Why I’m A Steelers Fan

The Sporting Life:

The Public Professor’s

Saturday Sports Column

It’s time to start laying the cards on the table and come clean.  I was born and raised in New York City, and I’m partial to the New York teams (Yankees, Rangers, Knicks) with one exception.  I’m a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, loyal to the core.  And here’s how it happened.

Baseball came first, and it was all I really cared about beginning at the age of eight.  Football was something in the background, largely ignored, and at times mildly annoying, such as in August when channel 11 WPIX would forsake its weekly Sunday morning Abbot and Costello movie so they could show a taped replay of an exhibition football game from the night before.  Grrrr.

Then, on January 21, 1979, at the age of 11, fate intervened.  My friend Dirk and I found ourselves on the small, rectangular patch of grass between his apartment building (the ridiculously named Fountain Garden, which showcased a bleak, inoperative concrete fountain) and a blacktop driveway.  He had a football and we were going to play with it.  But being 11 year old boys, we couldn’t simply play with it.  We each had to choose a team that we would represent and personify.  But which to choose?  This wouldn’t take too long.  I only knew of four teams.

There were of course the local squads, the Jets and Giants, those interlopers of my weekly Abbot and Costello ritual.  And then there were the two teams squaring off in the Super Bowl later that day, which everyone had been talking about: the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

That was it.  That was the full range of my familiarity with the NFL, the entire carte from which I was to pick a team and seal my fate.  But even then I realized that Dirk and I were about to make momentous decisions.

“I’m the Cowboys,” he shouted.

It was predictable.  He’d always cultivated a cowboy fetish, even having gone as one the previous Halloween, replete with a vest, hat, and pop-gun.  Besides, he was a Red Sox fan, so aligning himself with yet another team covered in schmaltz, glitter, and arrogance would be consistent.  I was nonplussed by his decision.  It left me with three choices.

“Giants,” I thought to myself.  “That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.”  My mind’s eye pictured a big, stupid, cartoon oaf.  No way.  And the Jets?  Cool name to an 11 year old boy in 1979, but I remember not being terribly excited at the prospect of rooting for a team in Hunter Green.  We had a `74 Chrysler that color.  Ugly as all getout.

And then it dawned on me.  “The Steelers,” I whispered, as I slowly nodded my head and my eyes began to glisten.  I knew nothing about them.  I couldn’t name any of their future Hall of Fame players.  I had no clue they boasted the coolest color scheme in all of sports.

I didn’t know about that awesome helmet with the one-sided logo, a symbol of the American Iron and Steel Institute.  I was completely ignorant about the two previous Super Bowl victories, about the rabid fandom and collapsing rust belt economy back in the `Burgh, about the stoic brilliance of head coach Chuck Noll, or about their owner, the legendary, cigar chomping, former amateur boxer, and Yonkers Raceway proprietor, Art “The Chief” Rooney, who bought the team in 1933 after parlaying a good day at the track into a better night at the poker table.  No, all of that still awaited me.  All I knew was this one truth that had struck me like a bolt of lightening:

Steelers.  People who steal things.  That’s cool.

I was eleven.  I was from the Bronx.  A team named for thieves.  I was all in.

Later that day I began learning the players’ names as I watched the thrill-fest that was Super Bowl XIII, when every Cowboys fan relearned the valuable lesson that would soon be put to song by Charlie Daniels:

You just go and lay your hand
On a Pittsburgh Steelers fan
And I think you’re gonna find he understands.

A year later, I was demanding my mother handover her yellow dish towel so I could wave it while I watched Super Bowl XIV, five bucks riding on the game with a seventh grade classmate and devoted Rams fan.

And of course I’ve treasured their recent success.

But I was also there during the Tim Worley years, the first round pick and reliable fumble machine whose major at the University of Georgia had been “Recreation.”  And he still had to sit out his junior year so he could “concentrate on studies”; that particular nugget of information coming to me courtesy of the 1990 Steelers Media Guide, a publication I used to get free for subscribing to a Steelers fanzine as a teenager back in the pre-internet days.

And I was there when the roster wasn’t stocked full of future Hall of Famers, but when Dwayne Woodruff and Louis Lipps who were the best players on the team; when Bubby Brister was the face of the franchise; when a slow white guy named Bryan Hinkle anchored the defense for a decade; and when men like Frank Pollard and Ernest Jackson did their damnedest to fill Franco’s shoes.

And you’d better believe that I’ll be there tomorrow even if it all goes to pot.

This one’s for life, and I think you’re gonna find I understand.

UPDATE, October 7, 2013: The Steelers are 0-4 for the first time since LBJ was president.  It’s officially all gone to pot.  But I’m still here.