About Three Bricks Shy of a Load: A Highly Irregular Lowdown on the Year the Pittsburgh Steelers Were Super but Missed the Bowl

1

ABOUT THE TITLE

I got all my stuff together one time, and then I couldn’t lift it.

—ROGER MILLER

PRO FOOTBALL PLAYERS ARE adults who fly through the air in plastic hats and smash each other for a living. I now know a bunch of them, and I think they are good folks. They are made up, loosely speaking, of rickety knees, indoctrination, upward mobility, pain tolerance, public fantasies, meanness, high spirits, brightly colored uniforms, fear, techniques, love of games, Nutrament (a diet supplement used, sometimes with steroid drugs, for bulking up), corporate kinesthesia, God-given quickness, and heart. Sober, one of them told me, What it boils down to is, sacrifice your body with a picture in your mind. Drinking, one of them told me, When I’m on the football field I’m a knight in shining armor. When I’m selling insurance I’m just an asshole. Stoned, one of them told me, "You can be hit so hard it burns." High on the game he had just played, one of them told me, There was no other world outside it. There was nothing.

But there was a rich penumbra. I recall the afternoon of November 11, 1973. The Pittsburgh Steelers were beating the Oakland Raiders, 17-9, in a tempestuous game, in Oakland, on national TV. It was drizzling rain, great hunks of ill-rooted sod were flying through the air, sea gulls were frenetic overhead, Oakland fans were roaring and pulsing ambiguously… it was like standing in the eye of a tumbler washing machine, only noise and throat-figures all around instead of soapsuds and clothes. Steelers were running off the field with snot on their moustaches and glee and strain and grass blades in their eyes, and Craig Hanneman, a reserve defensive end from Oregon with whom I had often chewed snuff, turned to me on the mushy sidelines and cried:

You picked the right team! Oh, a great bunch of guys! And a bunch of crazy fuckers! I’m crazy too! We’re all about three bricks shy of a load! Hanneman’s last sentence—as an expression of wild approval, which I shared, tinged with then-unintended undertones of fallibility, which I tried to register as the year went on—summed up my six months with the Pittsburgh National Football League team better than anything else.

I spent the 1973 NFL campaign, from the first day of training camp in July through the draft in January, loafing with (to use the old Pittsburgh term for hanging around with) a rich mixture of Steeler or Steeler-related persons: players, coaches, scouts, fans, wives, girl friends, relatives, media people, front office people, hangers-on and prospects. I fooled around the periphery of practice, habituated the dressing room, experienced games from the bench, and followed people home. I helped Mean Joe Greene, the tackle, buy his wife a birthday card; lost 11-10 in electronic Ping-Pong to Franco Harris, the running back; heard Terry Bradshaw, the quarterback, sing his own songs and speak of welding; considered stereo buys with Frenchy Fuqua, the running back; chatted up nurses with Moon Mullins, the tackle-guard; played the horses with Art Rooney, the patriarch; and listened to Center Ray Mansfield’s little girl play Faith of Our Fathers on the clarinet. I talked labor-management with vice-president Dan Rooney (management) and player rep Andy Russell (labor, but he sells tax shelters). I threw my arm out returning Kicker Roy Gerela’s field goals to him in the cold; elicited catcalls from Palm Springs residents by dropping (in street shoes) eight end zone passes from Quarterback Terry Hanratty; and sprained my ankle and had it taped up with a vengeance by trainer Ralph Berlin. I reminisced fleetingly about candy bars with head coach Chuck Noll, met a man who steals phonograph records for a living (can’t give his name), saw tackle Jon Kolb’s goat, and was helped up off the floor by Bill Nunn, the scout, at 3 o’clock in the morning in a black after-hours club in Jackson, Mississippi. I gained some thirteen pounds of Steeler-related beer and perhaps an ounce or two (from pushing on the leg-weight machine while talking to people with knee injuries) of Steeler-related sinew. I shared linebacker Jack Ham’s shampoo, interviewed at her insistence Mrs. Bruce (guard) Van Dyke’s obstetrician, and heard the word collision used as a transitive verb. I hardly ever did anything I wanted to do.

By just sort of drifting around, and not having any readily discernible immediate objective, I became more intimate than a press person, more detached than a football person, and possessed of a certain amount of gossip from all angles. As the bricks in the load shifted, I acquired interstitial inklings of how players, coaches, scouts, fans, press and front office people fit together and how they viewed each other. (Generally, as necessary evils.)

