thepoliticalfreakshow:

SOME BOYS JUST RUN SMOOTHER THAN others, burn premium for fuel, not unleaded. Eric Pelly is a Jaguar of a kid, all throttle and forward lean, no square edges. From the age of six, he’s played two sports a season and trained with the zeal of a walk-on grinder, the peewee Clay Matthews. Crunches and pushups while he’s watching TV, hours of lifting after he’s home from school and blitzed through his class work, then out with his boys for games of flag football that turn into tackle without the pads. At one point, in middle school, he was bigger than other kids, but topped out — cruelly — at five-eight. He moped for weeks when the doctor told him that his growth plates had shut for good, then bore down harder to craft a body that would take him where he planned to go. Here’s a straight-A student at a high school so competitive that he’s barely in the top 100 in his class, but he’s still telling his mom what he’s said since grade school: I’m going to play pro football. You just watch.

That isn’t merely the Pittsburgh talking in him, though it seems like every male in this yellow-and-black town wants to be Troy Polamalu, or hit like him. Since he was old enough to walk or, more like it, run, Eric has craved contact the way fat kids crave soft serve. At 16, playing flanker for his high school team, the perennial section champs North Allegheny, he goes up for a pass, cracks helmets with a safety and bangs his head on the turf when he lands. By the time he’s 17, he’s had a couple of concussions that his parents, Joan and Mark, know about, and maybe another couple that they don’t. “I kept him out of football as long as I could — he knew I didn’t want him to play,” says Joan, an ex-flight attendant who stopped flying long ago so she could ferry her three kids to their games. “He was always so driven, but clever, too; he could talk you into anything,” she says. “In the end, he finally wore down my resistance.”

In the fall of his junior year, Eric stumbles home after taking a shot to the jaw in a backyard football game. His friends help him in, then he slides down the wall, saying, “Mom, I got another, but don’t worry.” This concussion’s different, though: The headaches last for weeks, as does the fatigue that keeps him home on school mornings. He fights through it and goes in late, but has trouble finishing exams: His eyes seem to wobble in their sockets. “He had headaches and stuff, though he didn’t talk about it much; he was hard-nosed, always going a hundred-and-ten,” says Bill Landefeld, a friend and confidante with a concussion history himself, having wrestled in high school and college. “There are certain kids that don’t know another speed and need someone to step in and slow them down. That’s what he was missing: a coach to say stop. He’d be in the gym, lifting, while he was still concussed.”

At length, Eric recovers but gives up playing football, in part to reclaim his summers from the grind of practice. Still, he can’t shake it, that need for speed; it’s wired into the dura of his brain. So when a close friend, Jon Casile, joins a high school rugby club, Eric tags along to check it out. He falls hard for the game, finding it just the right mix of skill, force and smarts — and no cheap head shots. He likes it so well, in fact, that he makes a huge leap the summer he turns 18, earning a spot on the Pittsburgh Harlequins, a semi-pro team. “We were going against men, guys who’d played college and World Cup, but Eric was so good he fit right in,” says Casile. Fast and fearless, Eric scores in bunches and becomes a starter at outside center. At an away game, however, he gets dinged carrying the ball and subs out before the half and doesn’t return. Once home, he tells no one about the blow to his head, afraid that Joan will blow her stack and squash his playing career once and for all. Just two weeks later, he’s back on the pitch, wrestling men a hundred pounds bigger. Joan watches from the stands when he makes his trademark tackle, a low, hard takedown of a bruising forward. The forward pops up again but Eric doesn’t; he’s too woozy to stand, so his teammates carry Eric to the bench. The next thing Joan knows, her son is balled up on the ground, moaning and holding his head in vice-grip pain. An ambulance is called as she races across; Eric is barely conscious when she gets there. Still, he keeps muttering “I’m OK, Mom,” as they wait for the medics to show. “It was so ingrained in him to tell me that,” she says. “Even out of it, laying across his coach’s shoulder.”

