CLAIRTON, Pa. (AP) -He sits in his basement on a hill south of Pittsburgh, encircled by lovingly framed portraits of those who mean the most to him. His wife. His children. His grandchildren. Franco Harris and Mean Joe Greene.
And when lifelong steelworker Bill Kramer talks of football and his beloved Steelers, he is talking about far more. He is talking about how western Pennsylvania’s people have long seen their community – and the ideas and traditions that help shape who they are.
“People associate working hard with the Steelers,” says Kramer, a 60-year-old welder for Union Electric Steel in Carnegie, an industrial town at Pittsburgh’s edge. “The atmosphere in the mill, it’s not one man who gets the job done. It’s a team attitude … and football’s the ultimate team game.”
cash from Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Athletic Association and returned a fumble for a touchdown to become history’s first pro football player, the gridiron has occupied a unique spot in this region’s imagination.
More than baseball, more than hockey, western Pennsylvania is about football. This is the cradle of quarterbacks whose hillside and valley towns belched forth the likes of Joe Namath, Johnny Unitas and Joe Montana. It was here, not Texas, and certainly not Arizona, that formed the backdrop for the iconic high-school football movie “All the Right Moves.”
When the Steelers take the field Sunday for the Super Bowl, they will be watched rabidly by a far-flung following like no other – a stalwart lot that ESPN.com last year pronounced professional football’s most faithful fan base. In Pittsburgh, even lawyers can be spotted wearing jerseys over their business suits on game-week Fridays.
“I’ve been in lots of communities that have football teams. They have fans. But here, it’s visceral,” says Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers. He grew up in a Canadian industrial town and was, like many around him, a Steelers fan.
burgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, faced with an AFC championship against the Baltimore Ravens, temporarily changed his surname to “Steelerstahl.” And marketers have called the cradle-to-grave Steeler loyalty a potent template for strengthening the NFL’s brand.
“In other cities, football is a tradable commodity – it’s an asset,” says Andrew Masich, president and CEO of Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center and a co-author of Steelers chairman Dan Rooney’s memoirs. “Here,” he says, “it’s a family business.”
That’s certainly part of it. It’s also about the strands of memory that connect Pittsburgh’s heritage of solidity, solidarity and sweat to the football tradition. It’s about a collective unconscious that contains the days when men mined minerals and forged metal, when the only respites to a grueling week were church, a good Sunday dinner and a rough-and-tumble game of football.
And at the tail end of a generation-long transition between a manufacturing economy and its service-based replacement, it’s about pride that, as heavy industry collapsed in Pittsburgh during the 1970s, a football dynasty arose as a counterbalance.
-by-play man since 1994. The four championships in the second half of the 1970s, he says, “allowed people to identify with something positive – a winner.”
A winner, of course, produces loyalty – and big names. Ask younger Pittsburghers about the Steelers and you’ll hear enthusiasm about the Roethlisbergers, the Polamalus, the Hines Wards. But even among fans who never experienced the region’s lean years – and the team’s – talk eventually veers toward community.
Eric Ubinger, a 41-year-old physical therapist, personifies Pittsburgh’s newer service economy as much as Kramer represents manufacturing. Ubinger sits in his own memorabilia-stocked basement in the northern suburb of McCandless and looks up at a black-and-white 1979 photo of his younger self with Terry Bradshaw.
In those days, Ubinger says, the players, following the Rooney family’s example, went out into the community and made themselves a part of it. That traditionalist spirit endures today, he says, even in the face of a celebrity culture that has elevated football stars into national demigods.
He voices what is eminently clear: Pittsburghers have scant room in their hearts for the hot-dogging of a Terrell Owens or a Pacman Jones. And a bare-bones win built on a 1-yard touchdown run or a safety is just fine, thank you.
er be flashy, score 40 points, get in the limelight. Here, it’s not ‘Let’s see who can score more points,”’ Ubinger says.
“Everything seems to come here last – music, fashion, trends. We’re outdated, and we like it that way,” he says. “It’s the same thing with football. The ’60s, ’70s, it was all about defense. And we’ve never changed. We’ve never been a high-scoring offense. You want to feel part of a sport, and what’s better than if your team shares the same values?”
Those values, for many, have gone elsewhere but not changed. Part of the history of Steeler Nation has little to do with football and everything to do with economics.
When the mills began to shutter in the 1970s, one generation and then another left western Pennsylvania looking for work. These expats put down roots elsewhere but kept looking homeward. Now they turn up just about anywhere, ready to get their Pittsburgh on.
Kramer’s children are a good example. One moved to Dallas – the belly of the beast – and managed to sniff out not one but two Steeler bars there. The other seems, as she points out, to have babies in years when the Steelers end up in the Super Bowl.
They’ll see you in your Steeler bathing suit and they’ll say …”
On Sunday, the Kramers will gather around their flat-panel Samsung and a roaring artificial fire and, like so many others, they’ll watch a football game in Florida and hope for the best.
That day, outside the Heinz History Center, the special 30-second parking will remain in effect so passers-by can pull up, hop out and kiss the old Steelers goal post. On Pittsburgh’s South Side, the Breathe Yoga studio’s “yin yoga” classes will be scrapped for the day; even meditation, apparently, must make way for football.
And in black-and-gold-festooned basements across western Pennsylvania and bars across the world, fingernails will be bitten – and, heaven help us, probably a few toenails as well. Iron City beers will be consumed. Terrible Towels will be waved.
People won’t be thinking about community or industrial roots or history. They’ll be thinking about the western Pennsylvania football tradition that everybody cares about most of all: winning.
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AP National Writer Ted Anthony grew up in Pittsburgh during the Steelers’ 1970s dynasty and recently moved back after a 20-year absence.
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