On the one hand the Steelers in ’73 didn’t make the Super Bowl, or even, as they had the year before, win a playoff game by a miracle; on the other hand none of them was caught up by tragedy—though two of the coaches were fired, two of the marriages broke up, and Mansfield, the veteran center known as the Old Ranger, did once offer, if it would help my narrative, to die of a pinched nerve. The Steelers won ten of their fourteen regular-season games and made the playoffs, but they were proved not to be as inevitable as they and their supporters thought they were. The previous year was the year the franchise lost its maiden, winning its first title, but ’73 was a year that innocence was lost. I never had a headier year in my life, though, than I did checking out the various feels and levels of the Pittsburgh load of bricks.

I doubt that Chuck Noll—a constrainedly low-keyed man and reputed gourmet cook who speaks in terms of programming, preparation, adulthood and good experiences—would like to think of his team as being three bricks shy of a load, which is comparable to playing with less than a full deck. But what deck that is worth anything can ever be said to be full, and what is so boring as a complete, neatly squared away load of bricks? We don’t have the peaks and valleys, said a member of the NFL champion Miami Dolphins; neither do expressways through Kansas. The great thing in sports and nature is the way bricks slip and reassemble in unexpected combinations. That, for all the coaches’ planning, is how the Steelers won games and lost them. The Steelers and the people around them were a great miscellany of minds, bodies, backgrounds and visions of reality, held firmly but hazardously together by the goal of winning all the marbles. In ’73 they won only a good share of them—like most enterprises they fell short at the end, and heads rolled and players felt bleak and the fans in Pittsburgh very nearly started saying The Same Old Steelers again. But the Steelers’ mix was more than their aim.

I want to thank the Rooneys, Noll, engagingly upfront publicists Ed Kiely and Joe Gordon, and everybody else in the Steeler organization for the access and help—not to mention the almost unlimited Vitamin-E-and-wheat-germ pills and cigars—they afforded me, and Andre Laguerre, Roy Terrell, Ray Cave, Gil Rogin, and Tex Maule of Sports Illustrated for their guidance and sponsorship; and the men in Black and Gold—Hanneman, just for instance, for the title and the snuff.

2

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Après moi, le déluge, i.e., first things first.

—FATHER ORFE IN CARDS OF IDENTITY, BY NIGEL DENNIS

ONE DAY LATE IN December 1972, Andre Laguerre, then managing editor of Sports Illustrated, summoned me, one of the staff writers, and said he wanted somebody to live with a pro football team for a season and write a book about it.

Well. I was thirty-one years old and just divorced, so I was at suitably loose ends, but otherwise I wasn’t sure about the idea. I came into sportswriting unexpectedly from a newspaper job in which I made fun of, and occasionally deigned to talk to, politicians. I was the natural man, the politicians were the connivers. I was primary, they were secondary. In sportswriting I found it to be the other way around: the athletes were instinctive artists, just trying to stay inspired and exercise their craft, and I was in the position of trying to get them to conceptualize, to say something that they tended to feel would somehow get them into social, financial or ontological trouble. I will never entirely get over the sensation of realizing that my boyhood idol Willie Mays disliked me on sight. The fact that every other writer I know who ever tried to talk to Mays came away with the same impression does not really help. Willie, I said to him at one point, do you realize that the last eight innings you’ve led off, you’ve gotten on base seven times?

Man, he said, I don’t keep up with that shit.

All I want to happen to me in heaven is for Willie Mays to come up to me and say, by no means humbly, but appreciatively, Do you realize that in the last eight descriptive sentences you’ve written you’ve used only one adjective?

Man, I will say (nicely, but firmly), I don’t keep up with that shit.

I prefer doing outré sports stories—coon hunting, synchronized swimming, an eighty-two-year-old lifeguard. I like to hang around with people I feel I am in the same boat with, which is to say that we are all confused but have visionary flashes occasionally and like to argue and tell stories. Then I like to go back to my office and render these people as semisympathetic characters, which entails a certain amount of betrayal I-Thou-wise, but after all, if you hang around with an eighty-two-year-old lifeguard you put up with certain things, and the same goes for hanging around with a writer. Everybody, as subject or object, is a semisympathetic character at best.

