Got Yourself a Towel

By Mike Batista
Steelahs.com founder
June 12, 2007

Assuming there are no motorcycle accidents, things should be relatively quiet on the Steelers front until training camp opens July 23. So I’m providing some filler to keep this site fresh until the Steelers descend on Latrobe. It explains how I became a Steelers fan and my evolution as a Steelers fan over the last quarter century.

This column might not be for everyone. But if David Chase can throw in one of those useless dream episodes on “The Sopranos” every now and then, I can do this. Some readers (you know who you are) have complained that I’ve rambled on too much in my columns. I don’t recommend reading this piece in one sitting. That’s why I broke it up into segments. Take the hour you used to watch “The Sopranos” on Sunday night and read as much as you can. Then take whatever hour you used to watch it again, and finish it up. Now that “The Sopranos” is over, I know I can get all of the show’s 8 million viewers to become die-hard Steelahs.com readers. I just know I can.

I promise my game commentaries during the season won’t be this long. This column does include some insight into Steelers history, if you can handle a lot of autobiographical information along with it. Of course, you can skip this column, but if you do, you better not ask me how I became a Steelers fan growing up in New England. If you want to know that, you’re just going to have to read it.

Closing time

Ever get to a bar 10 minutes before last call?

In the 26 years between their fourth and fifth Super Bowl championships, that’s what being a Steelers fan felt like for me.

I became a Steelers fan in 1979 and saw them win their fourth Super Bowl. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was closing time for the Steelers’ dynasty. There were a couple of after-hours parties when the Steelers went deep into the playoffs with two of the worst teams ever to make the playoffs.

In 1984, they went 9-7 and upset the Broncos in Denver in the divisional round, but they had no chance in hell against Dan Marino and the Miami Dolphins in the AFC championship game. It turned out the Dolphins had no chance against the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl. And who was the only team to beat the 15-1 49ers that year? The Steelers. Don’t ever forget that, Joe Montana.

Then in 1989, after opening the season with a 51-0 loss at home to the Browns, the Steelers of Bubby Brister, Merrill Hoge and Mike Mularkey somehow went 9-7, upset the Oilers in Houston on New Year’s Eve in the wild-card game then lost at Denver by a point. During that off-season, whenever I crossed paths with a stranger in a Steelers hat, we’d start talking about the team. In more than one of those conversations, it was pointed out that if the Steelers had beaten Denver, they surely would have beaten Cleveland in the AFC championship game.

But the 80s were mostly a decade of mediocrity. The bar didn’t open up again until 1992, when Bill Cowher was hired.

Why the Steelers?

When the time came to make one of the biggest decisions of my life, which NFL team to swear allegiance to, I was 8 years old. The decision I made would turn me into a mutated New England sports fan. I grew up a hard-core fan of the Red Sox and Celtics (and unlike with the Steelers, I picked the absolute best time to become a Celtics fan) and a Bruins fan pretty much by default since I rarely follow the NHL.

And then there’s the Steelers.

In the schoolyards of New England in 1979, boys who liked football wore those knitted winter hats with the pom-poms on top. The ones who didn’t wear Patriots hats wore either Steelers or Cowboys hats.

I had read somewhere that the Steelers were unbeaten, but strangely enough, it was largely two losses that hooked me on the Steelers. They had won their third Super Bowl the season before and started the 1979 season 4-0. Then one Sunday afternoon, a Steelers game at Philadelphia just happened to be on TV. It would be years before it was do-or-die that I be glued to the TV for Steelers games from kickoff to the final gun. Back then, in my youthful innocence, I looked at the TV and saw that the Eagles were beating the Steelers. I pointed to the TV in amazement and told my father something like, “The Steelers haven’t lost any games this season!” My father just shrugged. I don’t think he understood the magnitude of what was happening. His son was being lured by a cult. This cult would brainwash him to the point that at age 34 he would be reduced to howling at the top of his lungs and waving a yellow towel in front of dozens of strangers at a public establishment as he watched the Steelers win Super Bowl XL. He would even ignore his girlfriend, who sat with him at that very same establishment the following November, as he watched the 2-6 Steelers desperately maintain their dignity by beating the Saints 38-31. Only there was no towel-waving that day (I only break out the Terrible Towel for the playoffs).

It all started that day in 1979. This was before DirectTV. This was before the term “sports bar” was even established. This was before cable TV. I just stumbled upon a Steelers game on a tiny TV mounted on a bureau in my parents’ bedroom in our second-floor apartment in Pawtucket, RI. The antennas were bent well enough for me to see the Eagles beat the Steelers 17-14. The Steelers might have lost a game that day, but they were starting to gain a fan.

