officers learned who they had stopped.”

When asked what would have happened had Roger Staubach been pulled over during his career, Ethington responded, “The cop would carry him on a silk pillow to his house. But now, if Michael Irvin gets pulled over for speeding, he gets two tickets. The suspicion of favoritism has pretty much swung the other way.”

While insisting that some police officers in the 1990s are unduly aggressive in trying to “make the case” against a famous athlete accused of a crime, Ethington admitted that ballplayers share responsibility for the change in the way the game is played. “It may be the fault of the players themselves,” he said. “They get out of hand. There have been a lot of tragedies among sports figures because of bad behavior and dangerous behavior—athletes getting drunk, driving fast and killing somebody or killing themselves. That has a cumulative effect. A cop who is just trying to do his job, after reading about three of those reports in the paper decides he better snatch some of these guys off the street rather than let them go down further and kill themselves or somebody else.”

M
orris’s agent, Steve Zucker, selected Ethington to represent Bam, a logical choice given Ethington’s extensive experience handling high-profile litigation, particularly cases involving Dallas-area athletes such as Cowboys players Rafael Septien, Tony Hill, Michael Irvin, and Jay Saldi. In addition to his exceptional skill and reputation in the Dallas legal community, Ethington became particularly seasoned in representing players with drug-related problems through his long-term representation of Dallas Mavericks forward Roy Tarpley. The NBA barred Tarpley from the game in 1991 for cocaine use. After being reinstated at the start of the 1994–95 season and signing a six-year, $26 million contract with the Mavericks, Tarpley was banned for life in December of 1995 after using alcohol in violation of his aftercare program.

In representing more than two dozen professional athletes (predominantly Cowboys) in his career, and handling over a thousand criminal and civil cases, Ethington said, in his opinion, players arrested for substance-abuse-related crimes are often the ones least equipped to handle fame, wealth, and the illicit temptations that come with them. Severely undereducated, in many instances these unsophisticated athletes lack the discipline necessary to avoid the people and places where drugs are found, he said.

Like Cowboy Duane Thomas and Dallas Maverick Roy Tarpley, Ethington insisted that Morris fit this category. Unable to achieve the minimum score required on the ACT for college admission, Morris spent six months with a tutor hired by Texas Tech just so he could qualify for admittance. “They need more guidance, more direction than the ordinary person,” Ethington explained. “These athletes are put on a pedestal in high school. They’re spoiled in that their emotional development is arrested. They are childlike. It is almost like dealing with a twelve-year-old rather than a twenty-year-old. They don’t have a mind of their own.”

Sumrow, who was sympathetic toward Morris, agreed that Morris fell into a category of NFL players who are sucked into illicit behavior by a system which engineers champions without regard to developing social and moral character. “I think Bam was in over his head,” Sumrow said in an exclusive interview. “He’s always had people to handle things for him, to make every move for him. In actuality, he’s immature. A kid in a man’s body.”

Morris was not the only NFL player in Texas facing drug charges after the 1996 Super Bowl. At the same time Ethington began preparing Bam’s defense, his law partner Kevin Clancy was retained by Michael Irvin. A Dallas County grand jury was charged with deciding whether to indict Irvin after police found him in a motel room with cocaine and other drug paraphernalia. One day while Morris was in Ethington’s office, Irvin telephoned in to talk to Clancy.

“Michael happened to call in,” Ethington recalled. “He was on the phone, so I said, ‘Hey Mike, I want you to talk to this guy Bam.’ They knew each other because Morris had scored a touchdown against them in the Super Bowl.”

Both facing felony drug charges and league suspensions, Ethington thought it would be particularly beneficial for Morris to speak with Irvin. “Both of them were in a jam,” said Ethington. “Both of them had the same position in the community and league. It was like a younger brother talking to a much older brother—Bam, of course, being the younger. It was like a fifteen-year-old talking to a thirty-year-old.”

Unlike Morris, Irvin was much more self-assured, astute, and extremely street-smart. The popular press largely underestimated Irvin’s intelligence when he arrogantly entered the Dallas County Courthouse wearing a mink coat and tinted sunglasses to answer cocaine charges in 1996.

“I told Michael, ‘Do not wear that mink coat to the grand jury. It’s not going to look good,’” said Ethington, exasperated by his and Clancy’s failed attempts to stop him. “He turned to me and said, ‘Jay, I have a different audience than you do.’”

At first, Ethington and Clancy failed to understand Irvin’s attitude. But through their intimate relationship with him, both soon came to understand Irvin’s actions. “There’s a whole segment of society out there who thought it was cool,” Ethington said. “Now, the authorities didn’t. But he didn’t have much concern about the authorities. He cared more about public perception. And his public is different than mine. I’m an old white guy. He’s a dandy. The guy knows what he’s doing. Most everything he does is calculated for the public perception.”

There is a consensus among prosecutors and defense attorneys familiar with Irvin’s case that the cause behind his run-ins with the law is starkly different from that of players like Morris. Irvin represents a second category of NFL players who are cognizant of their power and know how to exploit it to their advantage. Players of this type who violate the law often share a brazen disrespect for authority and distrust of the justice system.

