Union's Smith says NFL won't bully players on HGH testing

INDIANAPOLIS -- The head of the NFL Players Association insists the league won't "bully" its way to a test for human growth hormone.

At his annual Super Bowl news conference, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith said talks continue in a bid to resolve the impasse over adding HGH to the NFL's testing program -- six months after the labor deal ending the lockout included a provision to allow checking for that performance-enhancing drug once players approved the process.

Originally, the league hoped it could start testing for HGH as soon as Week 1 of this season. Now there's no certainty it'll happen by the beginning of next season.

"No one will bully us into a test," Smith said Thursday. "No one will force the players to accept something that's unfair. How could we?"

The union has raised questions about the detection methods and appeals process.

"We are going to continue to fight and ensure that due process is something that is not thrown away at the expense of just having the test," said Smith, who is up for re-election in March.

A year ago this week, he fielded question after question about then-ongoing negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement. Eventually, there would be a lockout -- NFLPA spokesman George Atallah referred Thursday to the "L word" -- before a new 10-year labor deal was signed.

"We have had a tumultuous and event-filled year in the business of football, but it is a great feeling to stand here today knowing that the conversations about our business and our union will not be about how to save them but about the agenda we are looking to set so we can grow them together," Atallah said.

Smith said the issues of most concern now are current players' health and safety, health care for former players, and painkillers, a topic not frequently discussed in such settings.

Smith spoke about confronting the "issue of painkillers and the use of painkillers, not only on game days and practice days, but how that issue of using painkilling drugs continues to be an issue for our players and our men and their families long after football is over."

Asked about last month's announcement that the St. Louis Rams would play one game in London in each of the next three seasons, Smith said that plan "raises some significant concerns about the health and safety of the players, given the transportation, given the jet lag. ... One significant issue for our players is the length of time they have to travel in planes before and after games."

He said he thought the London games should be discussed by the NFL and NFLPA.

Smith also did not rule out the possibility of returning to a discussion of an 18-game regular season, something the NFL pursued at the outset of labor negotiations.

"The lesson from the ... lockout and the labor fight was that it is important to consider everything," Smith said.