But whoever did this book was going to have to spend a lot of time in a big-time dressing room. Big-time dressing rooms had always made me nervous. For one thing I could never spend longer than a few minutes in one without being galled by not having my own stool and uniform and helmet, or glove, and some of those cleated shoes that click on hard floors like the bears’ claws on the cement in the zoo. Faulkner said a novelist is a failed short-story writer who is a failed poet. I am a failed linebacker, or defensive end. I have gotten over those ambitions, at least vocationally, altogether (now I want to be a man who operates a steam shovel), but still my reaction around football practice is like that of my four-year-old boy Kirven. When I took Kirven to watch the Steelers practice he enjoyed it until he realized nobody in uniform was going to chase him. Then he wanted to go home. So he missed meeting Johnny Unitas, which was probably just as well considering the moods he and Unitas were in. (While the two moods were not identical, they were perhaps comparable, as we shall see.)

Another thing is that I had never liked being around a lot of people each of whom could so easily beat me half to death that there wouldn’t be any point to it. It’s not that I actively fear or feel antagonism toward football players. Many people do, I think, including football fans. And so might I, if I had gone to a college where jocks were more freely indulged than they were at Vanderbilt in the early sixties, where several Commodores were my friends—which may bear a relation to how seldom the Commodores won. Some drunk Georgia Bulldogs once threatened to kill my sister Susan and peed on her date’s foot at a house party, and when she complained to Coach Vince Dooley he said the boys were under a great deal of pressure.

I never saw any Steelers bully any civilians, and in fact I saw some of them contain themselves when people were being pointedly obnoxious. Lemme at them, I remember crying one night. "I’ll pee on the bastards’ feet."

No, I was told. It would reflect adversely on the organization.

I just made that up. But whenever I heard of Steelers being involved in barroom brawls I did wish, irrationally, that I had been there and had pitched in by doing what I once did as a fraternity pledge raiding the Sigma Chi house in college: leapt from the top of some stairs onto a crowd that was dragging a fellow pledge up the stairs toward the shower and knocked a good dozen people all the way down the whole long flight, in a thrashing heap. And ran.

But it wouldn’t have been that way for me in a pro football brawl. I would have been hit spang in the middle of the face so hard that not only were my glasses broken and I had to be led back to the car but I also lost forever my sense of taste. That’s what happened to a man I know who was fool enough to get in a fistfight because it seemed like the thing to do at the time. And the boys would have told me, Well, you certainly took all the fun out of that donnybrook. (Or whatever the appropriate term would be. In Pittsburgh they call a brawl a hey-rube.)

I had always felt uncomfortable in a big-time dressing room because everybody who belonged in it had laid his body on the line. I imagine that if you hang around a showgirls’ dressing room for very long without making an advance you feel like a eunuch. Hanging around a sports dressing room without ever having knocked anyone in it down, or tried to take his job, or helped him knock someone else down, tended to make me feel wispy.

Not that I am, by any means, of a mind with the civilians who come up to Van Dyke in Pittsburgh bars and try to get him to go one-on-one with them—the civilian rushing some imaginary quarterback, Van Dyke blocking—in the parking lot. I know you’ll beat me, such a man once said, but I just want to see.

This one guy was so nice about it, Bruce said. I almost did it, he wanted me to so bad.

I drove it, Ray Mansfield said. And I’d’ve killed him.

Well, but you can’t… said Van Dyke.

I think I’ll start carrying a couple of helmets in my car. And when some guy comes up with something like that, I’ll do it.

Well, but… said Van Dyke.

And I’ll kill him, Mansfield said.

I don’t have any desire to test myself against the best hitters, or to make a living hitting, any more than I want to make a living punching cows. I just want to act like a cowboy, and sing cowboy songs. (Interestingly enough, there are no pro football player songs, in the sense that there are cowboy songs. I thought about trying to write one during the season, but the closest thing I could produce was the title to an Ode to a Stewardess: My Seat Back, Tray-Table and You Know What / Are in a Full Upright Position Over You.)

