The league is hoping to block a full-scale congressional investigation. | REUTERS NFL tries to avoid Hill hearings

Are you ready for some … hearings? The National Football League isn’t.

The league is doing all the blocking and tackling it can to avoid a full-scale congressional investigation and the televised spectacle of star players testifying under oath.


Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are taking aim at the use of human growth hormone, the NFL’s unique status as a nonprofit, the special antitrust exemption granted to professional football, and a number of other player health, safety and labor issues.

( PHOTOS: Political football)

A key congressman has given the NFL and the players union a July deadline — the opening of NFL training camps — to resolve the ongoing fight over HGH testing or face hearings. The league and the NFL Players Association agreed two years ago to mandatory HGH tests but no tests have yet taken place.

The congressional interest in HGH resembles the scrutiny of steroid use by Major League Baseball players in recent years, and the NFL has only to look there for a cautionary tale. Mark McGwire’s refusal to answer questions at a famed 2005 hearing on steroid use; a 2008 follow-up hearing led to perjury charges for Roger Clemens. (He was found not guilty last year.).

“There’s nothing good for the NFL to come out of hearings like this,” said former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), who chaired the 2005 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. “It just exposes their dirty underwear.”

Baseball was slow to resolve its drug issue, Davis said, so Congress and federal investigators stepped in.

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“We shone a light on something that wasn’t very pretty, and it got cleaned up,” Davis said about the baseball hearings. “But it’s a lot harder and the risks are higher now” for the NFL.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House oversight committee, said in April that he wanted a resolution to the HGH issue by July — or his committee would start calling players to testify under oath. Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Cummings wrote the union in January to demand answers on the HGH use.

According to a spokesperson for the oversight committee, the players union provided the requested documents and information. The committee declined to share them with POLITICO, citing privacy.

“Our position has been that we want the NFL players to do what they’ve already agreed to do,” Cummings told POLITICO. “They agreed in their contracts almost two years ago that they would take the test.

“It sends a strong message to children that they’re willing to subject themselves to these tests,” he added.

The league has primarily been trying to use its clout on Capitol Hill to push for a resolution of the drug issue without congressional interference. The NFL’s lobbying campaign mostly used their outside firms for quiet, targeted outreach to the offices that care most about the issue: Issa; Cummings; Rep. Henry Waxman, the top Energy and Commerce Committee Democrat; and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

“We have been clear in our belief that HGH testing is necessary — we’ve been clear about that for several years,” said Adolpho Birch, the NFL’s senior vice president of labor policy and government affairs.

“We understand that the committee has an interest and we are making every effort to cooperate with them,” he added. But “hearings are not something that should be taken lightly by anyone.”

George Atallah, the NFLPA’s assistant executive director of external affairs, said the union doesn’t mind Congress’s interest or oversight.

“From our perspective, we’re more than happy to have Congress involved on the broader health and safety topics,” Atallah said, adding the union will wait as long as it takes to get a fair testing protocol in place for its players.

“We have never put a timetable on getting a testing protocol that is fair and just,” Atallah said.

The ongoing Internal Revenue Service scandal involving scrutiny of conservative nonprofit groups isn’t helping the league avoid the congressional spotlight. NFL franchises pay taxes, but the league itself — along with the National Hockey League and the Professional Golfers Association — is classified a nonprofit trade association.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) introduced an amendment to the Internet sales tax bill in April that would have stripped sports leagues of their tax-exempt status. Members of Congress in the past have also used the nonprofit issue as a way to poke the NFL.

Coburn has vowed to try again — perhaps as part of a broader tax reform package.

“It’s an issue he’s going to continue to push and advocate for,” said Coburn spokesman John Hart. “What he’s trying to do is raise the issue and frankly educate the public about the ridiculousness of the Tax Code.”

The NFL is the hub of America’s most popular sport with TV contracts worth billions of dollars, teams valued at hundreds of millions of dollars and players making millions of dollars.

So like any other big business that faces the possibility of congressional scrutiny, both the league and the players union have powerful K Street firms at work on Capitol Hill: The league has spent over $1 million per year on lobbying and has almost two dozen people on retainer at big-time firms including Covington & Burling, Elmendorf Ryan, Gephardt Government Affairs and John Dudinsky & Associates.

The NFLPA has lobbying powerhouse Patton Boggs on retainer — and its current executive director, DeMaurice

Smith, was a longtime attorney for Patton.

Happy Carlock contributed to this report.