Steelers Extra

Two things you should know about the Steelers going to the Super Bowl. First, for Pittsburghers, wherever they live now, this is a Big Deal. Second, this truly could not happen to a better team, from owners to players. And I mean better as people and citizens.

The Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh/western Pennyslvania bonded forever in the 1970s, when the team became a winner for the first time in its long history, and the city began losing the anchor of its identity, its steel mills. Pittsburgh was a working class city, a city of immigrants, some of them rich, many of them working their way into the middle class. But pretty much top to bottom it was a city that shared some values in common: family, tradition and civic virtue. Not that there wasn't crime, corruption and the alcoholism, abuse, intolerance, anti-intellectualism and all the other vices of their virtues. But there was and is a certain character that has its values and strengths.

But when the mills went, so did a lot of Pittsburghers. The city's lost just about half its population. The city government is about bankrupt. But even with the new emphasis on high tech, medical, educational and cultural institutions, the old identity remained. But it was no longer anchored by the mills. It was invested in the Steelers.

The Steelers became the city's heart and heroes, the NFL their deeply felt living metaphor for their confrontation with the larger world, though of course never articulated that way. But that's part of the meaning when one fan--an operations manager in a telephone call center---told a Pittsburgh Post Gazette reporter: "This is not just a game. This is football."

Pittsburgh is the heart of Steeler country. While the Steelers were dueling with the number one ranked team in football, the Indianapolis Colts, last week, eight out of ten televisions that were turned on in the city were tuned into the game.

But the steel mill diaspora, as well as the fascination some fans who never lived here have with the Steelers mystique, means that the Steelers have ardent fans everywhere in America and all over the world. In Denver Sunday:

"An estimated 8,000 Steelers fans watched the game at Invesco Field. Many stayed well after the victory, waving their Terrible Towels in the corner of the stadium above the exit to the Steelers' locker room until security finally had to ask them to leave," Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

I saw another estimate that about 1500 fans traveled from Pittsburgh for the game. That means more that 6,000 live in Colorado.

When I wore my Steelers cap after the game here in far northern CA, somebody congratulated me for the Steelers win. At first I felt silly about it, but then, sure, I earned it--I was a hometown fan of the 70s teams, but I also suffered through Bubby Brister and Mark Malone and Neil O'Donnell, and a couple of decades of broken hearts.

As for the Steelers themselves, there is no one more revered in a city that reveres its cherished elders than the late Art Rooney. He was legendary as much for his individual kindness and his civic generosity as for his guiding the Steelers through thin and thick. Loyalty was important to him in large ways and small. He was the man who bought the Steelers, their first owner. And even in their great 70s years, I remember talking to a sports writer who had left the city for awhile. He got regular postcards from Art Rooney. Eventually he had to come back.

His son, Dan Rooney, is the team owner now. He also has an unassailable reputation for kindness, loyalty and civic virtue. The fact that the Steelers have had only two owners, both in the same family, is reflected in the fact that---almost unheard of in football--it has had, over the past 35+ years, only two head coaches: Chuck Noll, and his successor 14 years ago, Bill Cowher.

And in the national Blue-Red Game, the Black and Gold are True Blue.

The 2005-06 team is not only the best in many years, it has the best people. The reason that Steeler players and fans are so happy that Jerome "The Bus " Bettis is finally going to his first Super Bowl in perhaps his last season, and the game is being played in his hometown of Detroit--is that they all love him. He has established the team character which young Ben Roethlisberger is carrying forward: the Bus is a kind, loyal man, and a stand-up guy.

The Bettis family is in reality what TV commercials had to invent for another team. His mother and father, who have attended every game everywhere in his professional career (except two pre-season games overseas), in fact had the entire Steelers team to their house one year for Thanksgiving dinner.

I'm sure the Seattle Seahawks are fine people, and that city is happy to finally send a team to the championship. But it's hard not to believe that this year is our year. This Steelers team has a destiny.