Sportsfrog.com

Former Pittsburgh Steelers star Jerome Bettis, in a new book to be published in early September, says he faked a training camp injury in 2000 to avoid getting cut by the team.

The book, “The Bus. My Life in and out of a Helmet,” includes an account where Bettis came into training camp with a knee that had been surgically repaired the previous summer. Bettis, fearing he would be cut if the team knew how much the knee was injured, didn’t say anything. During a short-yardage drill at an early camp practice, Bettis fell down, grabbed his knee and yelled in pain.

“Man, did I do a nice job of acting,” Bettis wrote in the book, co-authored by ESPN.com national columnist Gene Wojciechowski. “The thing is, I wasn’t faking that I had an injury. I was just faking that the injury happened on that short-yardage play. I had to fool the coaches and the team’s medical department into thinking the injury had occurred on that play. Otherwise, the Steelers would have had their reason to cut me and my salary.”

Because Bettis was hurt in training camp, the Steelers couldn’t release him.