Kordell Stewart / Slash & Burn, a new HBO Original documentary short streaming on HBO Max, goes back to the story Kordell Stewart never managed to outrun in Pittsburgh. It is not about the scrambles, the trick-play catches or the AFC Championship Games. It is about a homophobic rumor that spread through the city while he was the Steelers’ starting quarterback, one he has called a lie ever since. Directed by Brian Rivera, the film is the newest installment of NFL Shorts, the collection HBO makes with NFL Films, and HBO says it goes looking for “the truth behind a story that followed Stewart for decades.”

That framing is the reason the film exists. A sports documentary about a former Pro Bowl quarterback would normally sell the highlights. HBO is selling this one on what happened off the field instead: the tagline on its key art reads “The star. The rumor. The story.”

The player Pittsburgh called Slash

Before the rumor there was the nickname. The Steelers drafted Stewart in the second round out of Colorado, where his 64-yard Hail Mary to Michael Westbrook beat Michigan in the play known as the Miracle at Michigan. Pittsburgh did not hand him the quarterback job right away. Bill Cowher used him as a receiver, a runner and a situational quarterback, and Steelers broadcaster Myron Cope named him “Slash” for doing all three. As a rookie he took a snap at quarterback in Super Bowl XXX, the loss to the Dallas Cowboys, something no other rookie has done.

When he became the full-time starter, the results came fast. In his first season in the job the Steelers went 11-5 and reached the AFC Championship Game, and he became the first quarterback to throw for 20 touchdowns and run for 10 in the same season. Four years later he led a 13-3 team to the AFC’s top seed, made the Pro Bowl and was named team MVP. Across his Pittsburgh years he passed for 13,328 yards and ran for 35 touchdowns. Those are numbers that look far less like an outlier in today’s NFL than they did at the time.

The rumor, in Stewart’s own words

HBO’s synopsis never spells the rumor out. It calls it “a malicious rumor” that “upended his life” just as he became one of football’s biggest stars. Stewart has been more explicit. In an essay for The Players’ Tribune he addressed the story that took hold in Pittsburgh in 1998: that he had engaged in a lewd act with another man in a city park. “It never happened. It was a lie,” he wrote, before adding that the truth was not really the point. He described it as “Twitter trolls before Twitter existed, trying to put me in an impossible situation.”

He has also been direct about why it landed the way it did. “I’m a young Black quarterback in a blue-collar town,” he wrote, describing a late-1990s NFL in which that kind of rumor could not simply be shrugged off. In the same essay he recalled that Steelers president Dan Rooney checked in on him and that Cowher had him address the team, a conversation he says he regrets turning into something closer to a stand-up routine than an honest talk with teammates. He wrote that the Steelers later determined the rumor had been started by a local police officer.

What followed, by his account, was a season of second-guessing. He felt teammates looking at him differently and was, in his words, “in my own head, and that’s not a good place to be for a quarterback.” Later that year, after a home loss to the New England Patriots, a fan in a Steelers jacket threw a beer at him and hurled a racial slur. Stewart’s point in retelling it was the location. The hostility did not come from a road crowd. It came from Pittsburgh.

Who talks in Kordell Stewart / Slash & Burn

HBO’s list of featured participants starts with Stewart himself and then works outward. Cowher was his head coach for his entire Pittsburgh run. Jerome Bettis, the running back, shared that backfield. Mike Mularkey, a former Steelers assistant, was the offensive coordinator in Stewart’s Pro Bowl season. Bob Pompeani is a Pittsburgh broadcaster, and LZ Granderson is a journalist. HBO has not detailed what each of them says on camera.

Read as a line-up, the list suggests where the film looks for answers: the locker room, the coaching staff, the city’s sports media and an outside reporter’s eye on how a story like this moves. HBO’s promise of “candid interviews with Stewart and others who witnessed his brightest and darkest moments” points to a film built on testimony rather than on a reconstruction of the rumor itself.

A viral falsehood before viral had a name

Stewart’s comparison to online trolls is the most useful lens for watching the film. The rumor had none of the machinery that spreads a falsehood now, no screenshots, no hashtags, no quote posts. It still set the terms for how a city looked at its quarterback, and it attached itself to him long after the facts were in his favor. That is the part of his story that reads differently now than it did when it happened. Audiences now have a vocabulary for a coordinated smear, and the sports world has seen how fast one can travel.

It is also why the production credits matter. Slash & Burn is a Skydance Sports presentation and an NFL Films production, which means the league’s own film unit is revisiting a story that once circulated around one of its marquee franchises. The earlier NFL Shorts were lighter: The Shuffle, the Sports Emmy-nominated short about the 1985 Chicago Bears’ rap anthem, and last month’s Miller Night Football, about comedian Dennis Miller’s stint in the Monday Night Football booth. This installment takes the collection somewhere heavier.

The football record has its own explanations, and an honest film has to hold them alongside the rumor. Before the 1998 season the Steelers lost offensive coordinator Chan Gailey to the Cowboys and Stewart’s leading receiver, Yancey Thigpen, to free agency, and the team missed the playoffs that year and the next. Stewart later lost the job to Tommy Maddox, was released, and finished his career with the Chicago Bears and the Baltimore Ravens. Separating what the noise did from what the roster did is the hardest question the documentary sets for itself.

Stewart summed it up in the same essay, in a line that could serve as the film’s thesis: “I took all the shots. I took all the slurs. I took all the slander. I made a lot of mistakes. But I stayed in that pocket.” The documentary can chase the rumor back to where it started. What it cannot do is give a quarterback back the seasons he spent playing under it, or tell anyone how those years would have gone without it.

Kordell Stewart / Slash & Burn: what to know

Kordell Stewart / Slash & Burn is a documentary short about a real story: the false rumor that followed the former Steelers quarterback from 1998 onward, told through interviews with Stewart, Bill Cowher, Jerome Bettis, Mike Mularkey, Bob Pompeani and LZ Granderson. It runs 40 minutes and is directed, produced and edited by Brian Rivera, whose previous work includes WWE: Unreal. It debuts on Tuesday, October 27, 2026, at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on HBO in the United States and streams on HBO Max; availability outside the US depends on each market’s HBO Max catalog.

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