My father watched the Steelers on a black and white television in a house that didn’t have central air, which means he watched them sweating in the summer and freezing in the fall, because the reception in our part of the county was bad enough that you had to sit close to the set, and close to the set meant close to the window, and the window was either open or covered in frost depending on the time of year. He watched them that way for decades. Never missed a game if he could help it.
I got it from him. That’s the beginning and end of this, really.
The years, in order
I watched with my dad through the late seventies, when the team was something genuinely extraordinary. Four Super Bowls in six years. I was too young to fully understand what I was watching, but I understood that my father got loud and happy in a way he didn’t get loud and happy about much else, so I paid attention.
I watched on my own through the eighties and nineties, which were not great decades for the Steelers and which I will not dwell on except to say that loyalty means something different when the team isn’t winning. It means you keep watching anyway, which I did.
I watched with my wife through the nineties and into the 2000s. She wasn’t a sports person by nature but she understood what Sundays meant in our house and she was good about it. Occasionally she’d ask a question about the rules partway through an important play and I’d do my best to explain without letting it show that the timing wasn’t ideal. We managed. That was the word for a lot of things, actually — we managed.
February 1, 2009. Super Bowl XLIII. Steelers versus the Cardinals. Fourth quarter, the Steelers down 20–16 with just over two minutes left. Santonio Holmes in the back of the end zone. I was in my living room with both kids — my son was fifteen, my daughter thirteen — and when that ball came down in Holmes’s hands I made a noise I don’t think I’ve made before or since. My son came off the couch like he’d been launched. My daughter, who’d been doing homework on the floor because she’d inherited her mother’s more sensible approach to football, looked up and said “Did we win?” and the three of us just laughed until we couldn’t anymore.
That was a good night. I think about it more than makes sense for something seventeen years ago.
The Tomlin years
Mike Tomlin became head coach in 2007. Thirty-four years old at the time. Never had a losing season. Not one, in nineteen years. You can look that up — it sounds like the kind of stat someone exaggerates, until you check and find out it’s just true.
When he stepped down in January, someone inside the organization described the locker room reaction as feeling like a funeral. That phrase has stayed with me. It was honest in a way sports reporting usually isn’t.
I felt it too, from out here where I’m just a fan who doesn’t know the man. Nineteen seasons is a long time. You get used to something that’s always there. You stop noticing it until it’s gone and then you notice it quite a lot.
McCarthy, and what I’ve talked myself into
Mike McCarthy. Five years in Dallas, decent regular seasons, nothing deep in the playoffs. Before that, Green Bay, where he won a Super Bowl with Rodgers in 2010. That’s the line on his resume that mattered most to whoever made this decision, and I understand why they leaned on it.
I’m not against McCarthy. I just don’t know him yet. Tomlin I knew — I knew how he handled a loss, a win, a bad call in the fourth quarter. McCarthy is the new foreman in a factory I’ve worked at my whole life. I’m watching. Ask me again in December.
What I’ve figured out, which honestly isn’t much
The skepticism I have about this season isn’t entirely about football. Some of it is just about getting older and knowing that things end.
My dad watched four championships and then watched the team be bad for a decade and then watched them be good again, and he did all of that from the same chair in the same house, through a black and white TV and then a color one and then eventually one my mother made him put in the bedroom because it was too big for the living room. She redd up the whole front room around that thing and the TV still had to go. But he kept watching from wherever the TV was. The team changed, the coaches changed, the players changed. He kept watching. It was the one thing I could count on from him.
I’ve been doing it for fifty-some years. Through my parents’ house and my own house and through a marriage and kids growing up and moving away and a lot of changes I didn’t always handle as gracefully as I should have. The Steelers were always there on Sunday. That is genuinely not nothing.
Tomlin’s gone. Rodgers is here. McCarthy is getting to know the locker room. Season starts September 13th at home against Atlanta. I’ll be on the couch with Biscuit and Rusty — Biscuit doing her thing of just being near me, Rusty being unpredictable as always, the TV on, the game on.
Some things stay the same even when everything else changes. I find that useful right now.
Something I cannot stop thinking about:
Home opener, new coach, new quarterback, forty-two years old, last dance. I have been thinking about it more than makes sense for a game that is still weeks away. The Falcons finished last season somewhere in the middle of the NFC South and are not a team that should scare anyone on paper. On paper. I know what on paper is worth. What I know is that McCarthy will have his first regular season game as the Steelers’ head coach, Rodgers will take his first regular season snap in Pittsburgh black and gold, and I will be on the couch with the dogs and probably too much coffee and the kind of attention that only comes from fifty years of caring about something. I do not know what happens. I know I will be watching.
Biscuit’s asleep already. Game’s not for another five weeks. But I’m ready.
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Hey, thanks for stopping by. This is just a place where I write about everything I’ve tried lately: old watches, the dogs, movies, interesting sports games, and any new app or website that catches my eye. Just one guy’s take, nothing more
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