- Yinz might not get it, life in Stillers country
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It's hard to describe what it is like to live in Pittsburgh on the days leading up to a AFC Championship game, with the winner earning the right to go to the Super Bowl. It is an odd comradarie where almost everyone in town is wearing black and gold, the teams colors, the Christmas Tree in front of the court house was redone in black and gold will stay up until the Steelers either lose or win the Super Bowl, newscasts are given to just two items, the Steelers and the weather, in that order. It is a sense of community in an almost rabid fashion.
I know, some of you probably think that I am overstating it just a bit. Actually I think I am probably understating it, if only because I think I am more grounded than most here. Nonetheless, for those doubting Thomas's out there, one of the Denver papers (the opponent this Sunday), The Rocky Mountain News, sent a guy behind enemy lines so to speak, just to get a look at what life is like here leading up to the big game. Here are his two articles posted from Pittsburgh, and it should be noted that the complaints that he made about Pittsburgh resulted in him getting deluged with emails and comments on the papers web page.
Johnson: Shot-and-beer Pittsburgh froths at mouth
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Click here to hide user comments in the futurePITTSBURGH - Exactly why and how I got here, I still am not certain, but let's roll with it.First impression: This is a hard town, filled with hard people who bop around their gun-metal gray burg with nothing but football on their minds.
Five hours ago, I did not believe it possible to find a town crazier about football than Denver. I could have been wrong about that.
I am not five minutes off the airplane and standing at the rental car desk before a spaghetti-thin man whose nametag reads "Bob."
Bob's face turns red immediately upon seeing my Colorado driver's license, and he launches into a lengthy, completely unprovoked lecture on how his Steelers will kick the Denver Broncos' backsides - and be nasty about doing it.
Bob is fairly snorting when he says there is NO WAY Steeler Nation will not return to Super Bowl glory.
He catches his breath, pauses and asks politely, "And will you be taking additional insurance on your rental?"
I am in enemy country here. In a place that you may not understand.
On my way to the hotel, there is a man standing on a busy street corner, wearing a halter-top dress.
He holds a sign in his hands that says: "I BET AGAINST THE STEELERS."
I will tell you this, something I would never tell one of the locals. Pittsburgh is one butt-ugly town.
It is precisely the type of town that would name its professional football team the Steelers. Old mills, long stilled, dot the town. Weeds spill from smokestacks.
Across the Ohio River from where I write this rises downtown Pittsburgh, as dark and forbidding a skyline as you will ever encounter.
Just to the north, right on the river, Heinz Field, home of the Steelers, rises almost cathedral-like, a bright-yellow behemoth that casts shadows on all that surrounds it.
It is, too, a town of bars. I have been here only a short time, but if there is a city block without a bar I haven't driven by it yet.
In that regard, Pittsburgh might well be heaven.
"This is a drinking town with a football and parking problem," says Jessica Kerr, 23, the bartender at the joint on the hotel's first floor.
"And this is the thing about Pittsburgh," she adds, after learning I have come here from Denver. "Don't ever, ever say anything bad about the Steelers.
"I am not kidding," she warns me. "People are on edge right now."
She tells the story - already grown to legend - of the Steelers fan who literally fell from his stool with cardiac arrest at Chupka's Bar in South Side after Steelers running back Jerome Bettis fumbled the football in the closing minutes of last Sunday's game.
"That's a prime example of how seriously we take football here."
And the thing is, folks here believe there could not be a more honorable and fitting way to go.
If I really want to know about Steeler Nation, Jessica Kerr whispers to me, I need to head over to Jack's Bar, also in South Side.
It is a legendary hole, she explains, a joint where quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and other Steelers hang out after games.
"If Denver wins?" the bartender repeats as I rise from my stool. "There will be jumpers in this town. Yeah, a few."
Jack's rises from Carson Street just as it is billed: It is a hole. But it is a Steelers' hole, which makes it beloved.
This is working-class Pittsburgh, South Side, a long stretch that used to be home to the city's fabled steel mills.
It is why, I am told, it is also home to at least 100 to 125 taverns and bars within its roughly 20-square-block boundary.
"Pittsburgh's Legendary Bar," is how the front door to Jack's reads. Sprawled across the painted bricks out front are foot-high yellow letters: "In Ben (7) We Trust."
"This whole area was, back in the day, an iron-worker area, where the mills ran 24 hours a day," explains Kelly Spinelli, 42, who works the night bar shift at Jack's.
"We still have a lot of old-timers - shot-and-a-beer guys - who come in here."
Ben Roethlisberger still comes in, she says, but not like he did last year, when he and other Steelers would hold court in the back bar, before people started flocking to Jack's and hounding them.
"He only comes in once in a while," Kelly Spinelli says now. "That he does, it has been great for business."
Do I want to know from Pittsburgh? She points out the window at a shop across the street. In the front window, Santa still stands. And he is dressed in Steelers black and gold.
"Last Sunday, complete strangers were kissing each other after the Steelers won. People were honking, high-fiving each other.
"As soon as the game ended, you literally couldn't fit another human being in here. It was a sea of black and gold. I've never worked harder in my life."
The Steelers are a religion here, Kelly Spinelli says. "And it's year-round. It'll be baseball season, and everyone is still talking about football."
