NEW ORLEANS — Chastising the NFL Players Association for standing in the way of testing for human growth hormone, two members of Congress told union head DeMaurice Smith in a letter sent yesterday they might ask players to testify before their committee.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, a California Republican, and ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings of Maryland asked Smith to turn over documents connected to HGH negotiations between the NFL and the NFLPA.
“We are disappointed with the NFLPA’s remarkable recalcitrance, which has prevented meaningful progress on this issue,” the letter said. “We intend to take a more active role to determine whether the position you have taken — that HGH is not a serious concern and that the test for HGH is unreliable — is consistent with the beliefs of rank and file NFL players.”
The 10-year labor contract approved by the league’s owners and players in August 2011 paved the way for HGH testing once certain parameters were set. But the union wants a new population study to assess the validity of the test for NFL players; it is used currently by Olympic sports and Major League Baseball.
Issa and Cummings also wrote the NBA and its players have “made significant progress toward implementing an HGH test.”
NFLPA spokesman George Atallah said in a telephone interview the letter was received yesterday and the union intends “to fully cooperate with the committee’s requests, as we have done from the beginning of their interest in this issue.”