Wait! Before you click your mouse, give me a minute to explain myself. No, I am not arguing that the terrorists win if the Steelers lose (though I considered it!). There are other fine teams from other fine cities. It’s just that, to this studiously neutral observer, there is something special and inspiring about the shared life of the Steel City and its 68-year-old team.
Now comes what we call in newsrooms the “to be sure” paragraph. To be sure, I am not exactly a civic booster. Pittsburgh’s industrial glory days are long gone and have not really been replaced. Once home to nearly a score of Fortune 500 companies, the city, sadly, has a mere handful left. Labor disputes were (and sometimes still are) long and bitter. Despite the rich history of its black community, Pittsburgh was (and sometimes still is) a city with a racist streak. The gulf between rich and poor–between Sewickley and Homewood–is wider than the Ohio. As for me, well, I haven’t lived there in many years.
Still, I love the place and the good things about the city I believe that the Steelers represent. One is family. According to the Census, Pittsburgh has an extraordinarily high percentage of residents whose parents and grandparents were born there. You don’t dis your elders in Pittsburgh, you take them to dinner. A move to the suburbs is a radical gesture. My great-grandfather settled in the city in the 1890s-in a neighborhood only three miles from the one in which I grew up, and two miles from the one in which my mom lives.
Same with the Steelers. They were founded in 1933 by the late Art Rooney, who started his career as a saloon keeper on the old North Side of town. (Now, for some strange reason, they call it “The North Shore.” As if….) Art’s son, Dan, runs the team. Soon enough, another Rooney will take over, Art III, a lawyer in town. My son and I were lucky enough to have been guests in the Steelers’ box at the Ravens game last Sunday. If the Irish had bar mitzvahs, this is what they would be like: piles of food and lots of pride in family, the football team down on the field, gleefully obliterating the opposition. Heinz Field, the handsome new stadium, is less than a mile from where the Rooneys rose.
Family is more than the Rooneys themselves. Here’s the number of head coaches the Steelers have had in 32 years: two. The first, Chuck Noll, was in the box last Sunday, a proud uncle to the “new” crew. Bill Cowher, the current coach, has been there 10 years. He is one of the youngest coaches in the league-but has more seniority than anyone. It was because the Rooneys stood by Cowher that Cowher could stand by his quarterback. And it is because of that sense of family that the Steelers are a game away from New Orleans.
Tolerance was a sometime thing in Pittsburgh. Read the works of August Wilson or John Edgar Wideman to see what I mean. It existed, but only because every ethnic enclave stuck to its own. That instinct was reinforced by the geography of the city, with its isolating hills, valleys, rivers and bridges. And yet there was and is an appreciation for hard work that transcends race and ethnicity, and a shared if sometimes grudging pride in the place.
Same with the Steelers. Quarterback Kordell Stewart hasn’t had an easy time of it in Pittsburgh. Young, gifted and black–and inconsistent–he was booed unmercifully and even had to publicly deny unsubstantiated rumors about his sexual orientation. But he stuck with the job, and mastered on his own terms, a kind of jazz interpretation of the job of quarterback, full of controlled improvisation and sheer love of the game. Now he is a beloved figure. And his team is as polyglot a construction as you can find, peopled with guys from Africa, Samoa, Europe and small-town America, with every shade of white and black.
Performance is what matters. That is not uniquely a Pittsburgh thing, or course, it’s an American one. But Pittsburgh is a place that thinks of itself as underappreciated in the world. I remember, as a kid, that everything in my town was the biggest or best or tallest “between New York and Chicago.” In other words, we had it all over Cleveland, the one major city every Pittsburgher felt free to look down on. (Youngstown was really the pits….) We knew our symphony was as good as New York’s, but the Times wouldn’t admit it. We invented or perfected the manufacture of steel, glass, aluminum, petroleum. The first commercial radio station was (and still is) in Pittsburgh. I could go on, and so could we all. And yet the world thought of us the way one 19th-century traveler did, as “hell with the lid off.”
Which is where the Steelers come in. They were (perhaps again are) a form of first-class perfection that all the world could see, and would have to acknowledge. Even The New York Times. When the Pirates and Penguins joined the Steelers in glory years, we became “City of Champions”–even as the steel mills, one by one, banked their furnaces for good.
Pittsburghers love tradition to a ridiculous degree. I know Pittsburgh people in Washington who drive home to the Old Sod for the sole purpose of returning to the nation’s capital with a carload of half-baked Mineo’s pizzas. (It is the best pizza on earth.)
