It’s January, so that means it’s time for ESPN to generate controversy by suggesting that a recent Super Bowl champion that just so happens to be competing for another berth in the Super Bowl has obtained its success through cheating. Last year, Mike Fish of ESPN.com burst onto the scene on the Friday before the Super Bowl, the same day that former Pats video employee Matt Walsh finally went on the record with the New York Times after being chased by Fish and others for months. The feeding frenzy fueled by Fish likely prompted the Boston Herald to report the next morning that the Patriots had videotaped a Rams practice prior to the Pats first Super Bowl win six years earlier. Though ESPN didn’t have ultimate ownership of the ultimately disgraced story, Fish and others at ESPN.com were squarely in the middle of a string of reports that strongly implied Walsh knew something big about the Patriots and allegations of past cheating. In the end, the Herald admitted its error and apologized. ESPN never did. This time, Fish and his editors decided to plop onto the national sports consciousness less than three days before the AFC title game another lengthy-to-the-point-of-unreadable article suggesting that the Pittsburgh Steelers were giving their players HGH. Of course, Fish never says that the Steelers were giving their players HGH. But the article oozes with the implication that Dr. Richard Rydze was purchasing large amounts of HGH not for his non-football-playing patients. It is expertly written, in our opinion, to point the reader to the conclusion that Fish wants the reader to make but doesn’t have the evidence to support -- that Fish thinks Rydze was buying HGH and giving it to Steelers players. And the paragraph after paragraph of plodding prose will make most readers at some point abandon ship, after concluding that there must be evidence somewhere in the story linking the Steelers to HGH. The basic facts are simple. Reports surfaced in February 2007 that Rydze had used his own credit card to buy $150,000 in HGH in 2006. There was and still is no evidence that Rydze had distributed the substances to Steelers players. Four months later, the Steelers severed ties with Rydze. Fish abandons all common sense when addressing the reasons for the move. “So why . . . did Rydze leave the Steelers so willingly?” Fish asked former Steelers player (who played for the Steelers long before any of these issues came to light) and current ESPN talking head Merril Hoge. “Why didn’t he put up a fight to save his association with the team?” Um, maybe Rydze left because he knew that the team could no longer afford to be associated with a physician who had purchased HGH in any amounts, since it could cause people to conclude that the team endorsed his conduct. And maybe Rydze realized that the Steelers really had no choice, given that HGH is a substance that the NFL has banned. The entire goal of this piece, in our opinion, is to take facts that had been already reported long ago -- that a Steelers physician had purchased $150,000 worth of HGH with his own credit card -- and to then fill in details that aren’t all that surprising or groundbreaking as part of a lengthy analysis aimed at communicating to the casusal reader inclined to dislike the Steelers that the Steelers are cheaters. And, of course, to divert some of the national attention that the Steelers are enjoying to ESPN. It’s the same formula that Fish and ESPN used last year regarding the Patriots, and that the network employed during the 2008 season, as the Cowboys were imploding. Here’s our question for Fish and the editors at ESPN.com: Why now? Why on January 15, three days before the AFC championship game? Was the story not ready before today? Or was it specifically held to have maximum effect? Did ESPN consider holding the story until the Thursday or Friday before the Super Bowl, and did ESPN decide that there’s a good chance that the Ravens will win on Sunday, making the story of possible HGH use by Steelers players far less intriguing? Have we mentioned that there’s a need for a full-time, real-time ESPN ombudsman?
Like the Spygate frenzy of late 2007, ESPN’s look at HGH and the Steelers ignores the fact that, even if Steelers players were getting HGH from Dr. Rydze, plenty of other NFL players with other NFL teams have used it. Fish fails to mention, for example, that the NFL doesn’t test for HGH, which means that players can use it with impunity, as long as there’s no paper trail as to how they got it. (Rodney Harrison and Wade Wilson learned this lesson the hard way.) Fish also offers no background regarding the prevalence of HGH. In September 2006, Redskins tackle Jon Jansen said that HGH use “is on the rise” and that 15 to 20 percent of all players use some type of performance-enhancing substance. (Jansen later “clarified” his comments.) So why wouldn’t Fish and ESPN mention these facts, especially since they would tend to support the notion that Rydze was giving HGH to Steelers players? We think Fish and ESPN left it out because the story is far less sexy if other teams are doing it. The overriding purpose is, in our view, to create another Patriots-style lightning rod, drawing eyeballs and ears to the various ESPN platforms so that they can acquire information and express opinions about whether the Steelers’ most recent Super Bowl win is tainted, and whether their current run for another title can be undermined by the efforts of ESPN to create a distraction. All that said, there continues to be no evidence that Dr. Rydze gave HGH to Steelers players in 2006 or previously. So since Fish struck gold (or so he thought) with a disgruntled former Patriots employee last year, did Fish try to track down former Steelers players who might blow the whistle on HGH use, if the Steelers are engaged in some type of elaborate laboratory experiments in which no other NFL franchises are engaged? Guard Alan Faneca was a Steeler in 2006, and he was unhappy when he left. Maybe he would have given an off-the-record admission. Or what about Joey Porter? He was cut by the team after the 2006 season, and a looser cannon there cannot be. Receiver Cedrick Wilson has every reason to be upset; he was dumped for allegedly doing the same kind of stuff to a woman that two-time team MVP James Harrison allegedly did. Did Fish ask Cedric about HGH? So either Fish didn’t try to talk to former players at all, and thus was being journalistically irresponsible, or he tried to find out what former players had to say on the matter and came up with nothing, making him even more irresponsible for not pointing out the failed efforts to determine by talking with Steelers players whether Dr. Rydze had given them HGH. In the end, it was far simpler to point out the previously-known facts, splice in comments harvested via various interviews of folks who were in no position to confirm or deny Fish’s underlying suppositions, and scatter the suspicion throughout the article that HGH was given to Steelers players. “And that’s the issue,” Fish concludes as to the question of what Rydze did with the HGH. “People are still left to wonder.” As for us, we wonder how long ESPN can continue to peddle this same, tired formula.