The premise of summer ...

When June came busting out all over New Jersey, it also brought with it the promise of the first statewide steroid testing program in high school athletics.

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The first prophet-free statement off the table was from Robert F. Kanaby, the Executive Director of the NFHS: "New Jersey will serve as the model plan for other states."

The plan calls for the random testing of athletes who qualify for team or individual state championships beginning this fall, and will incur a one-year loss of eligibility for those who test positive.

Steven Timko, Executive Director for the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association, says the plan calls for the testing of about 500 athletes from sports such as football, wrestling, track and field, swimming, lacrosse, and baseball. (The sports most susceptible to steroid use.)

Each test will cost $150-$200, with the State and the NJSIAA contributing $50,000 to help offset the price tag.

Gary Wadler, a physician and drug-testing expert, reports that the sanctions on the prep level will not receive the priority they do for the Olympics and professional sports.

"Once you begin suspending high school football players, you are going to break the bank," he warned. "I don't see it as a sanctioning issue as much as ... an educational one."

The chief concern of other state federations will be financial.

Who will fund it?

Will the costs cover the array of banned substances and steroids?

Who will cover all the legal ramifications of such testing?

Do we have the manpower to handle all of the paperwork?

Good questions. But there wouldn't be any if New Jersey hadn't acted in the best interests of its scholastic athletes and the sanctity of fair play.

HICKEY'S SHOTGUN ...

It was a high school coach from Utah who phoned us last spring and asked us to locate an old coach for him.

When he told us the coach's name we instantly knew what the request was all about.

Red Hickey had invented the shotgun formation and the high school coach probably wanted to find out everything he could about it.

We didn't need much time. About a week later, we picked up our morning newspaper and spotted a neat little article with a neat little photo on the front page.

It reads as follows: "Red Hickey, '89, Coach of the 49'ers, Introduced Shotgun to NFL."

We hadn't realized that Hickey had been that old and had still been coaching the 49'ers in 1960. He had a big game coming up against the championship Baltimore Colts and was wondering how he was going to contain the Colts' Monsters Three made up of Art Donovan, Gino Marchetti, and Big Daddy Lipscomb.

At a squad meeting, Hickey asked his team whether they could beat the Colts with their regular offense. Not one hand went up. And so Hickey scrapped his T formation and installed a shotgun offense.

Red Hickey's last day in the sun with the shotgun occurred in 2001, when he paid a visit to the 49ers summer camp and was shocked to find the freshman quarterback, Jeff Garcia, using it!

Red Hickey tried the Shotgun several more times, but it didn't go anywhere--and stayed nowhere, until Tom Landry adopted it in 1975 for his QB, Roger Staubach.

LOSING IT ...

Is there anyone sadder than a talented young athlete who suddenly begins losing his edge and cannot turn it around? Or, maybe worse, an athlete who knows he has lost it and that he isn't going to get it back.

Forgive the dramatics. But that's exactly what happened to a phenomenal young pitcher that we met in 1982 at age 16 or 17. He was big (6-3) and strapping (210) and obviously destined for the mountaintops.

In the Tampa (FL) high schools, he was already being mentioned in the same breath as Bob Feller, Bob Gibson, and Tom Seaver.

After one stupendous Class B season in the Carolina League, where he went 19-4 with 300 strikeouts in 191 innings, plus a 2.50 Earned Run Average, the Doc was deemed ready for the major leagues.

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And that's where he wound up in 1984. He became a major league starting pitcher with the New York Mets. His stats: 17-9, winning percentage (.654), leads the league in strikeouts (276), and is named rookie pitcher of the season.

Not bad for a rookie, right? His sophomore year (1985) was even better! He won 24 and lost 4, led the league in strikeouts (268) and earned run average (1.53). And wonders of wonders--he won the Cy Young Award for pitchers!

Over the next five seasons of his career (1986-90), Gooden went 78-33 with 847 K's and an ERA that hovered in the low 3.00 range. After that, his path to Cooperstown took a downward, cocaine-induced spiral. Albeit he did toss a no-hitter for the Yankees on May 14, 1996.

How could a pitcher have gone from such greatness in seven seasons to nowhere in the rest of his career? That is a tragedy.

Instead of winding up as an immortal like Gibson, Spahn, Alexander, Mathewson, Johnson, Grove, Ford, and maybe 10 others, Dwight Eugene (Doc) Gooden wound up as a "should-have been."

Should-have-been is a sad-enough term. The more accurate one is, of course, tragic. When you think of this basically sweet young man who couldn't control his life for more than a half-dozen years, throwing it all away on juvenile excesses, you can weep.

DIPLOMA MILLS ...

Ever since we started leading off our publishing year with an August (rather than September) issue, we have been putting in quite a bit of time on undesignated hitting.

We call it "plotting." For example, could it be true that a cabal of sports-writers is trying to convince the public that a group of fraudulent prep and high schools have gone into business for themselves--selling test scores and transcripts to star high school athletes who need the grades to make it to college.

Early on, the plots were covered up with fake names and fake addresses, and it wasn't until the spring months that the truth began to emerge. The NCAA issued a list of 13 high schools whose transcripts the NCAA would no longer certify when determining the athletes' eligibility for competition.

We like the forthright way in which NCAA President Myles Brand is dealing with the situation: "We are stepping up the pace of our efforts in dealing with fraudulent prep and non-public high schools recently exposed as diploma mills.

"Any student who thinks he can apply for a grant-in-aid in the future and has been to one of those schools or is there now had better think twice quickly. They are at great risk, and there will be no amnesty."