FanPost

Shut Your Dirty Pie Hole


Today ESPN front paged a David Fleming article with the lede "Dirty Little Secret" Hey ESPN and David Fleming Shut Your Dirty Pie Hole!

Over at Page 2 David Fleming's editors tell us at the bottom of the post

David Fleming is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and a columnist for ESPN.com. While covering the NFL for the past 16 years at Sports Illustrated and ESPN, he has written more than 30 cover stories ...

Well, then I guess Fleming and his editors think all that experience means this sort of s**t gets to fly as is..

The end of the Steelers' amazing run in the 1970s came a full decade before the NFL banned steroids. Nevertheless, there has been widespread speculation that the first part of the Steelers' dynasty is tainted in some way by the fact that it helped popularize steroid use in the NFL. In the 1991 book "False Glory: The Steve Courson Story," the former Steelers offensive lineman wrote that 75 percent of the offensive linemen on the Steelers' Super Bowl teams in the late 1970s had used steroids.

Steroid use was, after all, not banned by the league at the time, and I wonder if the spotlight has fallen on the Steelers largely because they were so damn good. Not everyone agrees, though. "It started, really, in Pittsburgh," Jim Haslett said in 2005 while coaching the New Orleans Saints. "They got an advantage on a lot of football teams. They were so much stronger [in the] '70s, late '70s, early '80s. They're the ones who kind of started it."

The Steelers challenged this statement, of course, but the ramifications -- and suspicions -- linger. A 2009 investigation by ESPN into the Steelers' history with performance-enhancing drugs found an alarming number of former players suffering from heart ailments. "Even if there is no pattern or clue linking the deaths to steroids," wrote the article's author, Mike Fish, "since 2000, 17 former Steelers have died before they reached the age of 59."

Seventeen men. Dead.

Get that? There are 17 Steelers under 59 who are dead.
Fleming insinuates the cause is steroids, and that this fate is somehow unique to the Steelers.

Surely this very experienced writer in the area of NFL sports then goes on to compare the Steeler premature death rate with other NFL teams, right?

Nope!

What about other sports teams, say college football? baseball? anything?

Nope. Nope. And Nope!

You know what Mr. Fleming? Steroid use by the Steelers before the time it was neither thought to be detrimental nor banned was a bad thing. But no one needs your sensational yellow journalism with your site's scary graphic.

So, for the next couple of weeks why don't you just shut your dirty pie hole.

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