I am more than 3,000 miles away today, and I can feel it.
The western PA town where I was born is no longer called Greensburg. It’s Black and Goldsburg (at least until Monday.)
It could well be the name of the entire region. Black and gold is everywhere. Black and gold two- story balloons. Black and gold food. Michelle Pilecki (another Pittsburgher) at the Huffington Post has relevant links to this phenomenon.
It’s worth taking a shot at explaining it, not just to suggest what Super Bowl Sunday means to Pittsburgh and Steelers Nation, but to the possible fortunes of Lynn Swann, now the likely Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania.
Cross-posted at Daily Kos.
I not only grew up 30-odd miles from downtown Pittsburgh, I lived in the city for about eight years, just before coming to far northern CA. I still have family and friends in the state, some with political connections.
Pittsburgh on Super Sunday
On a normal Sunday in football season, business in the Pittsburgh area is slow, especially during the game. It’s a favorite time for non-fans to go to the mostly empty supermarket, though the game will be blaring from the p.a.
On this Super Bowl Sunday, come six pm eastern time, the city will just stop. The malls will actually close. It’s not just that fewer customers are likely. Too many employees want to be watching the game.
The Pittsburgh Public Theatre has cancelled its Sunday night performance of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” The Importance of Being Steelers takes precedence. The city’s science and art museums, and even the zoo, are running programs and contests related to the Steelers. The game is the cultural event. The Super Bowl is the city’s theatre.
By the time the game ends, portions of downtown Pittsburgh will be closed to motorized traffic. A big safe space is being created for the hoped-for celebration. There hasn’t been one for a Super Bowl victory since 1980.
City of Champions
The Steelers grabbed the heart of Pittsburgh with its great teams of the 70s, at precisely the same time that the steel mills, the source of the city’s identity, were shutting down.
The mills were failing, the Steelers were succeeding, preaching the blue collar ethic. Steel City became Steelers City.
From then until about 1990, the city of Pittsburgh lost half of its population. But people who left in this industrial diaspora retained close connections, if not also to family and the area itself, then certainly to the Steelers. That’s why the Steelers can go to any NFL city in North America and play to Steelers fans in the stands.
The Steelers were and are part of everything else that is and was Pittsburgh.
Family: you see it in the photos in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online Steelers Nation collection: seven young cousins in Big Ben No. 7 jerseys, a father and his infant daughter in Steelers shirts, etc.
Community: you see it in the joyful faces in other P-G photos of the rally downtown last week.
Tradition: Like other middle-sized media markets, a lot of TV reporters pass through on their way up or down, but those that stay and earn a place in the heart of this city will be royalty there forever. Every Pittsburgher from the 1950s will remember Rege Cordic, and Ed and Wendy King; Nick Perry, Paul Long in the 60s onward, and Bill Burns, joined at KDKA by his daughter, Patti in the 70s.
There are many more (one being one of the few liberal radio talk show hosts in the nation, the brilliant Lynn Cullen.)
One night in the 70s I was watching another Pittsburgh icon, Myron Cope, doing his “Speaking of Sports” segment before a key playoff game. He suggested that the kind of scarves (called babuskas) that he saw women wearing at Steelers events could be modified into a terrible weapon against the opposing team. When the Steeler defense came on the field, waving these golden Terrible Towels would have a magical effect and stun the opposition into submission.
Cope was always sort of nuts, and I admit that when I heard this I thought he’d really gone over. It was such a dumb idea, it would never work.
Thirty years later just about everyone in America knows about the Terrible Towel. There will be a sea of them in the stands at Detroit today. Three generations and counting have been waving them. A grandmother actually sewed a suit for her grandson made of worn out Terrible Towels. And Myron Cope retired from broadcasting, on Pittsburgh first game on Monday Night Football this season.
Loyalty: It’s a Pittsburgh ideal not always honored, but there are conspicuous examples. Many would point to the Steelers as an example of loyalty’s benefits, a team that has had two head coaches since 1969.
