Thursday, November 11, 2004
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Our top story on Action Snooze: Cope on the rebound. That's right, the top story, two nights running.
The Siege of Fallujah? Sorry. Yasser Arafat? Nossir Arafat. Don't you get it? Myron doinked his cranium.
"I got home from the hospital and 10 minutes later Channel 4 was at the door," Myron squawked happily at his South Hills townhouse yesterday. "Before they got their camera set up, Channel 2 is here, then Channel 11. I'm the lead story on the sports page when the Steelers are going great guns.
"It's amazing. I'm a broadcaster, and I'm in the toy department, sports."
Yeah it's amazing. But it's right. And this is really what he wants you to know.
"It's very nice; I appreciate it."
As much as the national sports media have done their damnedest to turn this into Steelers Appreciation Week, the last few days have played out locally more as a pleasing self-examination in the ways we appreciate Cope, a living icon and the singular nexus of the Steelers and their inalterably lathered fandom.
It is little less than compelling that the Steelers are enjoying their best year in a long, long time while Myron is merely rallying from his worst.
"I'm glad it's happening the way it is with the ballclub," he said. "If they were going the way I expected them to go -- and this fully shows what a judge I am -- I figured them for six wins. I thought the offensive line would be a disaster. I was dead wrong. If they were having the kind of year I thought they'd have, on top of the problems I'd had with myself, I'd be going to the games that would have made it twice as bad.
"I'm 100 percent better today; I actually have some energy. A concussion, which they diagnosed, takes a lot out of you. It makes you tired. But I got some good rest, got a good hot shower, scrubbed my hair ..."
OK, that'll do.
The fact is the delayed effects of this Saturday concussion, which forced him from the broadcast booth at halftime of the Steelers-Eagles fray, were the least daunting of Cope's physical and emotional challenges in 2004. As recently as the spring, Cope had started to collect literature from skilled nursing facilities. Sitting on his sofa day after day in his jammies and his bathrobe with his afghan pulled up to his neck and his thermostat pushed toward 80, the still undiagnosed polymyalgia rheumatica ravaged him with despair.
"I thought I'd never broadcast again," he remembered yesterday. "It wasn't fatal, but it was the same as not living. I figured, 'Hell, I'm 75, maybe this is the way I go.' "
Happily, what was thought to be the fallout of severe back trouble and the surgeries that followed was finally determined to be a kind of super arthritis, if you will, and Cope battled through the rehab just in time for doctors to find one lump on his epiglottis this summer, then a second. Surgery removed the entire epiglottis, meaning Cope had to learn to swallow again. But by the time the Steelers were ready to tee it up in earnest, he was ready.
How big was that? Let's put it this way. Who else -- eight weeks into a riotously successful Steelers autumn -- would turn up in Bill Cowher's weekly news conference as naturally as if he were himself a Steeler?
"OK, Duce is questionable with a hamstring, Kreider is questionable with a hip, Jerome is probable with a calf," Cowher could have said, "And Myron is out, with a head."
Of course, Cowher didn't say exactly that, but he said essentially everything else that illuminated the way this town still feels about Cope 35 years after he brought his screeching just-gargled-with-old-razor blades "voice" to the football matter at hand.
I teased him yesterday that his broadcast partners didn't know anything was wrong Sunday until he began using fluent English in perfectly modulated sentences.
He laughed, and then recounted some of the episode, his voice not entirely free of fear.
"I remember taking the wrong way to the stadium; I went out Allegheny River Boulevard," he said. "I remember getting to the game about a quarter to one and flying into the booth totally unprepared. I usually get to the stadium about 9:30. I sat down in the booth and didn't have my rosters pasted up like I normally do. I was trying to think of something to add to the broadcast while plays were going on. I called a Steelers touchdown when they were only at the 5-yard line."
Tunch Ilkin, who stands behind Myron in the booth, noticed the cut on Cope's head and sounded the alarm. Now, Myron will sit out the Cleveland game, which is too bad, because I can tell you from experience that three of the greatest things in life are driving to Cleveland with Myron, arriving at the Steelers hotel with Myron and being in a Browns-Steelers press box with him.
Though it's a while since I've had the pleasure, I remember a black and rainy Saturday night for one of those drives, this one in a ponderous Crown Victoria. Was it just bright fright, or was Myron actually short enough that he was looking at the road through the steering wheel?
As for the hotel, you couldn't walk into a lobby with Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X and Madonna and cause more of an uproar than the arrival of Myron at a hotel stuffed with Steelers fans.
The next day, if the line to the press box's only bathroom was long enough to screw up his halftime routine (bathroom, hot dog, back to the booth), he might go up on the roof of old Cleveland Stadium and urinate over the edge. Which, OK, happened only once.
Don't tell me there's anyone like him.
He'll be in Cincinnati for next week's game. You'll hear him, and you'll feel good. Big Ben will hit Plaxico down the middle for 30 yards and a first down, and Myron will sound like he's having a stroke. That's how you'll know he's fine.
(Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.)
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