How former small-town doctor landed at heart of UW scandal
The University of Washington players saved their real enthusiasm, though, for the wiry man in the windbreaker who followed the trainers. "Hey, Doc!" the players would hiss in stage whispers, waving their hands to flag him down, hoping to snare some of the pills Dr. William Scheyer always seemed to carry in his pockets.
It was the 1990s, and Scheyer was in the midst of a dream assignment: using his knowledge of sports medicine to care for big-time student athletes. After more than two decades in Port Townsend as a small-town, do-everything doc, the UW Medical School graduate had finally arrived. With the help of a new in-law on the UW Board of Regents, Scheyer came to the Seattle area in the mid-1980s, well-connected and eager to work with UW sports teams at home and on the road.
Though the venue was new, the likeable Scheyer practiced at the UW much as he had in Port Townsend — making himself, and the medications he controlled, available and accessible to all.
Today, Scheyer's days of dishing out drugs to athletes are over. Athletic director Barbara Hedges removed Scheyer as volunteer doctor for the school's softball team just weeks before state authorities announced on Oct. 17 that they had suspended his license to practice medicine.
Scheyer, 75, gave a signed statement to investigators, admitting he had improperly passed out medications to athletes and to trainers, written prescriptions for patients who never received the drugs and failed to keep a record of thousands of doses of narcotic pain pills, muscle relaxants, steroid gels and other medications.
Some of the drugs he prescribed are banned by the NCAA, including the stimulant Ritalin and the testosterone gels — anabolic steroids that build muscle mass.
UW officials launched an investigation last week. The State Patrol also is looking into the matter and is consulting with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle about whether a criminal investigation should be opened.
Scheyer, who came to the door of his modest Juanita home more than a week ago wearing a Huskies polo shirt, declined to talk to The Times.
News of Scheyer's troubles has thrown his beloved Huskies athletic program into turmoil. Fans and campus insiders alike are wondering who knew what about Scheyer's practices and whether Hedges will survive this latest tempest.
Port Townsend practice
This isn't the first time William Scheyer's life has "changed dramatically."
That was the phrase Scheyer used in his résumé to describe the day in 1984 when he says the University of Washington encouraged him to seek a spot as a volunteer team physician for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
For Scheyer, then practicing as a small-town generalist in Port Townsend, it was a ticket to the big leagues. He had been volunteering as doctor for the high school's football team, founded the Port Townsend Marathon Association and organized the annual Rhody Run, which just celebrated its 26th year. When he wasn't running marathons himself, he was spending his spare time with athletes.
"Sports was his whole life," said Ken Berink, who taught and coached at the high school.
Scheyer was popular and even served a stint on the City Council. "He was a good team doctor, as far as I was concerned," said Jack Freeman, a former physical-education teacher at the high school.
But even then, there were questions. A minor stir erupted after Scheyer told some buddies he had once played on the UW basketball team. One of them, a man who had attended the UW, couldn't find any record, Freeman recalled.
One woman, part of a couple that used to go dancing with Scheyer and his wife, remembered his penchant for handing out pills. "We'd go out to Chevy Chase (a local golf club) and dance, and he always had a few pills in his pocket," she said. "I never approved of that myself."
"A lot of people called him Pill Bill," said Tom Camfield, who was sports editor at the Port Townsend Leader while Scheyer lived in town. "He was always throwing pills. He threw me some salesman samples. Amphetamines, my sister-in-law got those from him. She was trying to lose weight, get into a dress for a dance."
Scheyer, then in his mid-50s, was invited by Dr. Steve Bramwell, well-known Huskies team physician and former standout UW football player, to join his sports-medicine practice, and Scheyer and his wife moved to the Seattle area in 1986.
It was the same year Scheyer's daughter married the son of newly appointed UW Regent David Cohn, a successful restaurateur. Cohn, who died at 85 last month, once headed the Tyee Club of athletic boosters at the UW.
Bramwell, in an interview yesterday, said he couldn't remember exactly how he came to hire Scheyer but recalled that Cohn introduced them. Bramwell said he also recalled hearing about Scheyer from the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC), another factor that led him to recruit Scheyer.
Scheyer's résumé notes several connections with the Olympic movement that, in some cases, are exaggerated. One example: He called himself the "chief medical officer" for the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, Colo., during a period in 1985. Actually, he had served a two-week volunteer practicum, USOC sources say.
Just before Scheyer left Port Townsend, a story in the local paper about his departure noted he would be working as a drug consultant at an upcoming boxing championship. Drug use is not a widespread problem in amateur athletics, Scheyer told the paper, but it was important "to tell the youth of this country what should and should not be taken."
Begins UW work
When Scheyer began working with UW athletic teams in the mid-'80s, it was under the direction of Bramwell, who had just put together a group of sports-medicine doctors to care for the teams.
Mike Lude, a former UW athletic director, said Scheyer was never considered one of the department's primary doctors. "He was like a backup quarterback. Maybe the third or fourth choice to travel with the football team."
Scheyer was assigned at first to treating athletes on what Lude called the "nonrevenue teams" — everything but football and basketball. Scheyer was popular with the athletes and unfailingly loyal to the teams and the school. "He was a very nice person," Lude said. "He really wanted to be liked."
Indeed, some now think that desire to please may have contributed to his problems.
"He was just so friendly to people — almost to a fault," said Dennis Sealey, head trainer at UW from 1978 to 2000. "He just really wanted to be everybody's buddy."
Bramwell said he never saw Scheyer do anything "outside any lines" in the time they worked with the UW athletic program.
He noticed, though, that Scheyer was more prone to prescribe medications, something he attributed to "generational differences" between himself and the older man.
