Talking trash: The, uh, forthcoming Plaxico Burress book

“Giant: The Road to the Super Bowl” (in bookstores July 1) is the literary equivalent of listening to Plaxico Burress speak — for 200-plus pages. In other words, Burress has nothing to say, and what he does try to say, is like, half-baked and incoherent. I feel sorry for all the English, writing and communications professors at Michigan State University (where Burress went to college), who must have shuddered when they heard that Plaxico Burress received a book deal. I feel sorry for aspiring authors everywhere, who now have to live with the fact that Plaxico — of all people! — has a book and they don’t. Most importantly, I feel for the children, all the young, impressionable minds who will have the misfortune of being exposed to this material. It’s an entire book filled with sentences like this one: “My first time taking the SAT was like 630 or 620 or something.”

Anyway, the only chapters of any real interest to Pittsburgh fans are four and five (“School Daze: Getting a Rep” and “Starting in Steeltown”), both of which reinforce my feeling that the Steelers should never have selected Burress with the eighth pick of the 2000 draft. While it’s not necessarily news to the Pittsburgh faithful, Plax does confirm that he failed to show up for his private pre-draft workout with Bill Cowher: “I was supposed to meet with [the Steelers] at two in the afternoon. But I slept through it. I got a call from Coach Cowher that afternoon and he said, ‘We missed you, what happened? I flew all the way [to Michigan] to see you work out.’ I said, ‘Coach, my bad, I’m just dead tired.’” That alone should have been enough for the Steelers to go in another direction, as it foretold his future in Pittsburgh (“I would be late to meetings all the time”; “When I lived in Pittsburgh … it was a party all the time”). He also openly discusses his “six homeboys from Virginia Beach,” the posse he supported during his first few years in Pittsburgh: (“I’ve seen them guys pull guns and shoot at people,” he says. “I’ve seen them beat guys with bats and things like that….”) With all these distractions, it’s no wonder Plax failed to live up to expectations while he played for the Steelers.