But there is a shared sense of hardiness around a sports dressing room which a reporter pointedly does not share. Often have I watched a fellow reporter prying away (most often deferentially) at a sports figure in his cubicle after a game—trying to get him to say something catchy and courageous about the trials and tribulations of being the only Jewish defensive end on a team run by Arabs, say—and felt that I shared with everyone in the dressing room this unvoiced assumption: Well, old B. B. (short for Booger Bear, the sports figure’s cognomen, richly earned in hand to hand combat with people justly named Hercules Koskov, W. W. Bad Tydings, C. M. Crazy Mother McFarlane and Boulder Feoli) could just stand up suddenly and with the updraft of his chest knock old Herb (the reporter) over into that pile of peeled-off bandages over there, if he wanted to.

Not that the likelihood of B. B.’s physically squelching Herb was high. (Though such a thing has certainly happened—I remember a New York baseball writer saying how much he liked Ralph Houk of the Yankees even though Houk had once picked him up by the shirt, in answer to a question, and held him against the wall of his office.) But the very fact that B. B. was refraining from the use of his physical presence against Herb—when that physical presence was the primary reason both of them were there—diminished Herb’s stature. Conceivably, though by no means necessarily, Herb could have squelched B. B. intellectually, but there would never seem to be any point to that in a dressing room. For one thing, if Herb tried it, then B. B. probably would put him over into the pile of bandages, with some justice.

Andy Russell, the Steelers’ all-pro linebacker, may read the above and shake his head, and even without the condoning chortle with which he greeted my assertion that a fluttery forward pass is like a flaccid penis ("And you’re going to write things like that, aren’t you? he said, with bemused delight). Russell’s hero is James Ling the businessman (or was, until Ling spoiled his record by going ill-advised into the steel business in Pittsburgh). Russell goes about linebacking the way Kissinger goes about negotiating (except that Noll doesn’t give him as free a hand as Nixon gives Kissinger). But I would like to point out what Russell’s friend Mansfield said about Russell and Joe Greene: When they’re in there on defense it’s like knowing your big brother is there, and if anybody tries to push you around he’ll beat them up. Football takes us back to certain fundamental concerns. And I felt a resistance to the idea of hanging around, in their element, with 47 people who, if all 48 of us were on a desert island with 47 coconuts (see Noll’s remark, in a later chapter, the strong will arise… I would naturally be on welfare, at best.

Of course, as in the children’s hand game, paper covers rock. What remained for the aforementioned Herb, after B. B. had either squelched him or declined to respond meaningfully at all, was to go to his typewriter and deal high-handedly in prose with B. B.’s output or attitudes. And B. B. may well have deserved it. But that prose, sportswriting being what it mostly is, would probably not be so sound or compelling, in any primal sense, as the way B. B. moved on the field of play, or even as the way B. B. sat on his stool with sweat running down his neck and gauze unraveling down his legs. Among themselves, of course, Herb and his colleagues would have their own bonds and hardihood, highlighted by talk in some ways more rounded and venturesome than the players’. But the stories told would be about players, mostly. Check out the sportswriter characters in pro football novels. Chumps would be a player’s word for them. Somebody you slap in the face and he don’t do anything. That’s the definition of a chump, Dwight White told me. And Joe Greene once referred to $50 as chump change. A player makes more money than a scribe, and yet has stayed truer to his fiercest childhood dreams; he pushes the equivalent of a dozen people down the equivalent of a flight of stairs on a normal working day. He lives firsthand, and doesn’t like to admit, by and large, that he is in the same boat with a man who asks questions and describes.

He looks like a fag, one Steeler said to me about a member of the local media who was as straight as Vince Lombardi. What does he know about football?

What I should have said to that was, You look at least as much like a gorilla as he does like a fag. What do you know about journalism? But I was too deep into the scene by then—in a sense, I knew what he meant—and anyway that’s not what a reporter says to a sports figure. What he does is take a mental note. It’s not a very dignified role. But then again neither, if you think about it, is flying through the air in a plastic hat.

It was true that I had in a sense appeared in the bestselling pro football novel of all time (I guess), Dan Jenkins’s Semi-Tough. But that was no real recommendation of me as the man for this job, since the character Elroy Blunt, a country singer, did not resemble me: I am not a professional country singer, I can’t afford to give parties where beautiful, young, scarcely clad women try to get people to go upstairs and urinate on them in the tub, and I can’t imitate a cricket (after the book came out I wore all the hair off the insides of my calves trying to learn). All I had done to merit such a place in literature was sing in Jenkins’s company my song, I’m Just a Bug on the Windshield of Life, whose actual lyrics are as follows:

He drove up in his big new car

And gave a little toot on his horn,

And drove off with the prettiest girl

That ever was born.

