George Kimball America at Large: Some guys just like to be close to the action. You find yourself in conversation with a conservatively-dressed man at a Super Bowl cocktail party and notice the tell-tale bulge beneath his jacket.

"Secret Service?" you guess.

"No," he replies. "I collect piss for the NFL."

Those of us who still harbour old-fashioned notions regarding the purity of sport react with a certain degree of schadenfreude when a drug cheat is brought down. Whether it's Floyd Landis or Justin Gatlin or an obscure Bulgarian shot-putter, the notion that there's one fellow fewer perpetrating fraud on the rest of us is somehow comforting.

What we don't often contemplate, mostly because we choose not to, is the unpleasant process itself. For every culprit nailed by the drug police, hundreds more have been tested, and for all the techniques science has developed to stay abreast of pharmacological developments, the means of collecting specimens remains largely unchanged.

You think it's easy to produce A and B samples on command in the presence of a stranger? Try it sometime.

At the 1993 Millrose Games in New York, Eamonn Coghlan and Marcus O'Sullivan were selected for random testing. Coghlan had just won the Masters Mile, and O'Sullivan had finished second to Noureddine Morceli in the Wanamaker Mile. The pair were corralled by the drug police, herded into a "medical room", and instructed to make water.

When Coghlan reached to take a drink of water out of his bag, he was told he wasn't allowed to drink it.

"Fair enough," he said. "If you won't let me drink my water, bring me some of yours." But when it came time to perform he wasn't able to produce.

"Marcus," he whispered to his countryman, "I can't pee."

"I can't either," confessed O'Sullivan.

The anti-doping official remained in the room with them. O'Sullivan suggested that maybe if they were allowed to take a shower the change in body temperature might expedite the process.

"Nope," the drug cop said, "no shower until I collect the specimen."

After another 20 minutes O'Sullivan proposed a compromise.

"How about we go into the shower and run some water on our legs?" he suggested. "You can come with us and watch."

The agent reluctantly agreed, and in the end collected his samples. Both runners tested negatively for performance-enhancing drugs.

The process can even take its toll on those of us from the Fourth Estate. I was in Las Vegas in May of 1995 when Dana Rosenblatt fought Chad Parker in a battle of unbeaten middleweights on the Oscar De La Hoya-Rafael Ruelas card.

Rosenblatt knocked out Parker in the first round. Since the winner was a Massachusetts fighter and I was covering the event for a Boston newspaper, this loomed as the biggest undercard story of the evening from my perspective. I raced to his dressing-room, where I was told the boxer could only be interviewed after he produced his specimen for the anti-doping test.

Rosenblatt had required less than two minutes to dispose of Parker. I couldn't tell you exactly how long it took him to furnish his specimen, but it was at least 45 minutes, because by the time I emerged from the dressing-room and got back to the arena, Jimmy Garcia was being wheeled out on a gurney.

Garcia had been battered into a coma by Ruelas's brother Gabe in the 11th round. He never regained consciousness and died two weeks later. It was the biggest boxing story of the year, and I'd missed all of it because I was waiting for Dana Rosenblatt to pee.

But if the means of collecting drug-test samples is dehumanising for the athlete, consider, for a moment, the plight of the poor fellow who actually has to handle the specimen.

Sure, he gets free tickets to the biggest sporting events in the world, but at the end of the day his experience consists of walking away clutching a couple of lukewarm vials in his hands.

For 15 years this is what Tom Taylor did for a living. A retired federal drug agent, he secured employment with the National Football League with direct oversight of its substance-abuse programme.

His official title, as was those of several other gun-toting ex-feds hired by the NFL, was "drug programme administrator" (DPA). The league office paid him $50 an hour to periodically collect samples from members of the New York Giants.

Now retired, the 77-year-old Taylor is suing the NFL on the grounds that the league failed to make good on benefits which would normally accrue to a long-time employee.

The NFL maintains the DPAs were independent contractors, not bona fide employees, and that it should not be held responsible for medical benefits and Social Security contributions.

The Revenue boys have ruled in favour of the urine-collectors; the next step will likely be the courts.

"The doctors and others in the management council were constantly pushing that theme that we were (independent contractors), but of course we were aware we were being micromanaged, and no independent contractors would put up with that kind of nonsense," Taylor told the New York Daily News this week. "Inquiry and investigation led us to believe that we were employees and we were not being treated properly."

While the issue remains the object of looming litigation, the NFL is already looking to cover its backside in future disputes. Beginning next month, it will replace the 80 DPAs on its payroll, outsourcing the oversight of its substance-abuse programme to a California drug-testing firm.

Taylor and his cohorts maintain no "independent" contractor would have been forced to put up with the nit-picking oversight the NFL exercised over the course of his employment. The league's posture, on the other hand, appears to be that a man performing the duties of a toilet attendant should have expected to be paid like a toilet attendant.

It will be interesting to see how the courts feel.