But we are survivors, and we are not burdened by foolish pride. A job is a job. Fancy does not matter. You adapt. Workers have. There isn’t a single steel mill left, precious few in Allegheny County. These days the top employer is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. One of the biggest remaining industrial operations in city limits is the ancient Heinz food-processing plant. But Pitt and Carnegie Mellon are growing centers for robotics and advanced medicine: things that work, that preserve the possibility of work.
Same with the Steelers. They adapt. Take Troy Edwards. He was a fancy receiver in college, weighed down by gold chains and a bad attitude. He was a No. 1 draft pick and was supposed to turn the Steelers’ passing game around. He didn’t–Plaxico Burress and Hines Ward did. But after being busted down by the coaching staff, Edwards adapted. Now he’s one of the best and most exciting kick and punt returners in the league. They used to boo Edwards, too. He ran his mouth. You don’t run your mouth in the Steel City, even if you’re good at what you do. (Barry Bonds never understood that.) You don’t complain, even if you are justified. Complaining is not something you do. Troy Edwards accepted his lesser role. He’s taking evident pride in it. And now they love him at Heinz Field.
Adapting is what men do, and Pittsburgh is a masculine place. If they wanted to name the team accurately after the city’s leading industry, the ball club would be called The Pittsburgh Nurse Practitioners or the Pittsburgh Software Designers or Pittsburgh Robotics Engineers. City fathers worry that the world sees the city as it used to be–a field of fiery furnaces. But steelmaking remains the defining metaphor. When I was a kid, Pittsburgh schoolchildren were taught songs and the lore of a local Paul Bunyan figure, a mythical steelworker named Joe who ate hot ingots for lunch, washed down with a bucket of molten steel.
Same with the Steelers. They may call it Heinz Field, and the scoreboard may boast giant ketchup bottles that pour digital goo onto the TV screen when the Steelers are in the “red zone.” (Ugh.) But most of the cheerleading videos feature sweaty guys with hard hats, “advancing the chains” or tossing scrap-metal insignias of opposing teams into a blast furnace.
Think about it: Hollywood hasn’t set a lot of love stories in Pittsburgh. There was “Wonder Boys,” which captured the rainy gloom of the winters beautifully. And of course “Flashdance”–though there never was a welder who looked like Jennifer Beals. It’s a place that produces its share of writers and actors, but they tend to have a kind of mordant, bitter edge. Current example: Dennis Miller. I am pretty sure ours is the only city in America where you can see a guy in black-and-gold camouflage cargo pants and be reasonably assured he’s not gay. At the ballgame last weekend, my son and I saw thousands of those guys in the parking lots: tailgating away around oil-barrel campfires (no fancy gas grills), cans of Iron City firmly in hand, Terrible Towels hanging from their belts.
Defense is an unromantic guy thing-which is why defense defines the Steelers as a team. Offense is nice. It can be thrilling. Terry Bradshaw firing the ball downfield at 100mph was an electrifying sight. Franco Harris picking his way through Chuck Noll’s infinitely complex blocking schemes … same. Same for Kordell’s improvisations and Jerome Bettis’s bowling-ball obliterations of hapless tacklers. (He is, by the way–in true Pittsburgh fashion–a great bowler.) But defense is the Steelers’ heart and soul. There is nothing pretty about it, nothing obviously artistic. It’s about defending the home turf–Fort Pitt. (Remnants of its 18th-century frontier outpost are right across the river from the stadium.)
And that’s the last thing I wanted to mention: the sense of place. I live and work in Washington, a lovely capital of broad avenues and noble vistas. But, for most who live and work here-at least in the “federal” world of Washington–it’s not “home” in a profound way. People come here, do their business and go elsewhere. It’s a city full of consultants, visitors, members of Congress whose real point of reference is somewhere else. They run the football team here that way: Dan Snyder is on his third coach in three years with the Redskins.
Not so with the Steelers. My son and I watched last Sunday’s game at a stadium built near the site of the city’s first sports stadium, the long-since-demolished Exposition Park. My grandfather had attended games there. Later, he bought season tickets to the Steelers from old Art Rooney himself. When my son and I left Heinz Field, we joined the throng that happily trudged back across the bridge to the Point, the place where the three rivers meet and the city began as a colonial outpost in 1754. I can’t tell you how good it was to be home.