All of these, and more, come together in the Steelers, especially in the character of the team and its owners. The original owner, Art Rooney is as revered as anyone ever will be there. Around town he was known as unprententious and kind. A sports writer I met who’d left the city told me for years afterwards he would get postcards from Art Rooney asking him when he was coming back, until finally he did come back. There are stories of his son and current owner, Dan Rooney, and his kindness towards fans. These are Pittsburgh people.
Governor Swann?
In 1980, I interviewed many people in Pittsburgh for a story on the relationship of its teams (the Steelers were NFL champs at the same time that the Pittsburgh Pirates were MLB champs) and its people. I talked to the mayor, who told me how important the positive attention the Steelers brought was to the future of the city. I talked to Steelers coach Chuck Noll, who said the Pittsburgh fans not only changed how fans relate to their teams all over the NFL, but were an important part of the Steelers success.
I talked to Pirate great Willie Stargell (who coined the “We Are Famalee” identity), and to Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Greene and Lynn Swann.
I talked to Swann on the training camp field at St. Vincent’s College. He sure could talk. It took another player’s intervention to get him to stop.
Years later, I was driving through one of the tonier city neighborhoods, stopping at a stop sign. A car came up behind me fast and stopped almost on my bumper. I looked in the rear-view mirror. The expensive car behind me was driven by an attractive young lady, and sitting next to her, grinning and talking a mile a minute, was Lynn Swann.
I thought of this when I saw people on this and other boards make fun of the idea of an old wide receiver as a candidate for governor. Swann is personable, charming and smart.
And so far, Swann could not have written himself a better script. He officially announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination the week that the underdog Steelers were playing the Wild Card game to begin the playoffs. They were the last seeded team, and barely made it in.
They won. Then they beat the team that was universally picked as this year’s Super Bowl champ, Indianapolis. Then they beat Denver, convincingly. No team has done what they’ve done so far. And they’re no longer underdogs in the Super Bowl.
Attention is focused on the Steelers of today: Big Ben, the young quarterback on the verge of greatness, and who hangs out on the city’s South Side. The Bus, Jerome Bettis, beloved as a person as well as a player, playing his last game, in his hometown of Detroit. His parents have been to every game in his professonal career, except two overseas. Pittsburghers love that.
But after it’s all over, there will be Lynn Swann. He was a Steelers hero of the mythic 4-time NFL champion team of the 70s. He was himself a hero of at least one of the four Super Bowls, and one of the stars of the others.
The Republicans nominate days after the Super Bowl. Swann is expected to win it.
The latest polls I’ve seen reported have him neck and neck with the sitting governor, Democrat Ed Rendell, in the general election. My friends in PA tell me the state is in a sour mood, itching to throw out every incumbent they see.
It’s unlikely that many voters know Swann’s positions on the issues. His candidacy may fade. Still: Pittsburghers, as loyal as they are to the Steelers, identify with them for many reasons, but one of those reasons is they are winners. And Pittsburgh, beset with problems, often enough the butt of jokes, and possessed of an inferiority complex that is a characteristic working class legacy, needs to identify with winners—that is, winners who win the Pittsburgh way, and stay true to it.
I’m told that this year Steelermania has spread from the west to the doorstep of Philadelphia in the east. I’m used to the fanaticism of the city in the 70s, when schoolteachers went nuts trying to match each student to the right Steelers jacket in the cloakroom, and waitresses really would ask you if you wanted your coffee black or gold. But the apparent range of this outside the city is something I can only imagine.
Can a Steelers victory mean victory for Swann? Looked at one way, it won’t even take a victory—the Steelers as winners are already a matter of state identity. And though this season is over today, the Steelers will be back on the field by election day.
I’m not saying Swann is likely to win. I leave better calculations to Pennsylvanians still in the state. But my gut feeling based on all I know is that Democrats should not take this guy lightly. Not this year.
