The Super Bowl and why I care
I am a fair-weather fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Oh, there were many years, in the '90s, when I suffered like a stalwart, week after week. My roommate in Pittsburgh first conned me into the ritual -- every Sunday he'd make a ton of delicious hoagies and sit on the couch, watching the Steelers on TV with the sound off and the radio on so he could listen to the deranged rants of our local color commentator, Myron Cope. Hungry and ever-eager to be distracted from my work as a freelance writer I'd join him. Soon I was hooked. When I moved to L.A., I found myself getting up at ungodly early hours to watch the Steelers on widescreen at a Santa Monica sports bar, surrounded by the kind of guys who used to beat me up in junior high school. When the Steelers won I was happy. When they lost, my day of rest was ruined.
After agonizing through years of disappointing seasons, though -- most notably the Kordell Stewart era, when the team could have clearly gone all the way if that multi-talented QB could have managed to stop throwing the ball into the arms of opposing teams' defensemen -- I quit cold turkey. Why gamble my sanity on a football team? My life was painful and stressful enough without spending every other Sunday walking around in a deep blue funk of post-game loss.
So now that the team has finally made it to the Super Bowl, I feel almost guilty to take pleasure in their success. I haven't quite suffered the way some of my fellow Steeler-loving Pittsburgh ex-patriates have.
Well, fuck it. I can't help it. I'm still proud as fuck.
And I'm not the only semi-fan experiencing that inescapable pride. Two weekends ago, when the Steelers clinched their Super Bowl berth, the first person to call me was my Dad. He was giddy. "How about that?" he kept saying. "Wow, how about that?!" I don't think he's watched a football game since the mid-1970's.
What's at work here is a kind of symbolism which I'm not sure a non-Pittsburgher can really understand. It's certainly hard to explain to my mostly anti-sports friends, who are often surprised to learn I give a shit about the Steelers. After all, I 've got little or no interest in any other team of any kind.
Here's the thing: more than any team in any sport I can think of, the Steelers truly embody their hometown -- a great, stubborn city so mired in the past that it's brought itself to the edge of extinction. If they win, it means the city, against all odds, can too.
Pittsburgh, in its heyday, was America's most important manufacturing hub, and the ultimate blue-collar town. The place was thick with beefy Polish and Italian immigrants who migrated there to work in the steel industry. They worked until dark and then drank and slept and worked again. They ate pierogies and haluski and kielbasa -- the kind of potato-and-cabbage diet that hardens you from the gut out. In the Homestead neighborhood, workers battled to the death in labor clashes with cops and mercenaries. They fought for the right to a simple middle-class life, and eventually they got it.
Then globalization began and within a few years, the Pittsburgh steel industry vanished, beaming all those jobs and mills overseas. Even today, tourists are surprised when they visit Pittsburgh and find it shiny and clean, not (as writer James Parton once described it during the steel boom) "Hell with the lid off." That's how fast the mills went away -- there still hasn't been enough time for the rest of the country to fully realize they've gone.
But even as the city converted itself from a manufacturing to a service/academic economy (the biggest employer in town is the University of Pittsburgh), it hasn't let go of its milltown past. It's still a place of weird little neighborhoods which residents don't often leave, separated as they are by rivers, bridges and hills. Many of those neighborhoods are dotted with relics of the steel era -- old buildings, shops, streetcar tracks. People patronize their local dive bars, some of which still serve pierogies along with the local pisswater -- Iron City Beer. Lots of Pittsburghers are pro-life, but they tend to vote Democrat because Democrats are pro-labor. The number one radio station is old-school AM, not FM. Fashion and fitness are not top priorities -- you can still find plenty of big hair, mullets and obesity. Shitty roads, endless mountains and lousy weather keep Pittsburghers isolated from other nearby cities, and that's made the town insular, eccentric, hard-nosed and slow to change.
Pittsburgh is distrustful of change. It hasn't learned how to give its kids anything new and interesting to do. It's done a shitty job of parlaying its cheap cost of living and historic arts culture (the city boats some of the greatest museums on Earth) into programs and policies that actually encourage artists to stick around and make art. So it's been losing its young, talented people for decades. A couple of years back one of those big business magazines rated Pittsburgh one of the worst cities in America to be single. They cited the lack of stuff to do, and the fact that most of the people who live there are old. But it's also just plain futile to attempt a long-term relationship if you plan to stay in Pittsburgh -- because at some point your partner will almost certainly move away.
So the population is shrinking and getting older. The tax base has dwindled to the point that the city teeters perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy.
Now, compare Pittsburgh to its team.
