Thursday, August 28, 2003

By Chuck Finder, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

The reviews are in, and the expert critics at 3400 S. Water St. give it a big, gnarled thumbs down.

Players hate "Playmakers."

Steelers players, anyway.

"Hate to say it, but I watched it," quarterback Tommy Maddox said yesterday in the Steelers' locker room, after viewing the overhyped series premiere the night before. "It was horrible."

"It's terrible," added receiver Antwaan Randle El, who watched it with his brother and wife. "My wife was like, 'It better not be [like that].'"

"I thought it was more reality-based because ESPN is doing it," safety Mike Logan said, shaking his head. "When I saw that, I was, like, 'Wow.' For a portrayal of NFL life, like they said it was supposed to be ..."

"It isn't even close," said defensive end Aaron Smith.

Well, the folks at the ESPN never claimed the show was complete pro football reality. This fictional football series is undoubtedly intended to rip from the more tawdry headlines and the more underlying personal conflicts found around the NFL. It's just that nobody expected to find the worst of the worst committing a piling-on penalty in the first episode, a stereotype wrapped inside a cliche smothered in dramatic writ.

Or, as Smith put it so bluntly, so correctly: "How come every character on the show has to have a problem? Isn't there anybody normal?"

A linebacker who paralyzed an opponent. A head coach with a medical problem he attempts to keep secret. The linebacker getting sent to a psychiatrist by the coach, who later chews out the therapist for prescribing no more football for the troubled player. An aging halfback with a thing for a female sportscaster. A rookie halfback with, uh, a drug problem.

Yeah, it's a problem when a guy goes to a house and lights up 15 minutes before kickoff.

"At least make it a few hours before," groused linebacker James Farrior, jokingly.

"The beginning, where the running back was getting ready to go to the game?" Logan began, backing up to the part about the halfback waking up late for team breakfast, with two barenaked ladies in his bed (and I don't mean the band), then getting pulled over without incident for going 70 mph in a 35 mph zone -- no matter that he accidentally spilled drugs in full view on the car's floor. "That's a little off to me."

"That coach isn't going to let him play, I don't care who he is," Randle El said. But, in the "Playmakers" premiere, the coked-up rookie is allowed to play. "You got to respect the coach and your teammates. That was baaaaaaaaaad."

Nice to know some of the real players have values, huh?

Receiver Hines Ward found one redeeming quality in the show, which is just like him, such a positive guy.

The part about that linebacker, the one with the Pittsburgh name of Olczyk? Ward found some consolation in the sensitive, thought-provoking manner in which "Playmakers" delved into an issue that football players try to suppress: the fear of a tragic injury from such a violent game.

Outside of that, the players found few redeeming qualities in the premiere.

Then again, they cannot wait to see what awful twist comes next -- more from a rubbernecking, how-much-worse-can-it-get perspective.

"Somebody who's around the game as much as ESPN is?" Maddox wondered. "Stuff like that might have gone on in the '70s. It's kind of one of those everybody will watch it to see what happens."

"I just hope people don't actually, really -- and hopefully, don't -- believe that's real life," Ward said. "The people watching it, don't believe everything you see out there. Everybody has problems in life. Not just athletes. But it made football players look bad."

That's the saddest part of all.

There is a true-to-life football story that the public would find riveting.

Look at these Steelers, for instance. Maddox as the quarterback who is a retread, having dropped off the football planet and sold insurance for a time. Jerome Bettis as the aging halfback who has been drugged by a wayward doctor's needle and dragged through slime by a criminal allegation later dropped and dogged by squawk-show detractors. Amos Zereoue as the young halfback overcoming the coach's doghouse and a debilitating liver ailment. Kendall Simmons as the hulking lineman felled by a form of diabetes. Plaxico Burress as the young receiver whose mother recently passed away from cancer, leaving him to tend to his siblings. Ward as the receiver raised by a single parent -- a foreigner in a strange land, no less -- who worked several jobs to support him. Smith as the defensive end who similarly grew up a latchkey kid. To say nothing of their everyday aches and pains and worries and family life.

See, some reality TV requires no tweaking. Sports are infused with drama and personality. Screenwriters need not apply.

As Smith said: "I mean, they could have made it realistic, and people would have been entertained. But they had to make it Hollywood."

Not Hollywood Henderson, either.

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