Print edition: 
KANSAS CITY, Mo. —Dwayne Bowe is running late for Thursday's 2 p.m. meeting, but there are some things he needs to get off his chest.
The Chiefs wide receiver is like a lot of players inside this locker room. He's not perfect, and there is perhaps more work ahead than what lay behind. He is talented but unproven. Full of potential but unpolished. So many things about Bowe's 2009 have demanded an explanation. The drops, the blemished work ethic, the suspension. He's like the Chiefs in that way: so many questions remaining, and the season just wasn't long enough to answer them all.
The Chiefs are 3-12 and ready to turn the page. They'll play their final game of this season today at Denver. Coach Todd Haley said the offseason will give the team a fresh start. He says the Chiefs need it. No one needs it more than Bowe.
"Two thousand nine," he says on New Year's Eve, "I wish I never knew you. By far, 2009 had the most obstacles I've ever faced as a young man. I'm not even saying as a professional. Just all around: a death in the family, never getting in trouble for nothing and then getting suspended, coming back. It's been a steppingstone.
"Twelve o'clock, oh, I can't wait. I'm counting down. How many hours are left? Eleven more hours. Ten more hours. I just want to get to 2010."
Bowe is one of the few at Chiefs headquarters who will at least acknowledge that 2009 has been a disaster. Players file out of the locker room, toward some meeting room where another game plan will be explained and a new optimists' creed will be shared. Bowe says the time has come for understanding. Time for his side of the story, and his reasons why he's ready to end 2009 and forget it ever happened. He takes a breath and begins.
"It was one pill," he says, and he won't stop for five minutes.
* * *
Bowe wanted a sure thing. He had been overweight when he reported last spring to the team's offseason conditioning program. Now, he was sore from the marathon conditioning sessions during the first week of training camp and desperate for relief.
He says he couldn't afford to slow down. Haley's requirements were tough on the body, and Bowe says now that some days were tougher than others. He says he called his grandmother, Dorothy Williams, and asked for a remedy. Something to ease the cramps he'd been having.
"I told my grandma to send me something," Bowe says.
He says now that his grandmother keeps her "cramp medicine" next to her water pills and that Williams unknowingly sent the wrong thing. Bowe says he took it anyway. After taking a pill he says was a diuretic, a banned substance by the NFL because some diuretics are taken to cut weight or mask the use of steroids, Bowe weighed himself. He says that before he took the pill, he was three pounds heavier than his suggested playing weight. After taking it, he says, he was six pounds under his target.
"I was real light," he says. "I was like, 'How did I lose all this weight?'"
Bowe says he called his grandmother, and he says now that she had no idea what she had sent. Bowe says he thought it was a potassium supplement, which was not against the rules. But Bowe says his grandmother sent him something different — and couldn't tell him what it was. He says now that he doesn't know the name of the substance he took and that his grandmother doesn't know, either.
"I tried to ask her," he says. "She's old."
Bowe says he took only the one pill, nervous after the drastic weight loss. But weeks later, there was a note in his locker at Chiefs headquarters. He says he thought he'd been fined for some on-the-field theatrics.
Instead, he was told that a drug test from training camp had been flagged. It had shown traces of a substance among those banned by the NFL. Bowe says he offered to take another test but that he was told the league would make a decision based on the one he'd submitted in camp. Bowe was suspended four weeks, and despite a season in which he'd shown progress, the third-year wideout now had more questions to answer. Serious questions now about his judgment, maturity and training regimen.
Bowe says he can't prove his story. He says he hopes his reputation is enough to convince others that he wouldn't knowingly cheat.
"A lot of people know that it wasn't steroids," he says. "I didn't have any intention of taking nothing that would jeopardize me professionally.... Even the doctor from the NFL, every time I call him, he's like, 'You're the easiest guy to ever work with; I think it's BS,' and stuff like that. Man, everybody knows."
So why didn't Bowe appeal the suspension and attempt to defray the suspicion that he is a player who cuts corners? Was he not determined to curb the effects of being a pro athlete now stained, like so many others, by failing a performance- enhancing drug test?
"I could've fought it, you know," he says. "But for what?"
* * *
Bowe says he learned. That was what this season was supposed to be about, anyway. Bowe says he knows now that trust doesn't always exist in the NFL and that his maturity will be questioned in the future.
"You've got to have good people in your corner, I'll tell you that," he says. "Without good people in my corner, I probably would've made a couple more mistakes.
"You've got to fall but not fall on your face."
Bowe steps into a pair of sneakers and heads to his meeting. He might represent the blemished face of this franchise — a franchise that, after 12 chaotic months, could use a break.
Haley says he still believes in Bowe. The coach says he thinks Bowe can be part of that nucleus that Haley has mentioned so many times. Haley says the upcoming months will be valuable for his team. He says that players and coaches are now aware of the expectations and the rules, and Haley says he hopes that because of that, 2010 should be smoother than 2009.
After today, Haley says the Chiefs will enter the second phase of their rebuilding plan. Fewer drastic lessons, fewer threats, and perhaps fewer harsh truths than everyone had to endure this season. That's the hope, anyway.
"Every word isn't going to be new," Haley says. "There's now a glossary of terms that will allow us to function much more efficiently in the offseason."
Haley says the second level of the plan involves more lessons relayed from players to their teammates, instead of coaches trying to teach it all. It involves more football and less discipline. More polish, maybe, and less of an overhaul. It doesn't hurt to have hope, as long as a different reality doesn't come as a surprise.
"A difficult year for everyone involved," he says. "These guys took it on the chin."
