The Nightmare Season

Published in 1976, The Nightmare Season is an autobiography of the 1973 San Diego Chargers season told from the perspective of Dr. Arnold J. Mandell, a psychiatrist, co chairman at the University of California at San Diego Medical School and a prominent researcher in brain chemistry and psychopharmacology.

Prior to the ‘73 season, Mandell was hired by Chargers owner Gene Klein as a team psychiatrist and was assigned to figure out why the Chargers, who had endured five consecutive losing seasons, did not consistently perform to the level they knew they were capable of reaching. Given that sports psychology was an underdeveloped area of expertise at the time, Klein and Chargers head coach and general manager, Harland Svare, felt they had nothing to lose and would try anything to give them an edge.

What was intended to be a progressive move to build a healthy foundation and culture of winning, however, resulted in the largest drug scandal in professional sports at the time when it was discovered that Dr. Mandell was prescribing amphetamines to the players. To make matters even more humiliating, the Chargers finished 2-11-1 and fired Harland Svare mid way through the season. After the season, Klein, Svare and Mandell would appear in Manhattan for a deposition with NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. Klein would surrender $20,000 to the league as a penalty for his lax supervision. Mandell would be banned from the NFL for life, in addition to having his license temporarily stripped by the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance before having the decision overturned.

Indeed, the futility of their efforts left many Chargers fans grieving, and left even more fans laughing at the comedy of errors.

It’s no secret that drugs held a place in professional football’s history well before this scandal broke out. The St. Louis Cardinals and the Oakland Raiders were two of the marquee franchises that were sued by former players for being persuaded by trainers and/or management to take drugs that made them “more violent.” Blistering memoirs written by former players, such as Out of Their League by Dave Meggyesy and They Call It A Game by Bernie Parish, offered a first hand account of how much and how frequently football players consumed these drugs to stay in a game after sustaining crippling injuries to avoid be perceived as weak. When asked about these memoirs, Pete Rozelle and league representatives maintained silence on the validity of these drug accusations. 

While attempting to write another “behind-the-scenes” exposé in the vein of the previous two memoirs listed above, however, The Nightmare Season provides little to no extra details on the drug culture surrounding professional football, nor does Mandell spend a terrible amount of time explaining his psychoanalyses of the team and his decision making process of prescribing amphetamines to the players. Early in the book, Mandell does recall how an anonymous veteran showed him a pill called “Black Beauty" and that many players would drive down to Tijuana to buy it off the street to take before the games. Mandell claims at the end of the book that he was writing prescriptions to players so they won’t be buying unreliable drugs off of the street.

Beyond that, Mandell’s memoir quickly sacrifices the opportunity to justify his actions or shed light on a pressing issue and instead chooses to indulge in tabloid spectacles that can be found in grocery store check out aisles. Harland Svare is often referred to as a “good friend” by Mandell, but the readers will clearly see that Mandell’s recollection paints a picture of an unofficial patient-client relationship, opening up to him and discussing his conflicting appetite for the chaos that football provided, yet longing for the peace of a more wholesome, less time consuming life. Often times Mandell views Svare as passive and not strong enough to lead a football team, which would lead Svare to blame Mandell book for “destroying my credibility” and prevent him from being a head coach in the NFL again.

Mandell also reconstructs conversations between Svare and his assistant coaches that seem better fit for a daytime soap opera than an autobiographical account (Mandell would later admit to the UCSD student newspaper that he fabricated the dialogue and order of the events to emphasize a point). Furthermore, Svare dedicated an entire chapter to describing an orgy had by the players in a hotel the night before a road game. At the end of that same chapter, Mandell would describe an arousing dream he had that same night after witnessing the debauch. Mandell rounds out the rest of his commentary of the season with internal monologues about overzealous fans and about the Chargers poor play on the field.

As previously mentioned, The Nightmare Season does little to fulfill the curiosity of a person wanting to read more into the drug culture of the NFL, and instead offers the insight of a peculiar outsider who had a foot inside pro football for a brief period of time. It is a good relic of it’s time, and provided some interesting perspectives on little known figures like Harland Svare. Ultimately, though, The Nightmare Season is more spectacle than scandal.