The Pittsburgh Steelers will play the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XLV in Dallas’ Jerry World on February 6th. It seems every time the Steelers football team does well enough to make them a contender for the Big Game, sportswriters feel compelled to find a steroid scandal to which they can connect the Steelers.
ESPN’s Mike Fish was fortunate enough to find a scandal when the Steelers played in the 2009 Super Bowl; it doesn’t get any better than connecting a team physician with boat loads of human growth hormone. Sportswriters are usually not so lucky. However, when it comes to the Steelers, they can always take a walk down memory lane, they can provide their readers with a history lesson covering anabolic steroids and the 1970s Steeler dynasty as ESPN’s David Fleming does this year.
The end of the Steelers amazing run in the 1970s came a full decade before the NFL banned steroids. Nevertheless, there has been wide-spread 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% 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.”
Of course, it is also nice when the history lesson on performance-enhancing drugs in pro football is accurate. The Steelers were by no means the first team to use anabolic steroids in professional football. They weren’t even the first team to use them in a systematic and organized manner.
Rather than learn the history of steroids in football from ESPN, steroid historian Matt Chaney gives the true scoop of steroids in pro football in his book, “The Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football”. According to Chaney, it wasn’t the Steelers who started the steroid revolution in football during the late 1970s; it was the San Diego Chargers in the early 1960s, a full decade before the Pittsburgh football dynasty dominated the NFL.
While steroid use was clearly an issue for the Pittsburgh Steeler football team during their first few Super Bowl victories, it is misleading to suggest that their domination was due to secret use of steroids. After all, steroid use had already gained a permanent foothold in the sport and was used by various players on practically all teams in the 1970s.
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