Ten days later — after leaving the hospital and making a shockingly swift return to class — Eric goes back to his stopless life, though he clearly is not the same kid. “We ate lunch together and he wasn’t all there, said his head was really hurting bad,” says Landefeld, 23, now the front-desk manager of a Marriott hotel in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. “I met him in the hall and saw the same thing: He couldn’t focus or really follow the conversation,” says Adam Neugebauer, another close friend who’s now a graduate assistant at Tiffin University in Ohio. “He said he wanted to go to sleep but couldn’t that day. He had to work at his father’s shop after school.” That evening, eating dinner and discussing the frog pond in the yard, Eric suddenly seizes up, midsentence. His eyes roll back and his fists clench tight; he’s dead from a massive brain swell either before he hits the floor or within a couple of seconds of having done so. His mother screams at his sister Jenna to call 911, as Mark tries to revive him, but the cranial edema has crushed his brainstem and shorted out his heart and lungs. This boy, who was so fully and sleekly alive that he never stopped moving or multitasking from the moment he rolled out of bed, is killed at 18 by a pair of concussions that no one who saw them happen thought life-threatening. And then, two years later, comes a second shock of horror to a family blown sideways by grief. At a lab outside Boston, neuropathologists examining Eric’s brain have found clumps of poisoned cells, the brown-tinted markers of CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It is the disease that’s dimmed the minds of retired football icons, wrought early dementia in hockey fighters and turned the brains of punched-out boxers into mush. As it can’t yet be detected in living subjects (the clumps are too small to show on current scanners), it’s been confirmed only in deceased ex-athletes whose brains were donated for study. Those players include Mike Webster, Pittsburgh’s Hall of Fame center; Terry Long, who played be-side him on that Steelers line, and Justin Strzelczyk, Long’s mountainous linemate soon after Webster retired. To date, 75 subjects have tested positive at that lab, the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy in Bedford, Massachusetts — men who won Super Bowls and hockey brawls and paid an awful price for it by their forties. To their number, add Eric Pelly, a boy who once burned to be a Steeler and, if nothing else, died like one. He very surely will not be the last.

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thatisawesome:

Pixar animator Austin Madison created a ton of drawings based on this years sports season. These pictures are unbelievable and completely fit within the context of what happened in each match-up. Unbelievable. 

Full gallery here. 

Amazing. They’re all amazing.

This is the greatest headline that will ever be written.

That work of genius is from news editor Rebecca Reis. Read the full story, written by Grant Engle.

“There are no signs of abuse,” Washington State University athletic director Bill Moos told reporters last month, after the school had concluded an internal investigation into claims that football coach Mike Leach and his staff had mistreated players in his debut season there. Based on interviews with a dozen football players and staff members, the school cleared the coaches of any wrongdoing.

In early November, star wide receiver Marquess Wilson walked out on practice, was suspended by Leach, and then released an open letter announcing he was quitting the team because of the coaches’ abusive conduct. According to documents obtained by Deadspin and interviews with people around the football program, Wilson was not the only person who saw trouble between the Cougars’ new coaches and the players they’d inherited.

The Pac-12 is doing its own separate investigation into the program, with results expected soon. Whatever that inquiry concludes, it’s already clear that Leach—who was fired from his last job at Texas Tech after a dispute over his treatment of a player—has not been treading lightly in Pullman when it comes to matters of discipline and player injuries.

Sources and documents recount clashes between training staff and coaches over player safety, and physical—and nearly physical—altercations between coaches and players. They describe “dangerously excessive” workouts used as punishments, including an episode in which coaches supposedly sprayed players in the face with water from a hose while making them exercise in a sandpit in cold weather.

“Dangerously Excessive”: How Washington State Football Confronted, And Didn’t Confront, The First Bad News Of The Mike Leach Era

(Photo from USA Today Sports Images)

KENT STATE = NATIONAL CHAMPS!

usatodaysports:

My Kent State, what big eyes you have … on your helmets.

Seriously, what is going on with these helmets?

pgdigs:

Aug. 16, 1961: “Steelerettes — the Steelers’ hard-hatted cheerleaders”

Before the Terrible Towel and that ever-present chant “Here we go Steelers, here we go,” we had the Steelerettes to whip up enthusiasm for our favorite NFL team. It was a tall order — the Steelers of 50 years ago were perennial losers. Heck, even selling tickets was tough.

The Steelerettes were formed in 1961, making them the NLF’s first cheerleading squad. Members were “secretarial science” students at what was then called Robert Morris School of Business. And the look? Let’s just say it was conservative by today’s standards. Steelerettes of the early 1960s wore gold knee-length bibbed jumpers and hardhats. Even their grandmothers could approve.

The Steelerettes cheered until 1970, when Art Rooney Sr. ordered them gone. In a Post-Gazette interview several years ago, Art Rooney Jr. said his dad  ”never did like that stuff.” And so the young women who cheered a losing team through many lean years missed the glory days that were so soon to come.

(Photo by Morris Berman, Post-Gazette)

— Steve Mellon

I wrote a column for the Stater sports page today because I needed to vent about Kent State football coach Darrell Hazell leaving to coach at Purdue.