The Steelers. STEEL-ers, for Christ's sake! Decades after the steel industry abandoned the city, the team's helmets are still emblazoned with U.S. Steel Corp's old "Steelmark" logo. Why? It has always been that way, that's fucking why. The Steelers play a brand of football that for years had similarly been considered a relic of a bygone age. "Smashmouth," it's called. Not much fancy passing. Lots of running headlong into the opposing team, again and again and again, until they give. This year the Steelers ran the ball more than any other team in the league. It's bruising, it takes forever, it tends to make for excruciatingly close games, and though it almost always gets the Steelers into the playoffs, it's only brought them to the Super Bowl one other time in coach Bill Cowher's 14 years at the helm (they lost). Yet they refuse to give it up. They just put their heads down and keep doing what they do. Fuck fashion. Fuck looks and style -- until the arrival of the miraculous Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers' star player of the century has been Jerome Bettis, a 268 lb. fatty with asthma. Fuck these newfangled opponents in their redesigned uniforms with their flashy long-bomb quarterbacks and their flashy cheerleaders (the Steelers haven't had cheerleaders since 1969, when the team's owners decided they were a distraction from the game). Just dig in, do your job, and work hard for every single yard. Seem symbolic at all to you?
Consider also the Steelers as a business. They're owned by the Rooney family. Have been for decades. There's no plan to move the Steelers away from Pittsburgh, even though Pittsburgh's a tiny city with not much cash. The Rooneys are notorious tightwads, reluctant to pay their stars huge salaries. They rarely try to buy great stars from other teams. Their strategy has always been to sign new, cheap players and develop them into stars. Eventually, many of the best Steelers players leave for greener pastures (the ones that don't do so for love of the team, like Bettis, who took a pay cut to stay). Seem symbolic at all to you?
And finally, consider the Steelers' 2005 season. They were down. They were out. They lost their division to a team from -- choke -- Ohio. To make it to this Super Bowl they had to win an insane number of games in a row, some against teams who had badly beaten them already. So they put their heads down and ran. They ran four games in a row and eked their way into the playoffs as a sixth-seed wild card team. No one expected them to make it past the first round. But they did, against the winningest team in the league. And then they won again. No sixth-seed team in the history of the sport has ever done this before. The Steelers should have crumbled long ago, but survived on sheer strength and tenacity. Seem symbolic at all to you?
It's been said that in this day and age, pledging allegiance to a team is really like pledging allegiance to a fashion brand; the only thing constant, after all, is the name and maybe the logo. Players come and go, management and coaches come and go -- these days even the cities come and go, as corporate owners move their teams to more lucrative towns.
But you can't fucking say that about the Steelers. They are as stubbornly constant as the city itself, even when it would behoove them to change. They ARE Pittsburgh. And if they smash their way through Seattle -- a team owned by a Microsoft millionaire, a team with recently (and horribly) redesigned uniforms -- every Pittsburgher who reluctantly had to leave gets a little bit of hope that tenacity and an almost pathological respect for the past is enough to keep their throwback of a hometown alive.
Oh, there were many years, in the '90s, when I suffered like a stalwart, week after week. My roommate in Pittsburgh first conned me into the ritual -- every Sunday he'd make a ton of delicious hoagies and sit on the couch, watching the Steelers on TV with the sound off and the radio on so he could listen to the deranged rants of our local color commentator, Myron Cope. Hungry and ever-eager to be distracted from my work as a freelance writer I'd join him. Soon I was hooked. When I moved to L.A., I found myself getting up at ungodly early hours to watch the Steelers on widescreen at a Santa Monica sports bar, surrounded by the kind of guys who used to beat me up in junior high school. When the Steelers won I was happy. When they lost, my day of rest was ruined.
After agonizing through years of disappointing seasons, though -- most notably the Kordell Stewart era, when the team could have clearly gone all the way if that multi-talented QB could have managed to stop throwing the ball into the arms of opposing teams' defensemen -- I quit cold turkey. Why gamble my sanity on a football team? My life was painful and stressful enough without spending every other Sunday walking around in a deep blue funk of post-game loss.
So now that the team has finally made it to the Super Bowl, I feel almost guilty to take pleasure in their success. I haven't quite suffered the way some of my fellow Steeler-loving Pittsburgh ex-patriates have.
Well, fuck it. I can't help it. I'm still proud as fuck.
And I'm not the only semi-fan experiencing that inescapable pride. Two weekends ago, when the Steelers clinched their Super Bowl berth, the first person to call me was my Dad. He was giddy. "How about that?" he kept saying. "Wow, how about that?!" I don't think he's watched a football game since the mid-1970's.
What's at work here is a kind of symbolism which I'm not sure a non-Pittsburgher can really understand. It's certainly hard to explain to my mostly anti-sports friends, who are often surprised to learn I give a shit about the Steelers. After all, I 've got little or no interest in any other team of any kind.
Here's the thing: more than any team in any sport I can think of, the Steelers truly embody their hometown -- a great, stubborn city so mired in the past that it's brought itself to the edge of extinction. If they win, it means the city, against all odds, can too.
Pittsburgh, in its heyday, was America's most important manufacturing hub, and the ultimate blue-collar town. The place was thick with beefy Polish and Italian immigrants who migrated there to work in the steel industry. They worked until dark and then drank and slept and worked again. They ate pierogies and haluski and kielbasa -- the kind of potato-and-cabbage diet that hardens you from the gut out. In the Homestead neighborhood, workers battled to the death in labor clashes with cops and mercenaries. They fought for the right to a simple middle-class life, and eventually they got it.
