Write By Me

In March 1973 (Ernie) Holmes, who was later diagnosed as suffering from acute paranoid psychosis, allegedly pulled a shotgun from his truck while driving on the Ohio turnpike and began shooting out the tires of passing trucks. This led to a high-speed chase, a shootout and a standoff with state police that ended in a nearby forest with Holmes allegedly shooting an officer in the ankle.

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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.

Still think this is all sensationalist anti-Steelers crap?

That list includes former Steelers guard Terry Long, who tried to kill himself with rat poison after testing positive for steroids in 1991. He died in 2005 after drinking antifreeze. A year before Long died, Steelers offensive linemen Justin Strzelczyk was killed in a fiery head-on collision with a tanker truck after leading New York state troopers on a 40-mile chase. Hall of Fame center Mike Webster died from heart failure in 2002 at the age of 50, tormented by years of dementia, drug use and homelessness.

- David Fleming
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=fleming/110127&sportCat=nfl
 

But no one would contest that as of that time, the 1950s, Chuck Yeager was at the top of the pyramid, number one among all the True Brothers. 
And that voice… started drifting down from on high. At first the tower at Edwards began to notice that all of a sudden there were an awful lot of test pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. And pretty soon there were an awful lot of fighter pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. The air space over Edwards was getting so caint-hardly super-cool day by day, it was terrible. And then that lollygaggin’ poker-hollow air space began to spread, because the test pilots and fighter pilots from Edwards were considered the pick of the litter and had a cachet all their own, wherever they went, and other towers and other controllers began to notice that it was getting awfully drawly and down-home up there, although they didn’t know exactly why. And then, because the military is the training ground for practically all airline pilots, it spread further, until airline passenger all over America began to hear that awshuckin’ driftin’ gone-fishin’ Mud River voice coming from the cockpit… “Now, folks, uh… this is the captain… ummmm… We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not… uh… lockin’ into position…”
But so what! What could possibly go wrong! We’ve obviously got a man up there in the cockpit who doesn’t have a nerve in his body! He’s a block of ice! He’s made of 100 percent righteous victory-rolling True Brotherly stuff.  
 -Tom Wolfe from “The Rght Stuff” on Chuck Yeager’s West Virginia drawl suddenly spreading among pilots because he was such hot shit, such an All-American paragon of a pilot, after breaking the sound barrier. 
(Kudos to Joshua Robinson for the heads up)

All the way down the bank of radar scopes, the air traffic controllers have that savage, bug-eyed look, like men on the verge of drowning, as they watch the computer blips proliferate and speak in frantic bursts of techno-chatter to the pilots: “Continental 1528, turn right heading 280 immediately! Traffic at your 12 o’clock!” A tightly wound Tom Zaccheo, one of the control-room veterans, sinks his teeth into his cuticles and turns, glowering, to the controller by his side: “Hey, watch your goddamned planes — you’re in my airspace!” Two scopes away, the normally unflappable Jim Hunter, his right leg pumping like a pneumatic drill, sucks down coffee and squints as blips representing 747’s with 200 passengers on board simply vanish from his radar screen. “If the F.A.A. doesn’t fix this goddamned equipment,” he fumes, retrieving the blips with his key pad, “it’s only a matter of time before there’s a catastrophe.” And Joe Jorge, a new trainee, scrambling to keep his jets safely separated in the crowded sky, is actually panting down at the end as he orders pilots to turn, climb, descend, speed up, slow down and look out the cockpit window, captain!

— Darcey Frey

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/24/magazine/something-s-got-to-give.html?pagewanted=all

(Thanks to Ryan Killian for the heads up)