In the months before his 2005 death, former NFL offensive lineman Steve Courson wrote a 5,000-word letter expressing disappointment that more players aren't open about their steroid use and saying the league's enormous popularity relies on a "myth" of its players as drug-free heroes.
"I believe the NFL is a prisoner to their own public relations myth," Courson said in the letter, which was found on the computer of his western Pennsylvania home after he was crushed to death at age 50 by a tree he was cutting down. "The level of deception and exploitation that the NFL requires to do business still amazes me."
Frank, personal and philosophical, the letter, obtained by The Sun, amounts to a treatise from the grave. "Steve deserves this chance to continue to speak, and it was a godsend in a way to get this," said friend and author Matt Chaney, who said he plans to quote from the document in a book titled Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, due out early next year.
Courson, who became one of professional sports' first steroid whistle-blowers by detailing his use in a 1985 Sports Illustrated interview, wrote the letter to a former Pittsburgh Steelers teammate he played with on Super Bowl-winning teams in 1978 and 1979. Chaney says he believes Courson never sent it because it was unfinished.
Chaney provided it to The Sun on condition that the intended recipient not be publicly identified. Chaney and others said it was not Courson's goal to ruin retired players' reputations, but rather to look broadly at steroid use in sports.
"He was upset at the fact that these guys wouldn't come clean for him," said Denise Masciola, who was Courson's girlfriend. "But if Steve really wanted names to be mentioned, he would have done it. He didn't."
In the letter, which was authenticated by Masciola, Courson suggested that many current and former players are, in effect, living a lie by denying their use of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. He said those players were pawns to a sport that continually required them to be bigger, stronger and faster.
"It's not complicated; either you behave like a stand up person or you don't," he wrote. "Finally, I guess it gets down to whether or not we want to be remembered historically for being stooges to the myth or for being freed by the truth."
Courson's letter focuses more on his era than on the present day. But he said steroid use had persisted.