“Irvin wasn’t wearing that mink coat because it just happened to be lying by the door when he left his house,” said Ethington. “He wanted to project a certain image when he went to the courthouse. That image was, ‘You’re not going to put me on my knees.’”

S
hortly after arresting Morris, Agent Spears took the seized drugs to the state crime lab in Austin for fingerprint analysis. A laser was used to examine the plastic wrapping around the marijuana. Through his attorney, Morris was maintaining that the drugs were not his.

In addition to turning up Morris’s fingerprints on the outside of the Saran-wrapped bales, the lab found five positive matches of Morris’s fingerprints on the inside layer of Saran wrap. “The marijuana had been opened, unwrapped, the dryer sheets placed next to the marijuana, and then rewrapped,” said Sumrow. “Morris wrapped the marijuana. He’s the one who put the fabric sheets in it and wrapped it because his fingerprints are not only on the outside of the containers, they’re on the inside.”

Reynolds’s fingerprints, meanwhile, were not found on any of the plastic wrappings. Morris, authorities were convinced, was solely responsible for packing the drugs.

There was more. On the day Morris was booked into the Rock-wall County jail, he asked Agent Spears, “Is marijuana all you found?” Spears, then, was not surprised when officers who were inventorying the contents of Morris’s car four days later discovered a small rock of cocaine hidden underneath an ashtray located in the console between the bucket seats.

Although possession of less than one gram of cocaine is a state jail felony in Texas, Sumrow decided not to add a cocaine possession charge to the indictment. “The cocaine wasn’t discovered until after the car was in police custody for four days,” explained Sumrow. “Besides, the marijuana charge is treated as a more serious offense in Texas due to the amount he had.”

On July 11, 1996, after a series of testy negotiation sessions between Sumrow and Ethington, Morris pleaded guilty to a felony—possession of five pounds of marijuana. Teachers and residents of Morris’s hometown came to offer character testimony in his behalf at his sentencing hearing. “What they’re seeing in him is what Bam Morris was in Cooper,” said Sumrow. “What they don’t understand is that in the NFL, when you’re put up on that shelf, there are all those things—the drugs, the sex, and the things that go along with it—that change people. It’s sad. They want to remember him as the Bam Morris that grew up in our community. Not what Bam Morris has let himself become.” A potential ten-year prison sentence was suspended in favor of probation. It was made clear to Morris that violation of his probation could land him immediately in jail.

Morris received no jail time, but was not as fortunate with the Steelers. His felon status cost him his job in Pittsburgh. “We have always felt that to win you have to have good people, people that related to the moral judgment and proper conduct,” said Steelers team owner Dan Rooney. “In any season there is adversity. And people with character are going to stay the course. They’re going to be there when things are tough.”

Rooney’s approach reflects a throwback to a previous era when NFL teams showed less tolerance for crime. While most teams have come to accept the use of convicted criminals in the pursuit of victory, Rooney has tried to honor the values established by his father, longtime Steelers owner Art Rooney.

“My father was a hands-on person,” said Rooney. “If there was a problem [with a player’s off-field conduct], he would get into it. He would come and discuss it and look at it.” Rooney said that his father rarely got rid of any players for off-the-field issues, instead opting to help them in any way he could.

Admitting that his father took a Father Flanagan approach with some of his players, Rooney estimated that in over 90 percent of the cases where he took a troubled player, he helped correct the player’s problem through discipline and hard work. “He was a fella that gave people a chance,” Rooney reminisced of his father with a chuckle. “He always believed in the good in everybody.”

But Rooney Sr.’s fatherly approach was during the 1960s and 1970s when fewer NFL players were arrested and convicted of crimes. And the Steelers, while capturing four Super Bowl titles, were led by respected veterans who exhibited the character Rooney cherished and who policed themselves. “We had players on the Pittsburgh Steelers,” Rooney recalled, “who said, ‘If you catch a guy, throw him out forever. First offense—throw him out!’ Andy Russell, Jack Lambert—I know they felt that way. I know that Joe Greene felt that way. Mark Malone felt that way.”

Amidst a climate of inflated salaries, free agency, and increasing off-field problems, top players no longer want any part in policing teammates. Rooney sees little place for Father Flanagan types in the 1990s version of the NFL. “I don’t go as far as my father did,” said Rooney. “He believed he could do it with anybody. I think that there are some who you are better off not having.”

From the moment Morris was arrested, Rooney was actively involved in the case. “I talked to him after he was arrested,” said Rooney. “There were others in the organization who talked to him also.” Head coach Bill Cowher made clear to Morris back in June that he was not welcome at the team’s minicamp due to his pending case. And once he was convicted, the Steelers released him.

“We don’t want to run away from a guy who’s in trouble,” insisted Rooney. “And we didn’t run away from him. But we felt because of [his conviction] and other things that occurred prior to that, he was someone who we were better off not pursuing. It wasn’t just that incident.”

Although Morris had no criminal record reflecting drug use, there was no shortage of intelligence linking him to drugs. The Drug Task Force, in the course of their criminal investigation of Morris, received intelligence from the Drug Enforcement Agency in downtown Dallas that Morris had a reputation as a regular marijuana user. In a report filed with the DEA and subsequently turned over to the Rockwall County prosecutor’s office, a Dallas woman claimed that Morris had been a marijuana supplier.