The next time I was aware of a Steelers game was three weeks later, when they beat the Broncos 42-7 at home on a Monday night. I can’t believe there actually was a time when the Steelers were playing on a Monday night and I didn’t watch it. I was 8. It’s not like I was working that night. Anyway, I looked at the box score in The Evening Times (Pawtucket’s daily newspaper) the next day. The overline read something like “Big, Bad Steelers.” Seeing the words above that box score was another step toward the Point of No Return for this budding Steelers fan.

The next week, I caught the tail-end of the Steelers’ 14-3 win over the Cowboys (25 years later, almost to the day, another Steelers win over the Cowboys would increase my interest in the team, which had slipped to the devoted level, back to maniacal once again. I’ve maintained that level ever since).

Three weeks later, I watched a Steelers game from beginning to end for the first time. Unfortunately, it was a 35-7 loss to the Chargers in San Diego. But for some strange reason, this embarrassing loss just drew me in even more. I watched this game on the living-room TV. The Steelers were losing 28-0, and I wasn’t happy. They finally scored a touchdown. I probably didn’t know enough about football yet to realize that it was too little, too late. I screamed “Touchdown!” loud enough to be heard throughout the whole apartment as I sat on my father’s lap. There it was, the first time I screamed while watching the Steelers. Sort of like Pete Rose getting his first hit.

Inside information

It was the best Christmas of my life. Among the black and gold gifts I received were these little Steelers figurines that came with uniform-number decals so you could pretend it was whatever player you wanted. I also got a Steelers sweatshirt that my sister (two years my junior) would point to and say “Pitts-bird Steelers.”

Then came the playoffs. It wasn’t until years later that I found out the Steelers might not have been the best team in the NFL that year. The truth would have been too painful for me at such a young age. The Chargers, like the Steelers, were 12-4 that year, but had home-field advantage throughout the playoffs by virtue of their win over the Steelers.

Mean Joe Greene said something interesting in an interview on WFAN in the days leading up to Super Bowl XL. To the best of my recollection, he said the Steelers watched game film of Dan Fouts, the Chargers quarterback, after their loss to the Chargers and noticed that he shifted his feet a certain way before passing. He said the Steelers gave this information to the Houston Oilers, who played at San Diego in the AFC divisional playoffs. The Oilers upset the Chargers, which allowed the Steelers to avoid the Chargers and play the AFC championship game at home, where they defeated the Oilers and reached Super Bowl XIV.

When the Steelers beat the Rams to win their fourth Super Bowl. I remember Terry Bradshaw jumping up and down doing a windmill motion with his arms. I tried to imitate that in the living room. Our babysitter thought I was crazy. I would only get crazier from there.

No flipping

During the early part of this decade (what do we call this decade, by the way? The 2000s? The zeroes? Any input on this would be greatly appreciated), Patriots fans emboldened by their team’s dynasty charged me with being a frontrunner. A frontrunner wouldn’t be able to stomach the likes of Mark Malone, Scott Campbell and Delton Hall during the mediocre 1980’s. And the Cowher Era was frustrating until the Steelers finally won the Super Bowl in 2005, but if anything it strengthened my resolve as a Steelers fan, especially when the Patriots became their nemesis.

When I moved to New York from Rhode Island, fellow Red Sox fans told me to not to turn into a Yankees fan. I told them that if living in New England when the Patriots won three Super Bowls didn’t convert me into a Patriots fan, nothing the Yankees do will flip me, either.

Not long after Super Bowl XIV, I caught a foreshadowing of what was to come. I read a newspaper article about one (or more) of the Steelers players pondering retirement. After reading that story, I went to my mother and said: “Mom, I might not be liking the Steelers anymore.” My mother never raised an angry hand to me. But if there ever was a time when I needed to be smacked around, it was then. But my buyer’s remorse about choosing the Steelers soon passed. I went into the next season fully equipped with Steelers gear and ready to cheer them on again.

Problem was, the Steelers plummeted back to earth. They were getting old. I still enjoyed Christmas in 1980, but it just wasn’t the same because there were no playoffs for the Steelers. It taught me something about sports. I learned that athletes get old and not as good as they used to be. If I knew then what I know now, the Steelers’ decline would have made a lot more sense to me.

It’s a damn good thing I didn’t have to deal with 2006 as a wide-eyed 9-year-old. But enough looking back. There are three more Vince Lombardi trophies to be won until 2010. It’s not too late to wrest the Team of the Decade title away from those damn Patriots. The bar has a new manager. Welcome to the 'Burgh, Mike Tomlin. Ya' got a championship on tap?