Walt Sweeney, All-Pro and Critic of N.F.L., Dies at 71

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter, Kristin Sweeney, said.

Sweeney, who stood 6 feet 4 inches and weighed more than 250 pounds at the peak of his career — a modest weight for offensive linemen by today’s standards — was a 1963 first-round draft pick from Syracuse University. Later that year he helped the Chargers win the American Football League championship against the Boston Patriots (now the New England Patriots). He played 11 years for the Chargers and played in either the A.F.L. All-Star Game or the Pro Bowl nine straight seasons.

But he said later that drugs, administered by the Chargers, played a significant part in his professional career and were destructive in his life afterward.

“My drug addiction is directly related to the game,” he wrote in a memoir published in 2012.  “It was the San Diego Chargers trainers and doctors who gave pregame amphetamines to rev me up, postgame sedatives to bring me down, pain killers as ‘needed’ and steroids, said to be vitamins, for better health.  I considered taking drugs as normal for game-day preparation as putting on my game face.”

Sweeney had been a hard drinker as well as a hard hitter. His memoir, “Off Guard: The Story of the Earliest Drug Scandal in Professional Football, as Told by One of the Best Linemen to Ever Play in the N.F.L.,” written with Bill Swank, detailed many of his drinking bouts. After he stopped playing because of a knee injury at the end of the 1975 season, his substance abuse worsened, Sweeney said.

He claimed he had been given prescription drugs regularly for his entire career. Players were fined if they did not take steroids, he said, and many other pills were made available. (In an email on Wednesday, a Chargers spokesman said the team had no information on its drug policies of the 1970s.)

The N.F.L. began regulating the use of prescription drugs in the early 1970s after news reports about rampant drug abuse in the league. But the restrictions proved largely ineffective. Players were not tested, team doctors sometimes provided illicit prescriptions, and it was not difficult for players to obtain them from other sources. (The N.F.L. now has random testing for various drugs.) 

Sweeney eventually sued the N.F.L., contending that the drugs he had been given led to addiction, as well as cognitive and physical damage. The N.F.L. countered that it was his decision to use the drugs and that the league was not liable for problems his addiction caused, saying they were different from an injury sustained on the field, which the players’ pension fund was designed to address.

In 1995, Sweeney was awarded a $1.8 million judgment in federal district court, but the decision was overturned on appeal in 1997.

Walter Francis Sweeney was born on April 18, 1941, in Cohasset, Mass., the youngest of seven children of the former Mary Ann McCormick and Jack Sweeney, who was killed by a drunken driver when Walter was 2.

Sweeney accepted a football scholarship to Syracuse in 1959 in part “because the drinking age in New York was 18,” he wrote.

He played tight end and defensive end in college for the Hall of Fame coach Ben Schwartzwalder. Sweeney said that he lost his scholarship after a drunken brawl before the 1962 season, but that a wealthy alumnus paid the rest of his tuition.

He finished his 13-season professional career — the last two with the Washington Redskins — without missing a game, and he was feared in all 181 of them.

“If I had to play against Sweeney every day, I’d rather sell used cars,” Merlin Olsen, the Hall of Fame defensive tackle for the Los Angeles Rams, once said.

Sweeney was inducted into the Chargers Hall of Fame. In recent years he had five knee-replacement procedures.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a son, Patrick. His first two marriages ended in divorce. His third wife, Nanci Sweeney, died in 2012.

Sweeney’s resentment toward the league endured. “If a guy breaks his back in the N.F.L., they’ll pay him,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1995. “That didn’t happen to me. Instead, these guys broke my mind.”