The Loud Soul of Pittsburgh

I was on the phone with my brother after the Steelers-Jets game. He spoke like he just swallowed a box of razor blades. “I lost my voice in the first quarter,” he said.

My brother doesn’t sit much during a Steeler game. He gets right up close to the TV, yells at the defense to kill people, yells about who he’s gonna kill, stomps around and bangs on the floor with his fists. A typical Pittsburgher.

My voice didn’t suffer during the game. Joann’s dad and his wife and their 11 month old boy were in town from Maine. I was holding back as not to scare the poor kid. I learned the art of holding back during a Steeler game after I moved out of Pittsburgh. It’s a horribly unhealthy thing for a Pittsburgher to do to himself, but if you don’t want to be dragged out of a crowded North Carolina sports bar for behavior typical inside the 412 area code but unacceptable anywhere else you have to do as the Romans do, even if the Romans watch football with the enthusiasm of three-toed sloth.

We were watching the game from my house – I had the 13-inch hooked up with the foil antenna, my NFL-only viewing contraption, as in my opinion there’s nothing else worth firing up the cathode ray for, and even then I have to endure the stupid commercials. A couple of friends were over, a husband and wife, the husband from Greensburg, Pa, a fellow Steeler fan. There was beer, chips, guacamole.

I did scare the poor kid a few times, but not to the point of crying. The kid likes me, and I’m good with kids. In fact I’m better with kids than with adults. So I had to reassure him a couple of times after things weren’t going well for the black and gold and I voiced my opinion about it in the standard Pittsburgh volume.

“Don’t worry dude,” I said to him in my talk-to-kids voice. “You see, this is a Steeler game. This is what we do.” Luckily they went back to the hotel before the 2nd half, or I may have ruined football for the little dude for life.

That’s one of the common fixtures of the average Pittsburgh household: horrified toddlers on Sunday afternoon, wondering why dad just leapt from his chair red-faced spilling beer and generic chips everywhere bellowing at the television like a mad ape, all neck-veins. Then the kid cries and the mom comes in with some choice words for dad, who if he’s smart will tune her out as not to drag the argument into the instant replay, as she carries her trembling Yinzito back into the kitchen.

I remember that happening with my brother once or twice, when he was a baby. But, like all Pittsburgh offspring, he eventually got used to it. Now he’s worse than my dad. It’s a Pittsburgh family tradition.

Look at Myron Cope – the granddaddy of wild-assed Steeler fanatics, the Godfather of Losing Your Shit on Sunday, the towel waving drunken madmen, the 12th man on the field – with a journalistic mind like Norman Mailer and a voice like a yinzer on helium at 1 a.m. on a payday. Cope’s been blowing the speakers out of radios since the late 60s. He’s not separate from the game, as Dan Rooney said, Cope “is the Pittsburgh Steelers”.

Yeah, Pittsburgh is a loud culture, no doubt from the age when the steelworkers would yell all day in order to be heard in the mills and carried it out into the bars and back home. Growing up my family was loud, my friend down the street’s family was louder, and people from the Rocks and Carnegie were so loud and yinzer they never thought Myron Cope was weird.

LAHD!

LAHD like the still mills!

LAHD like Mirn Cape!

LAHD like the Stadium!

LAHD like Hahnz Fewld!

We are the Steelers. There is no separation from the fans and the team. I get the feeling a lot of people in Dallas aren’t too depressed after the Cowboys’ horrible season. I know in Charlotte-ans on the news were notably not depressed after the Panthers lost last year. The citizens of Green Bay, on the other hand, is probably devastated. You can’t buy the kind of football in Pittsburgh and Green Bay.

The Steelers are our culture. The Steelers are Pittsburgh. The Steelers and Pittsburgh are not two distinct entities. Art Rooney, the Irish Catholic North Side gambler, boxer, cigar-chomper, his old man a tavern owner, as a young man purchases a football team in 1933 for $2500, renames it the Steelers in 1941 and helps build the franchise into what it is today. They suck for 40 years, then, just as the steel mills were closing and Pittsburgh was losing, suddenly the Steelers rise up, and make Pittsburgh the City of Champions.

