- Commissioner’s statement on Ventura, Marte
- Ronnie O’Sullivan: Masters champion ‘felt so vulnerable’ in final
- Arron Fletcher Wins 2017 WSOP International Circuit Marrakech Main Event ($140,224)
- Smith challenges Warner to go big in India
- Moncada No. 1 on MLB Pipeline’s Top 10 2B Prospects list
- Braves land 2 on MLB Pipeline’s Top 10 2B Prospects list
- Kingery makes MLB Pipeline’s Top 10 2B Prospects list
- New Zealand wrap up 2-0 after Bangladesh implosion
- Mathews, Pradeep, Gunathilaka to return to Sri Lanka
- Elliott hopes for rain for Poli
How the NFL Cheats: Foreign Substances
- Updated: September 9, 2016
Whether you call it breaking the rules, bending the rules or just getting creative with the rules, cheating has always been a part of the NFL and always will be. This is Part 1 in a Bleacher Report series on how NFL players and teams seek out some advantage, any advantage, over their competition.
It was October 1977, and Lester Hayes was a rookie defensive back out of Texas A&M playing in the first game of his NFL career for the Oakland Raiders.
He was approached on the sidelines by the team’s star wide receiver. Fred Biletnikoff wiped something off his ankle and smeared it on Hayes’ fingers.
Hayes’ world changed in that moment.
“Clear stickum, from a can,” Hayes remembers. “This stuff was stupendous. It was a National Football League secret. Top-secret stuff.”
In his first three seasons as a starter, Hayes would go on to intercept 24 passes—four more than the next-closest players over that time span.
And the adhesive helped Hayes in other ways too.
“We played in a bump-and-run defensive technique,” he says. “I discovered the stickum could help me prolong the bump a second longer. That was very important.”
Stickum became part of a mystique—and a psychological tool as well as a physical one. Hayes’ teammate Matt Millen remembers Hayes, known as “Judge” to his teammates, once using stickum in an unconventional way during the 1980 AFC Wild Card Game against the Houston Oilers.
“They were driving for a field goal into the half,” Millen, a former linebacker, says. “Judge goes to the sideline, gets a big glob of stickum and puts it on his sock. As he came walking in, he puts it on his hand. He was loaded. He had it everywhere.
“[Linebacker] Ted Hendricks and I were standing there right on the ball. Judge comes walking by, takes a glob of stickum, wipes it on the ball, then keeps walking. [Oilers center] Carl Mauck came walking up to the line, grabbed the ball and got stickum all over his hands. He looks at Judge Hayes, veins popping out of his head, screaming. The ref throws him a towel, he wipes his hands, and they get a different ball.
“Then he goes to snap the ball and snaps it over the holder’s head. So it worked. Judge used it as a weapon.”
The impetus to outlaw stickum came from complaints by offensive players, especially quarterbacks who found it difficult to pass and handle a tacky football.
When stickum was banned in 1981, they called it the Lester Hayes Rule. But the Lester Hayes Rule did not prevent players from using stickum. Hall of Fame wide receiver Jerry Rice, for example, admitted during a 2015 ESPN interview to using stickum in a career that began in 1985 and said all players did it.
“It was banned after Super Bowl XV, but players still used it,” Hayes says.
Rice said he used spray stickum. Hayes used a paste.
Hayes’ use of stickum is perhaps the most notable way a player has used a foreign substance or object to gain an edge. But it is far from the only way. Stories about foreign substances are part of the game’s …