He’s in the drivers seat now,

Beside him sits my wife,

And I’m just a bug on

The windshield of life.

Now they’re driving down the road

And never think a thing of me,

Two in the front seat’s company,

You know what they say about three.

Now my wife looks over at him,

Her words cut like a knife:

"Old Arnie’s just a bug on

The windshield of life."

The Lord above looked down on me

And said, "I tell you boy,

Where you are is just misery,

There is no earthly joy.

You and him and your wife are all

In a world of sin and strife.

On down the road I’ll cleanse you from

The windshield of life."

I figured football players would have little sympathy for that kind of sentiment—that they were always in the front seat (I was wrong).

I have never claimed to be a fanatically interested or technically advanced student of pro football. Since I am an American it can stir my blood, of course, but here I was being told that somebody was needed to spend most of a year dwelling upon a pro football team, in a capacity somewhere between that of a tick and that of a consultant. I said, well, I would. And after some weeks of discussion, my preference for Pittsburgh was indulged.

3

WHY PITTSBURGH

Have you heard of these people before, Georgiana? Certainly not, Serena. Nobody has heard of any one in Pittsburgh.

—TWO BOSTON LADIES IN 1874, QUOTED IN VALLEY OF DECISION, A PITTSBURGH NOVEL BY MARCIA DAVENPORT

Losing has nothing to do with geography.

—CHUCK NOLL

A GOOD MANY OF my colleagues could not understand why I chose Pittsburgh of all the places in the NFL. Members of the Sports Illustrated staff are always tearing off to exotic places. I remember photographer Jerry Cooke pulling up in front of me in a taxi outside the Time and Life Building one evening. He noticed I was standing there with a suitcase.

Where are you going? he asked.

Pittsburgh, I said.

There was a pause.

"Where are you going?" I said.

China, he said, and then he rode away.

Well, I had never covered the Steelers but I had done several stories about the Pittsburgh Pirates. I once asked Pirate catcher Manny Sanguillen about his hitting. My weakness is I swing at the first pitch too much, he said. I know this.

Well, why don’t you stop? I asked him.

Because it makes me feel good! he cried, beaming.

I once got on a plane behind Pirate pitcher Steve Blass, who for fun had tied his tie so that it was only about four inches long.

Hello, the stewardess said.

Hello, said Blass. I’m the one in the short tie.

Dock Ellis, another Pirate pitcher, was once called upon suddenly to pinch-run. He ran out of the dugout wearing a Steeler warmup jacket. An umpire told him he couldn’t run the bases dressed like that. So Ellis took off the warmup jacket and had nothing on underneath. I once asked Ellis about the Cadillac El Classico he had driven to spring training. It was white with red-leather outside trim and a grille that looked like the Parthenon in chrome. It ain’t nothin’, he told me, but a DC-8.

I once sat with Pirate slugger Willie Stargell in a dugout in Bradenton, Florida, on a hot, sluggish day. Stargell commented on how little electricity, everything considered, was in the air.

A great day to be in the outfield, I said.

Yeah, said Stargell. To just stay out in the outfield all day. And every ball that comes out there, paint it a different color.

I figured any town with a baseball team that sportive ought to have a football team worth loafing with. I knew the expression loafing with already because I had been to Pittsburgh on various assignments and had met some of its people, including a man who sat down next to me in an ice cream parlor and said, "You’re looking at me—you may never see me no mo’. I may die before I get out of here, we don’t know. That’s one thing we don’t ever know. Gimme a butter pecan, lady.

I prophesy, he added. "I don’t use no cards. That’s gifted. That’s from the Lord. I broadcast tonight at 7:30."

I knew Pittsburgh, by reputation, as a town full of locally famous eccentrics, past and present—such as the late Baldwin McMoney, the late Yutzy Pascarelli and his assistant One-Way, the extant Maniac McDonough and the man, whatever his name may be, who walks the downtown streets wearing two huge sandwich-board signs and carrying a third sign on a stick. In June 1973 (they change), the three signs were hand-lettered as follows, in part:

President Nixon Vice President Agnew and Congress has the Power and Authority to Redress My Grievance Against All the Federal Courts of America But Purposely Failed to Redress My Grievance to Help U.S. Steel and the Steelworkers Who Has Tortured Me for Over 8 Years and They Will Abuse Me Until the People of America Bless Me With Their Help to Get My Grievance Against the Federal Government Properly Redressed. Please Show the World You Can Do It…. The sign man is usually struggling with the wind and often seems about to be carried away by it, especially as he goes around corners. But if you evince a glimmer of interest in his message, while walking or driving past (not many people do) he will turn gradually so as to remain readable to you for as long as possible.

