Pittsburgh Steelers safety Ryan Clark has balls.  Or maybe he wants to be cut, or traded.  Because Clark is sounding off regarding the manner in which the team’s training staff handled the injury that kept him sidelined for much of last season. After several weeks with an uncertain status, he was placed on injured reserve with a spleen injury. Eventually, Clark’s spleen was removed.

Though we typically frown on players taking this kind of stuff public (see Kelly, Malcolm), Clark is speaking out not because the training staff screwed up his initial diagnosis, but because they made him to feel like a malingerer when the diagnosis proved to be wrong, and when no one knew quite what was wrong with him.

Clark made his comments on 105.9 The X in Pittsburgh with Tim Benz. Here’s a portion of the transcript, as provided by the station: “There will always be a problem with me and the trainers here. . . . I got fed up with it. . . . I feel mistreated.  I don’t feel like things were handled in the way they should’ve been. . . . I was made to feel that the tests say, ‘You are okay so why are you milking this?’ . . . I felt like I was talked to like I was uneducated and misgiuided . . . . I felt like I was talked to like a dumb jock or a pampered football player. . . .”

The Steelers didn’t make a trainer available to respond.  Benz tells us that the Steelers said that they stand by their trainers, and that the team feels that the injury was handled properly.