I was born into that feeling of greatness, spouting from right over the hill, and then being 4 years old riding the 31A or the 26A buses, around the West End circle or through the Corliss Tunnel and up Carson Street and the great city appears in a flash, and across the Fort Pitt Bridge with my mum, when people still went downtown to shop at dollar-store places like Murphy’s, and the first thing I always looked at was the Stadium, where Bradshaw, and Lambert, and Mean Joe, and L.C., and Blount, and Jack Ham, and Franco, and Rocky Blier built pride in the steel city in the 1970s. We’d go down to the point, to the fountain, and I’d look across the Allegheny and think Terry was in there, dressed in his Steeler uniform, tossing the ball around or sitting around drinking Iron City Beer and eating peanuts, in June.

I thought they all lived there. In some ways they did. Art Rooney still lived on the North Side in those days, even as it was becoming ghetto, because he was the coolest old man in town, and nobody fucks with the Chief. The Stadium stood where his father’s tavern once did. Art was a Pittsburgher who spent the free time of his last years reading the obituaries and going around town to funerals of people he barely knew and paying his respects. O the stories and legends surrounding the man. Here’s a good story about the Chief:

Ralph Giampaolo, a long-time member of the Three Rivers Stadiums grounds crew who died in 1990, used to tell a wonderful Rooney story. He was hospitalized for three months in 1987 after a kidney transplant. Rooney offered to help with the medical bills. He visited at least once a week and regularly sent fruit baskets. He made sure Giampaolo's widowed mother had a ride to and from the hospital.

But it was a chance meeting with Rooney at Rooney's dog track in Palm Beach, Fla., that Giampaolo always remembered. Rooney found out he was there and invited him up to his box, where he and his wife, Kathleen, were having dinner with sportscaster Curt Gowdy and his wife.

"I'll never forget the way he introduced me," Giampaolo recalled. " 'This is Ralph Giampaolo, a member of our organization.' Not a member of the grounds crew. Not some rinky-dink bum. But a member of our organization. As far as Gowdy knew, I was a vice president of the team. Mr. Rooney made me feel 10 feet tall."

-- Pittsburgh Post Gazette August 30th, 1998

We lost Superbowl XXX in 1996, to goddamn Dallas “America’s Team” Cowboys, and I still got my AFC Champions Steelers sweatshirt from that year, when I had to sit in a house in Indiana, PA and watch the Superbowl with three Steeler fans and four shitheads who bet on Dallas to win, on a day which sealed my unending hatred for Deion Sanders more than any living thing on this planet.

Deion Sanders is dead now, but the spirit of Art Rooney isn’t. I remember talking to my sister the day before Super Bowl XXX. She said that same feeling wasn’t there like it was back in the old days, the spirit of Art Rooney was resting somewhere, haunting that dog track in Florida maybe. It wasn’t our time, she thought, it was a time for cocky bastards like Deion Sanders, and the next day we lost the Super Bowl for the first time in history.

But not this year. I think the spirit of Art Rooney is back with this year’s team, on the shoulders of Big Ben, and the Bus, who took his pay cut and temporarily losing his starting position with an old-school class rare in players, especially famous ones like Bettis. And Cowher, with the Pittsburgh chin jutting out, who grew up not a mile away from me, where his parents still live, must’ve been a junior or senior at the high school we both went to when the Steelers won Super Bowl IX against the Vikings.

In the post game interview Tom Brady expressed concern (maybe politely, but hell) about the loudness of Heinz Field. So, if you’re lucky enough to be in that place, get loud. If you’re outside tailgating, be LOUD. No, get LAHD. As LAHD as you’ve ever been. Why do you think Doug Brein missed those damn field goals? (Maybe it was the wind, but fuck it, I’m on a roll with this). Hack up your vocal chords for the Stillers! Win one for the Chief, the man who kicked this much ass:

In the early '80s, NFL Films approached Art with an idea. They wanted to give the Steelers a nickname - "America's Team." After all, they were very popular, the Team of the Decade for the 70's, why not give them a title? "No," Mr. Rooney said, "They aren't America's Team. They're Pittsburgh's Team."

--Pittsburgh Post Gazette August 30th, 1998

If we can take the AFC this Sunday, I'm sure as hell not spending my Super Bowl with the Romans. I'm going back to Pittsburgh with my LAHD brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, initiating a new generation of Steeler fans by making their undeveloped little ears ring with our traditional gametime shouting. And if we’re lucky, I’ll be heading back south on Monday, dizzy with an Iron City hangover, whispering about one for the thumb.