Then globalization began and within a few years, the Pittsburgh steel industry vanished, beaming all those jobs and mills overseas. Even today, tourists are surprised when they visit Pittsburgh and find it shiny and clean, not (as writer James Parton once described it during the steel boom) "Hell with the lid off." That's how fast the mills went away -- there still hasn't been enough time for the rest of the country to fully realize they've gone.
But even as the city converted itself from a manufacturing to a service/academic economy (the biggest employer in town is the University of Pittsburgh), it hasn't let go of its milltown past. It's still a place of weird little neighborhoods which residents don't often leave, separated as they are by rivers, bridges and hills. Many of those neighborhoods are dotted with relics of the steel era -- old buildings, shops, streetcar tracks. People patronize their local dive bars, some of which still serve pierogies along with the local pisswater -- Iron City Beer. Lots of Pittsburghers are pro-life, but they tend to vote Democrat because Democrats are pro-labor. The number one radio station is old-school AM, not FM. Fashion and fitness are not top priorities -- you can still find plenty of big hair, mullets and obesity. Shitty roads, endless mountains and lousy weather keep Pittsburghers isolated from other nearby cities, and that's made the town insular, eccentric, hard-nosed and slow to change.
Pittsburgh is distrustful of change. It hasn't learned how to give its kids anything new and interesting to do. It's done a shitty job of parlaying its cheap cost of living and historic arts culture (the city boats some of the greatest museums on Earth) into programs and policies that actually encourage artists to stick around and make art. So it's been losing its young, talented people for decades. A couple of years back one of those big business magazines rated Pittsburgh one of the worst cities in America to be single. They cited the lack of stuff to do, and the fact that most of the people who live there are old. But it's also just plain futile to attempt a long-term relationship if you plan to stay in Pittsburgh -- because at some point your partner will almost certainly move away.
So the population is shrinking and getting older. The tax base has dwindled to the point that the city teeters perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy.
Now, compare Pittsburgh to its team.
The Steelers. STEEL-ers, for Christ's sake! Decades after the steel industry abandoned the city, the team's helmets are still emblazoned with U.S. Steel Corp's old "Steelmark" logo. Why? It has always been that way, that's fucking why. The Steelers play a brand of football that for years had similarly been considered a relic of a bygone age. "Smashmouth," it's called. Not much fancy passing. Lots of running headlong into the opposing team, again and again and again, until they give. This year the Steelers ran the ball more than any other team in the league. It's bruising, it takes forever, it tends to make for excruciatingly close games, and though it almost always gets the Steelers into the playoffs, it's only brought them to the Super Bowl one other time in coach Bill Cowher's 14 years at the helm (they lost). Yet they refuse to give it up. They just put their heads down and keep doing what they do. Fuck fashion. Fuck looks and style -- until the arrival of the miraculous Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers' star player of the century has been Jerome Bettis, a 268 lb. fatty with asthma. Fuck these newfangled opponents in their redesigned uniforms with their flashy long-bomb quarterbacks and their flashy cheerleaders (the Steelers haven't had cheerleaders since 1969, when the team's owners decided they were a distraction from the game). Just dig in, do your job, and work hard for every single yard. Seem symbolic at all to you?
Consider also the Steelers as a business. They're owned by the Rooney family. Have been for decades. There's no plan to move the Steelers away from Pittsburgh, even though Pittsburgh's a tiny city with not much cash. The Rooneys are notorious tightwads, reluctant to pay their stars huge salaries. They rarely try to buy great stars from other teams. Their strategy has always been to sign new, cheap players and develop them into stars. Eventually, many of the best Steelers players leave for greener pastures (the ones that don't do so for love of the team, like Bettis, who took a pay cut to stay). Seem symbolic at all to you?
And finally, consider the Steelers' 2005 season. They were down. They were out. They lost their division to a team from -- choke -- Ohio. To make it to this Super Bowl they had to win an insane number of games in a row, some against teams who had badly beaten them already. So they put their heads down and ran. They ran four games in a row and eked their way into the playoffs as a sixth-seed wild card team. No one expected them to make it past the first round. But they did, against the winningest team in the league. And then they won again. No sixth-seed team in the history of the sport has ever done this before. The Steelers should have crumbled long ago, but survived on sheer strength and tenacity. Seem symbolic at all to you?
It's been said that in this day and age, pledging allegiance to a team is really like pledging allegiance to a fashion brand; the only thing constant, after all, is the name and maybe the logo. Players come and go, management and coaches come and go -- these days even the cities come and go, as corporate owners move their teams to more lucrative towns.
But you can't fucking say that about the Steelers. They are as stubbornly constant as the city itself, even when it would behoove them to change. They ARE Pittsburgh. And if they smash their way through Seattle -- a team owned by a Microsoft millionaire, a team with recently (and horribly) redesigned uniforms -- every Pittsburgher who reluctantly had to leave gets a little bit of hope that tenacity and an almost pathological respect for the past is enough to keep their throwback of a hometown alive.