About five hours after Myron Cope announced his retirement last week as color analyst on Steelers broadcasts, a veteran radio guy in town sent this e-mail.

"Are you listening to Madden?" he wrote. "I can't believe he's being so fair to Cope."

And therein lies the brilliance of Mark Madden, the late-afternoon talk-show host on ESPN Radio 1250. He not only can fool many of his listeners, but he even can fool savvy broadcasting veterans.

Madden wasn't fair with Cope. He didn't approach being fair. But on this day, when Madden knew Cope, a Pittsburgh legend, would receive reverential treatment everywhere, he turned down his venom a notch or two. Instead of his normal style of bashing Cope with a two-by-four, he was merely beating him with a stick. It was in such a contrast from his usual style that he appeared to be fair. But he wasn't being fair, he was being less unfairly biased than usual.

Instead of hailing down a torrent of abuse on Cope, he actually threw in a couple of compliments.

But the result was a same: talk radio at its worst.

Madden bragged about not having a filter on what he says. Actually, he needs a filter to separate truth from fiction.

Madden opened by acknowledging he has no use for Cope, something even casual listeners to his show already knew.

"I don't like Myron Cope, not personally or professionally," he said.

Then he threw out a compliment:

"But Myron Cope has become what everyone in our profession aspires to be: indigenous to the fabric of the community."

Sounded nice. Madden, after acknowledging he did not like Cope, was praising him. What could be more fair?

Except after that it was a series of statements that didn't make much sense or clearly were not accurate.

The show wasn't 15 minutes old when Madden said the following of the ultra-successful talk show Cope ran on that station for about 20 years until he gave it up in 1995:

"It was all Steelers all the time and I mean all Steelers all the time."

"Nonsense," said Cope, when informed of Madden's accusation. "It's the usual stuff he makes up.

"I knew I could do Steelers show all year round and I could get the biggest audience that way. But I was deliberate in doing other sports. I wanted a well-rounded show."

Cope went out of his way to pursue other sports. He regularly attended Pirates and Penguins games and worked the locker room afterward so he'd be up-to-speed for callers who wished to address those sports. He knew the players and the coaches on those teams, and they knew him. This enabled him to sometimes get scoops over print journalists who regularly worked those beats.

Shortly thereafter, Madden said of Cope: "He would hang up on hockey callers."

Anyone who knows Cope or listened to him knows he possesses old-world manners. He didn't and doesn't hang up on people in the manner Madden was suggesting.

"It's a total fabrication," said Cope. "The only time I hung up on a caller were for reasons that applied to any call -- if they got out of line or had a bad mouth or wouldn't accept a polite good night."

In fact, Cope courted hockey callers.

It was Cope, in the mid-1970s -- well before the Penguins became the hot item they were with the addition of Mario Lemieux -- who had a "Win A Date With Pierre Larouche" contest on his show. Larouche was the dashing young star of the Penguins at the time.

Madden also leveled this charge:

"There were many times, and this is where the Pittsburgh media just plays such favorites and ignores the truth. It has never been printed in any paper anywhere -- and I know Bob Smizik knows. There have been times over the past few years the Steelers' producers on the radio broadcast made the decision to shut off Myron's mike for minutes, sometimes for quarters or halves at a time, during Steelers broadcasts because he sounded so ridiculous and because he wasn't prepared to work."

These are serious charges on several counts.

"I flatly deny that ever happened," said John Moschitta, the operations director for WDVE, the Steelers' flagship station.

"I never heard of such a thing," Cope said.

More to the point, if this is true, why is Madden releasing it now? If he had such a damning morsel of information about a man he so clearly despises, he could have given it to any number of people in the media who would have printed it.

Why, in fact, didn't he give it to his own stations, which prides itself on breaking stories?

Truth be known, Madden likely was as sad as many of Cope's fans about this retirement. He won't have Myron to kick around any more.