War Crimes & Homoeroticism in the Sports Section

I think that Bill Plashke may be losing it…and I don’t mean that in an insulting way. I mean it in a positive we-can-help-you-Bill way.

Because I want to help.

The fairy tale is that, if he wins Sunday, the Arizona Cardinals quarterback has promised to buy his family a puppy.

It’s a fairy tale? As in, it's not real? Warner’s kids are going to be PISSED.

The reality show is that the Pittsburgh Steelers are going to whip the dog out of him.

I’m pretty sure that is not a real phrase.

The fairy tale is that, while dining with his family every Friday night before home games, the Arizona Cardinals quarterback picks up a stranger's bill.

How is this a fairy tale? This really happens. It happens every Friday night before home games. I know this because you just told me it was true…even though you also told me it was a fairy tale.

Your bad writing hurts me.

The reality show is that the Pittsburgh Steelers are going to cash him out.

Plashke is currently waterboarding this fairy tale/reality show device despite waterboarding being specifically disallowed in the Army Field Manual...which means that this column is four sentences in and already officially guilty of a War Crime.

Good start.

The fairy tale is that, for the second time in a bungee-jump of a career, Kurt Warner will finish work Sunday as the sweetest of Super Bowl heroes.

Just when I started to think “hey, that actually is kind of a fairy tale” and “maybe that means that Plashke just needed to get warmed up and is now going to make sense,” I do something stupid like read his next sentence…

The reality show is that the Pittsburgh Steelers will make him melt in their mouthpieces.

Without a single shred of a doubt, this is the single most disturbing sentence ever written in a sports column.

There are, by my rough count, 325,648 jokes that it is possible to make from this sentence alone, but each of them only reinforces what I just read…and I need to be cleansed of that sentence. To pretend that it never happened. To scour my mind clear of the thought that any part (or emission) of Kurt Warner might be melting in the mouthpieces of a single Steelers player. To try manfully to knock away the image of the Steelers actively wanting Kurt Warner in their mouths. So I do not joke about it.

I just flail helplessly beating my head against the wall and weeping in sorrow for the state of sportswriting.

I would go on, but Plashke rides the fairy tale/reality show metaphor so indecently, unfeasibly long that it really belongs in a John Holmes movie. And I just can't do that to myself.

Or to you.