People—including a good many in Pittsburgh—tend to look upon Pittsburgh as a Loser town. Perhaps it is the Pitts in the name, suggesting depression. Perhaps it is the immigrant millworker image of the population. Perhaps it is the fact that Pittsburgh has never been westerly enough to imply frontiersmen, easterly enough to imply sophisticates, or middle enough to imply stolid prosperity. Perhaps it is the fact that the Steelers went forty years without a championship of any kind. Perhaps it is the soot.

That’s all people otta ton think of the Burgh as, a local bartender told me: Soot. (Burghers sometimes refer to their town as the Burgh. For the ow sound in words they say something which I have tried to render here with a short o, as in donton longe, but which is more precisely, to take the case of town, a blend of tehn, tahn and tan. It falls somewhere in between the Boston version of the short a and the East Tennessee version of the long i. The Pittsburgh accent is unique.)

And to be sure, the city’s air before 1946 was so bad from the smoke of steel mills that the streetlights often had to be lit at noon. Here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn, wrote H. L. Mencken, that it reduced the whole aspiration of men to a macabre and depressing joke.

James Parton, writing in 1868, called Pittsburgh Hell with the lid taken off, a phrase which Lincoln Steffens used as the title of his expose of the shame of the town. Anthony Trollope, after stopping in Pittsburgh in 1862, called it the blackest place… I ever saw. At his hotel, on coming out of a tub of water my foot took an impress from the carpet exactly as it would have done had I trod barefooted on a path laid with soot. I thought that I was turning Negro upwards.

But there are ways of putting a better face on the soot. (Not, to be sure, that I want to imply that there need be anything abhorrent about turning Negro upwards. Many a white defensive back would love, would give his eyeteeth, to have black feet.) There was an eternal mist, an everlasting fog in the air, writes Stefan Lorant in Pittsburgh, the richly celebrative photo-and-text book he published in 1964.

The silhouettes of the buildings and those of the boats were soft, at times hardly visible, more felt than seen. The figures of humans as they walked through the streets seemed unreal, like in fairyland. The world was quiet, one could hardly hear the steps of the men who emerged from the fog, coming from nowhere and disappearing into nowhere. The city had about it a dreamlike quality—a phantastic and romantic paradise for photographers and painters. It is strange that no more works of art were done during Pittsburgh’s smoky decades.

I gather that the Burgher in the street took the air’s condition in his stride, and even developed a certain proprietary feeling toward it. For one thing, the open-hearth (pronounced open-herth) furnaces gave the mills a bright side, too. Nobody ever said anything about the soot and smoke, Steeler owner Art Rooney told me once. This used to be some town, Roy. When those mills lit up the rivers. I remember coming in on the train with [Chicago Bear owner George] Halas from Chicago to New York, we came by Pittsburgh at night and those mills lit up the rivers all the way along.

Little pieces of soot if you had oily skin used to sit on your nose, added Rooney’s friend and driver Richie Easton, nostalgically, almost as though he were recalling a small pet that perched on his shoulder.

Nobody else in the country but Pittsburghers could boast that they had to live in such interesting air. I know I would rather live in a town that had been described as Hell with the lid off than, say, Cleveland.

But even in a town where politics have traditionally taken their own sweet time, and their own sweet advantage of the populace, there comes a point when twelve hours of evening followed by twelve more of night is too bad for business. After World War II there began what was called the Renaissance, whose first big step was requiring the mills to filter out most of the visible pollution.

