A recent issue of the glorious Emerald insert, Sports Illustrated On Campus, listed the best jobs in college sports. More interesting was a story the next week on the worst jobs in college sports, like “hockey team manager” and “assistant video coordinator.”

But that second list ignored “Washington Athletics Director.”
As the Ducks ready to play the Huskies this weekend, turmoil is raging like the Great Seattle Fire on the banks of Lake Union. After the Rick Neuheisel betting scandal last spring, Washington Athletics Director Barbara Hedges is in trouble again because of Dr. William Scheyer, a 75-year-old consulting physician with the Huskies who has been distributing banned prescription drugs to Washington athletes for almost 20 years.
This goes far deeper than a ha-ha, Huck-you-Fuskies, Northwest rivalry story. This is a cautionary tale for all athletics departments that get too fat for their football uniforms. It’s a scary, real example of what can happen when you take out one block from the Jenga tower that is a big-time athletics department. Once one block falls, the rest of the structure comes down with it.
In early October, Washington fired Scheyer, and on Oct. 17, the Washington state medical board revoked Scheyer’s medical license for issuing thousands of pills to Huskies athletes during a 17-year period. Scheyer circumvented Washington procedures by opening his own accounts at local pharmacies and paying for the drugs himself.
Scheyer distributed the pills on team planes or after athletic events. Why? We may never know. Maybe because he wanted to be liked, maybe because he really thought he was helping athletes.
The drugs included stimulants like Ritalin, topical steroids and painkillers like Vicodin and Endocet. All are illegal in the eyes of the NCAA, which has demanded that the Washington athletics department take action in this case. The Huskies are currently conducting an internal investigation.
The real issue is how Scheyer pulled a ski cap over the eyes of the athletics department for so long. What he did was one step short of ramming steroid-packed needles into players, but he survived for almost two decades. He wasn’t on the Washington sports medicine staff and ran his own, legitimate practice. He consulted mostly with the non-revenue sports and was head physician for the softball team.
Those are excuses, and they’re as weak as light beer. The Huskies have no concrete drug-testing procedure, which would have found traces of the drugs in athletes. The athletics department never knew about “UW” accounts at local pharmacies. Hedges, who suspected Scheyer enough to demote him from softball “head physician” to “volunteer physician” in 2001, never really delved into complaints made about Scheyer by other sports-medicine staffers.
The system of checks and balances at Washington checked nothing and balanced only Scheyer’s checkbook. He slipped through the cracks like water on a Seattle pier.
For years, Washington has been a model for other athletics departments. The Huskies always had a strong blueprint for how to build a football team, a strong women’s soccer team or a lightning-fast crew team.
Now, the Washington athletics department gives others, like Oregon, an anti-blueprint of how not to run this Pacific-10 Conference show. The Oregon athletics department needs to study the Scheyer case like a chemistry student studies a textbook.
This is the most important memo: Don’t let this happen here. Seal the cracks, if they exist. The Washington athletics department is going down like the RMS Lusitania, and I don’t want the Oregon athletics department to be the Titanic.
It’s a double-edged sword sharper than anything in “Kill Bill: Volume 1.” We’ve asked to be linked with the image of the athletics department because it’s a sleek, Nike-designed image. But if anything happens to that image, our school is tarnished along with our athletics program.
Because for Hedges, the Washington athletics department and the University of Washington itself, no amount of Vicodin can ease the pain of the last year.