Lawanda Price, who worked as Scheyer's office manager from 1988 to 1994, said she grew concerned that Scheyer was overprescribing drugs. "I'm not saying improperly, I'm saying more readily," she said.
Some athletes and trainers have described another side to Scheyer's conduct. At least three told investigators they thought Scheyer's priorities were skewed toward getting them back on the field, not their long-term health.
One softball player said she played under the influence of painkillers. Another said she never went a day without Scheyer giving her pills, according to investigative documents.
Another former UW trainer, Craig Moriwaki, who left two years ago, acknowledged he handed out drugs to athletes, which was against guidelines, but said it was Scheyer alone who passed out the narcotic painkillers. Moriwaki said he was only following Scheyer's orders.
"I may be telling him that I don't think (an athlete) is ready to play, that she could risk injury," he said. "But he makes the last call."
The UW put a system in place years ago that was supposed to safeguard athletes and catch misuse of prescription drugs after a 1984 state pharmacy board investigation into allegations of drug abuse by UW athletes. All drugs they received were to be logged by either a physician or trainer. Prescriptions were to be filled exclusively by the Hall Health Student Pharmacy on campus.
"It was a terrific system to track meds," said Sealey. "We knew exactly what athletes were being given and by whom."
But such a system works only if everybody subscribes to it. And Scheyer apparently didn't. He was ordering drugs through unauthorized accounts, some with the UW's name, at pharmacies in Seattle and Kirkland.
"He'd work outside the system," recalled Doug Calland, a former UW assistant trainer who watched Scheyer's airplane-aisle dispensing scene unfold routinely in the 1990s before Calland left to become head football trainer for Ohio State University.
"He'd meet athletes in the hallway, outside the training room. He'd meet them after games," he said.
"We'd never know what advice they were being given. Or what medications. You'd just lose track. It was a constant problem."
Just as frustrating, he said, Scheyer "seemed to subscribe to the notion that if one was good, more was better."
Trainers "wanted to rein him in," Calland said, "but you weren't sure how to do it."
Sealey, the former UW head trainer, acknowledged he was approached "more than once" by trainers voicing concerns about Scheyer's freewheeling drug dispensing.
"But I never saw anything," Sealey said. "And without anything of substance, what could we do?"
There also was the feeling that Scheyer was somehow untouchable.
"There was always sort of this Dave Cohn relationship with him," said Calland, referring to the regent who served from 1985 to 1995. "He was friends with Dave. They were in-laws. You just don't want to mess with that."
Work with teams
By the 1990s, Scheyer was working as a team doctor for the football, men's basketball, track and cross-country teams, and as head physician for the softball team, according to his résumé.
By 1999, all the athletic teams, except for softball, began sending players to the UW sports-medicine department. With the switch, Scheyer was left with duties as head team physician for softball, at the request of its coach, Teresa Wilson.
By at least 2001, however, investigative documents indicate that an athletic trainer and at least two athletic-department doctors complained to higher-ups about Scheyer. One of the doctors, John O'Kane, was alarmed by the amount of drugs available to athletes and ordered an audit of the school pharmacy.
But Scheyer's name never showed up because he was using outside pharmacies and paying for the drugs himself.
Early this year, though, Scheyer's name surfaced quickly when questions by a supervising pharmacist at Swedish Medical Center started a chain of events that led investigators straight to Scheyer's prescription pad. The pharmacist wondered why the pharmacy had a shortage of generic Vicodin, a narcotic painkiller. His investigation led to the discovery that pharmacist Edward Matsukawa had improperly filled numerous prescriptions from Scheyer — as many as 15 in one day — all written for one supposedly healthy and active UW softball player.
State health-department investigators began interviewing trainers, athletes and UW doctors. Matsuwaka faces state sanctions.
One former UW trainer told an investigator she considered Scheyer "dangerous." The trainer said a "star" athlete had revealed she had been using painkillers and muscle relaxants given her by Scheyer virtually every day since she came to the UW.
Scheyer, interviewed by investigators, appeared surprised by the quantities detailed in the reports — 3,100 doses of the narcotic Vicodin dispensed for one patient over 18 months, for example. "Scheyer said the quantities were far more than he would have prescribed," one investigator wrote.
O'Kane, head physician for UW athletics, told investigators that student-athletes had been showing up with "tons" of medications provided by Scheyer and that he had notified UW athletic-department management of his concerns in 2001. That was the year Hedges reassigned Scheyer from head physician to "volunteer physician" for the softball team.
Lectures about drugs
Many people who have known Scheyer say they don't recognize the doctor described in documents by state investigators.
Don James, the Huskies' football coach from 1975 to 1992, praised Scheyer as a responsible doctor. "He is a great friend of mine," James said. Scheyer regularly lectured players on the dangers of street drugs as well as steroids, specifically pointing out the premature deaths of pro players who had used steroids, James said.
Scheyer wrote several prescriptions for Androgel, a testosterone gel that is on the NCAA's banned list because it is an anabolic steroid. However, investigators believe Scheyer used the medication, which can increase bone density, himself. He suffers from severe osteoporosis and had surgery earlier this year for a compression fracture in his back, according to an acquaintance.
But why Scheyer used a student's name on a prescription for a banned drug still puzzles investigators. He could have simply written "for office use" on an invoice. "We can't figure out the reason why he did it that way," said Grant Chester, operations manager for the state Board of Pharmacy.
It's only one of many questions that UW investigators are trying to answer. Key among the questions that remain: Where did all those pills go?
Staff writer Bob Sherwin and Sports Editor Cathy Henkel contributed to this report.
Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com