She has seen more than one set of good friends go at each other over simple calls. Punches would have been thrown last Sunday if she hadn't stepped between two men who disagreed on whether Troy Polamalu actually intercepted the disputed pass from Peyton Manning.
It is spitting rain when I stand and ask her the Broncos-winning question.
"It'll be . . . people's spirits will be totally crushed. I don't know how else to put it," Kelly Spinelli said.
"It will affect the whole town. Business will suffer. People will not go to work on Monday.
"It is that big a part of life here."
johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com.
That was his first column, the second read a little something like this;
Johnson: Yinz might like Steeler Nation, after allPITTSBURGH - This is not a bad town. Not at all. I swear it.Now, can I come home, please?
People want a piece of me. I have over the past 12 hours heard from perhaps every single person in Colorado who once lived here.
How dare I call Pittsburgh "butt-ugly?" You would have thought I was describing their children.
Slowly, I am coming to understand.
The people here, I will admit, are some of the nicest folks I have encountered in a decade.
And even they will acknowledge - if they are the slightest bit liquored- up - what your eyes are screaming at you: The place is kind of grimy and, well, kind of ugly.
But even if it is (and, between you and me, it is) that is not, I am learning, the point.
Pittsburgh is old, northern industrial on its facade, but deep down, in its heart, it is Paris.
In the City of Light, they never tear down anything, and neither does Pittsburgh.
So what if you have a corrugated-steel lumber mill from the 19th century plopped right in the middle of the old neighborhood.
In Denver, it would now be resting for eternity in a landfill. Here, they rip out just enough from the inside to turn it into gleaming, not-too-cheap condos, restaurants and office space.
The place where I ate breakfast, with its thick wood paneling, was a firehouse back in the 1800s. The old railroad station up the street? Today, it houses fancy cheese and wine shops, linen-tablecloth restaurants and boutiques.
But even that is not the point of Pittsburgh.
It is a relatively small city that appears not to aspire to grandeur or worry one bit about any large-scale greatness. Folks seem to know each other.
I spent the afternoon with the Yinzers, up in the Strip District. I know, I didn't get it at first, either.
A Yinzer, it turns out, will ask you this:
Yinz going to the Strip today? It is the Western Pennsylvania equivalent of the Southern y'all. Some pronounce it "yunz." The local radio sports station even has a "Yinzer Yap" segment.
You would love the Strip District. If Steeler Nation has a capital, the Strip is it. Even the candy is Black and Gold. It is home to Primanti Brothers Bar & Grill, where you are directed to lunch if you truly want to know the Nation.
Primanti Bros. is a 24-hour joint at 18th Street and Penn Avenue where the bartender/waitress sets immediately upon you, as if you've had time to read the long menu on the wall. You will be dead before they hand you a paper version.
"Pastrami and cheese," you blurt out, the first thing you read.
It comes the way folks here say you absolutely have to have it: with french fries and coleslaw tucked inside the bread. The bartender/waitress slides it to you on sheets of wax paper. They don't do dishes at Primanti Bros.
And all I tasted, Scout's honor, was fries and coleslaw. But forget that. The real show takes place just outside the doors.
Up and down Penn Avenue stand long tent enclosures, inside of which is every manner of Steelers gear you can imagine. People are standing five-deep in the spitting snow, just to get inside and buy yet another Steelers T-shirt, hat or jersey. Or all three.
But wait, I ask no one in particular, weren't these same items available the first week of the season? The reply comes almost choruslike: "They're in the AFC Championship now!"
The hottest-selling item, I learned, is a simple T-shirt that depicts the slyly smiling Calvin and Hobbes-looking kid (in decals, he's the one urinating on everything from Ford and Chevy logos to you-name-it).
On the T-shirt, his aim is at but a single word - Denver - done up in orange and blue. I bought one.
It is about as anti-Denver as you will find in this town. People here do not have time to hate Denver.
Churches fill at noontime with folks praying only for a Steelers victory. Whatever Pittsburgh is, the Steelers are the glue that binds.
School pep rallies are scheduled for Friday. This coming Saturday and Sunday have been officially declared Black And Gold Weekend.
The Steelers are religion here. An example:
It is just after noon, and the parking lot outside of Heinz Field is filling with cars. Residents are lining up outside to be part of the studio audience for the Jerome Bettis Show.
But the Bus' TV epic will not tape until 7:30 this particular evening.
"It's estatic here, this town is going crazy!" says Mike Stivason, 34, standing in the afternoon snow and bitter chill. He has come to the stadium with his brother, Ken, who will turn 30 today, and three of their buddies from Ford City, about 60 miles away. They have come only to be part of the Bettis show.
"What's 60 miles?" Ken asks. "We just want to be here, to see it and take part. It's the atmosphere! The Steelers are in the AFC Championship! We got our Terrible Towels in the trunk!"
You are born here and breathe your first breath as a member of Steeler Nation, says another of the group, Chris Zilla, and it never leaves you.
"I don't know what it's like in Denver," he says, "but here we live and die with the Steelers.
"And we don't intend on doing any dying anytime soon."
By 5 o'clock, the line waiting to get into the Jerome Bettis show numbers into the hundreds.
And it will not air until Friday.
Bill Johnson's column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Call him at 303-892-2763 or e-mail him at johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com.
Don't say I didn't warn you about this place.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Also appeared on 1/20/06
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