The Clemson Coaches Indicted in the 1985 Drug-Dispensing Scandal

Augustinus Jaspers died in his dorm room at Clemson University. His death brought scrutiny to the drugs being used inside the athletics department and led to a January 1985 investigation into steroids and prescription medications. Sports Illustrated published the resulting account on January 21, describing drug abuse in Clemson athletic programs and placing the death of the track athlete at the point where the issue became public. The university’s internal athletic culture had become a criminal matter. The first consequence was exposure.

The people who came under examination were not distant suppliers operating outside the program. Sam Colson coached Clemson’s women’s track and cross-country teams and worked as a strength and conditioning coach. Stan Narewski coached men’s track and cross-country. During the investigation, both men admitted supplying drugs to members of the track teams. The admissions connected the distribution of prescription drugs to coaches who possessed authority over athletes’ training and scholarships.

The investigation also reached football. Three football players said Colson gave them steroids, extending the allegations beyond the track programs where Colson and Narewski worked directly. The testimony described access controlled by staff rather than athletes: a coach could determine what was provided, to whom, and under what athletic circumstances. That arrangement placed the health and eligibility of competitors inside a relationship in which the person prescribing the substance also held institutional power.

On March 4, 1985, a South Carolina grand jury indicted Colson and Narewski on charges of illegally dispensing prescription drugs. The same grand jury indicted Jack Harkness, a former Clemson assistant football coach and strength coach. The indictments converted the scandal from a public dispute into a criminal proceeding. Prosecutors no longer had to address only whether athletes had received drugs; they had to address whether coaches had unlawfully supplied them.

Harkness occupied a separate part of the athletic structure but faced the same basic accusation: distributing steroids to athletes. He was later convicted after pleading guilty. His case placed a second football-related coach alongside Colson, whose name had already appeared in statements from football players. The indictments therefore identified three staff members whose contact with athletes had crossed into alleged illegal distribution, with the criminal process producing guilty pleas rather than a single administrative reprimand.

The court dispositions came quickly. On March 11, Circuit Judge C. Victor Pyle sentenced Colson to three years’ probation, a $2,000 fine, and community service. Pyle sentenced Narewski to one year of probation, a $750 fine, and community service. The penalties were imposed after plea-bargain agreements. They recorded specific consequences for the two track coaches while leaving the wider question of how many athletes, teams, and substances had been involved outside the charges resolved in court.

The sequence mattered because each institution acted at a different point. Jaspers’s death brought the issue into view. National reporting made the allegations legible beyond Clemson. A grand jury then identified criminal charges, and a circuit judge imposed probation, fines, and community service. The university’s athletic programs were no longer insulated by the ordinary distance between coaching decisions and public oversight. The legal action attached names, offices, and penalties to conduct that had previously been contained within athletic relationships.

The later testimony reached backward. On April 14, 1989, Dave McKnight appeared before a Canadian inquiry in Toronto and described his time at Clemson in 1979. McKnight said he and Desai Williams used anabolic steroids while competing on track scholarships. His account placed steroid use at the university six years before the indictments and identified athletes whose access to Clemson depended on athletic performance.

McKnight named Peter Cross as the coach who provided Dianabol tablets, an anabolic steroid, and said the Clemson program was Colson’s idea. The statement widened the chronology and shifted attention from the events exposed in 1985 to an earlier period involving different athletes and another coach. It also connected the later inquiry to the same central question: whether performance-enhancing drugs entered Clemson athletics through informal athlete networks or through decisions made by staff with authority over scholarship competitors.

The 1989 testimony did not reopen the 1985 sentences, but it changed the shape of the scandal. The criminal cases established official action against Colson, Narewski, and Harkness. McKnight’s account preserved an earlier allegation involving himself, Williams, Cross, Dianabol, and Colson. Together, the episodes show a university athletics scandal with a documented prosecutorial response and a later witness account reaching into 1979. They do not establish uniform doping across every Clemson program or settle every allegation attached to the earlier period.