Pittsburgh air is still bad, but the Renaissance has lifted the soot and brightened up the downtown to the point that what may be the nation’s most compactly dramatic city vista is disclosed. Suddenly, as you drive through the Fort Pitt Tunnel from the airport, you come upon a beautiful blend of hills, rivers, bridges, boats, old and new buildings, surviving smoke columns, and lights. You can see it best from Mount Washington, across the Monongahela River from downtown. They call downtown Pittsburgh the Golden Triangle; it comes to a vigorously focal point, called The Point, where the Monongahela and the Allegheny conflow to form the Ohio. Across the Allegheny from the Triangle is Three Rivers Stadium, the handsome modern bowl where the Pirates and the Steelers play. The birthplace of George S. Kaufman, Gertrude Stein and Bill Cullen was never merely a spot of smuts, and now it is not that at all. (The furnaces up the rivers from town are not as vivid anymore either, and some are inactive, but they can still be seen to glow. Molten! That is what something inside a productive pro football player must be.) I liked the view from Mount Washington best when the buildings appeared to be held lightly by a vaguely visible atmosphere, held tenuously like a tipped-in basketball just hanging in the net or breasts suspended braless in a softly clinging sweater: the skyline rendered more palpable by seeming just-contained in the air’s gauzy embrace.

Speaking of bad air, the Los Angeles Rams were considered for the subject of this book. But the last time I spent any time with a group of people in Los Angeles they seemed to be divided between people who said they were going to stop doing dope because they had started seeing faces in their food, and people who said they were going to start doing more dope because seeing faces in their food was not enough. I am not avid to condemn, and have been known myself to border on such behavior, but it was not the atmosphere I wanted to work in. I like to be surrounded by a certain kind of decadence—a digestion, rather, of something hard. Pittsburgh, like its leading beer, has the name Iron City. It has a literary magazine called Ferrous Oxide. It is the place, after all, where The Night of the Living Dead was filmed and where Strom Thurmond, at a school board meeting, was pelted with marshmallows. But things don’t happen too readily in Pittsburgh. As the feller says on Hee-Haw, The news is the same tonight, it just happened to different people. Pittsburgh is a town with roots. In Pittsburgh I encountered four or five different single or divorced women in their middle or late twenties who still lived with their parents. One of them had lived her whole life in the same house. Walter Iooss, who made the photographs for this book and who joined me off and on during the season in loafing with the Steelers, once told me he needs to keep his New York edge—the quickness you need in New York to preserve yourself and to keep up with what is going on—in order to take good action pictures. I know what he means, but I also need to keep my Georgia drag: the sense of ballast you need in Georgia, where I grew up, to appreciate the powers and even the uses of inertia. There is plenty of drag in Pittsburgh.

And yet—or, accordingly—Pittsburgh is the source of many of the nation’s great fortunes. The history of the Burgh is studded with inventors and entrepreneurs. Andrew Carnegie started out there as a bobbin boy. George Westinghouse proved the practicality of Alternating Current there, and later a Westinghouse engineer there set up KDKA, the first commercial radio station in America. After making aluminum in Oberlin, Ohio, Charles Martin Hall came to Pittsburgh for financing and the result was Alcoa. The money came from Pittsburgh’s Mellons, whose interests still control or dominate not only Alcoa but God knows what. H. J. Heinz started pioneering in packaged foods in Pittsburgh. There are more corporation headquarters in Pittsburgh than anywhere in the country except New York.

I don’t know where all those corporate-executive types loaf, though, if they are transfers from out of town. Everybody I met in Pittsburgh was from Pittsburgh, or some small town outside it. Pittsburgh often calls itself a big small town. It has an Old World sort of integrity. There are streetcars, cobbled streets and innumerable publike bars, not to mention the national headquarters of the Croatian Fraternal Union of America, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Italian Sons and Daughters of America, Polish Falcons of America, the Serbian National Federation, the National Slovak Society of the United States of America and the Ukrainian National Aid Association of America.

You know what I mean?n is an expression I never heard anywhere else but in Pittsburgh. That is as closely as I can render the inflection: You know what I mean?n. The drift of it is, You know what I mean, don’t you? I would think so. It is expressed by a rising and then suddenly a falling inflection on the last word, mean?n. It reflects, I think, a sure but not complacent sense of shared assumption.

There is a dug-in, inveterate quality to life in Pittsburgh. By that I don’t mean a peaceful quality. Pittsburgh has always been one of the drinkingest towns in the nation. A shot-and-a-beer town, its inhabitants often call it. You don’t have to drink too many shots and beers (I did a couple of nights, though, in a spirit of research) in a Pittsburgh bar before you begin to feel the frustrations perking all around you.

The frustrations, however, are not fly-by-night ones. Pittsburgh is a town of