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When did I become a Pittsburgh Steelers Fan?

I became a Pittsburgh Steelers fan in 1974.  And I owe it all to a small paperback book about professional football that

I bought through the Scholastic Book Club at my elementary school.  Originally I had ordered the book from their

catalog because I wanted to know more about the football games that my dad would watch on TV every Sunday

afternoon and so that I could watch and enjoy the games with him.  Even though I cannot remember the title, and the

book has been lost to me for over 30 years, I can still remember the photos and text within it.  I remembered that its

color photos showed Terry Bradshaw with his arm cocked back ready to throw and Franco Harris running downfield

with the ball. But what I remember most of all, and what made me into a Pittsburgh Steelers fan when I was 8 year old,

was reading the book’s in-depth description of the greatest play in NFL history, The Immaculate Reception! 

Personally, this play was great to me because it ignited both an interest in the Pittsburgh Steelers and in the sport of

professional football that has remained with me to this day.

My Family and Pittsburgh

Another reason why I am a Steelers fan is because to me the Steelers are more than just an NFL football team, they

are family.  They always remind me of my father who was born and raised in the city and whose family all live within Pittsburgh and the Western Pennsylvania area.  In the 1970’s and 1980’s I can still remember the abandoned, or soon

to be closed-down, rusted steel mills that lined the city’s river banks.  Back then I spent many a summer vacation as a child at my grandparent’s house on the North Side.  The 100 year old house stood within a hill top neighborhood next

to an old cemetery across the street from Oliver High School.  This was the house that my father grew up in.  Warm summer evenings meant catching green glowing fireflies in the front yard and birthday parties with bowls of ambrosia and glasses of mint ginger ale.  On the 4^th of July the entire family would walk down the street to the edge of the hill where my great grandmother’s house used to stand to watch the city’s fireworks.  From there you could see the entire

Y-shaped river valley with Mount Washington on the far right and The Point to the left as fireworks filled the evening

sky above the “dahntahn” skyscrapers.  Just to the lower right you could see the circle shaped Three Rivers Stadium.

I was fortunate to be in Three Rivers Stadium once, but it wasn’t for a Steelers game.  It was for a Pirates baseball

game that my Uncle Rich took me and my cousin to the year after they won the World Series.  If you think it’s hard enough to get seats for a Steelers home game, try being a 13 year old earning a three dollar a week allowance.  My

first Steelers game would have to wait as a dream that would take 27 years to fulfill.  Luckily, as a hard core Pittsburgh Steelers fan today, I make an effort to watch every game on satellite TV with my fiancé at my Steelers Bar.  And with every game I watch, I am reminded of my family and of my childhood.  I'm proud to wear black and gold.  I'm proud

to be a Steelers fan.

Super Bowl 14                                                          Subject Page

It was hard to be a Pittsburgh Steelers fan living in Southern California during the late 1970’s.  Before the advent of

satellite TV you could only watch a regular season game or two on NBC and they were usually local games of

California teams like the Rams, Chargers, Raiders or 49er’s and Monday Night Football on ABC.  The only time that I

could watch my favorite team was in the playoffs or in the Super Bowl.  The very first Steelers game that I remembered

watching on TV was Super Bowl 14 when they played the Los Angeles Rams.  Back then the Rams played in the LA

Coliseum that was only thirty miles away from my house, so almost every kid in my school rooted for the home team. 

A week before the big game the teachers at my school started a football pool for students for bragging rights, but with

no money to win.

To show my Pittsburgh Steelers pride I wore a black long sleeve sweat shirt that had the team’s jersey stripes printed on both of the upper sleeves, with Steelers and a sports number 32 printed in white on the front.  My Aunt Sissy from Gibsonia, PA had given it to me for Christmas (a far cry from the current number 86 Hines Ward black Steelers jersey that I wear when I watch a game today, but back then it was all that was available).  Even though it did not have my favorite player Terry Bradshaw’s number 12 printed on it, I still enjoyed it because I also liked Franco Harris and because it was the only thing that I could wear that was Steelers related.  I found out that week that I was the only Pittsburgh Steelers Fan in the entire school.  In a pre-Steeler Nation perspective, I felt like I was the only Steelers Fan west of Wheeling, West Virginia!  During the game I remember holding up my faded gold Pittsburgh Steelers pennant that I had bought the last time I was there on my summer vacation and wearing my faux Steelers "jersey" to cheer on

my team!  To this day I can still remember after the snap seeing Bradshaw wildly running from and dodging quick rushing Ram’s line backer after line backer only to throw an extremely deep spiral pass into the waiting hands of a fast running John Stallworth for a photo worthy Super Bowl game winning touch down.  I would not see another touch down like that for 26 years when Antwaan Randle El on a trick play would throw a perfect spiral pass into the waiting hands of Super Bowl 40’s Most Valuable Player, Hines Ward.  Needless to say, the next day after the Steelers won Super Bowl 14, I was the happiest kid in school with football bragging rights for the rest of the year.

When I discovered Steeler Nation

During the 1980's and 1990's I continued as a Steelers fan living in Southern California by watching the team whenever

they made it into the playoffs or the Super Bowl because these were the only Steeler games that the networks would

show on West Coast TV.  It wasn't until the winter of 2003 that a customer at the place where I was working told me that

Steelers fans were meeting at "Players Sports Bar and Grill" in Laguna Hills, watching all of the regular season games.  Since it was the very end of the season I was able to visit the sports bar and watch one game there.

On my first visit I was surprised to find the place packed wall to wall with about 100 to 150 black  and gold Steeler fans. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen what Steeler Nation really looked like.  I soon enjoyed the benefit

of high-fiving and of Steelers chant songs.  With this new game-watching option at my disposal, I decided that during

the 2004 season I would make an attempt to watch every regular and post season Steelers game from this sports bar.  Since that season I actually have watched almost every Steelers game either from Players or from another sports bar that I discovered in Southern California called "The Starting Gate" in Los Alamitos.  Having talked to many Steeler

fans regularly watching games at these sports bars, and some that I have worked with, I learned that many of them moved to the Southern California area from Pittsburgh within the last 15 to 20 years for economic reasons.  The economic reasons they were all talking about stemmed from the city wide recession that was caused by the closure

of many of the steel mills that I had seen as a child. This resulted in up to 40% of the work force moving to other parts

of the country looking for work, especially to the Eastern Seaboard (mostly in the New York City area), the Midwest, Florida, Texas and California.  Just recently with the use of online researching I have attempted to define how big Steeler Nation really is.  What I discovered is that Steeler Nation, in the form of fan clubs, sports bars and online

groups, can be found coast to coast in almost every state and internationally in countries such as England, Germany,  Austria, Mexico and Brazil.  Using the results from my search I created this website.

Discovering Steeler Nation Online

I enjoy the interaction I have with the 100 to 150 black and gold Steelers fans at my Steeler bar, but this only lasts four months out of the year.  To search for other Steelers fans who I could interact with all year long, and all across the country, I decided to create my own Steeler fan profile on MySpace in the spring of 2007.  Through MySpace I have been able to make friends with over 450 Steeler Nation fans who I interact with by trading artwork, photos, birthday wishes, holiday greetings and anything that has to do with the Pittsburgh Steelers.  I learned html codes and was able

to customize the look of my profile, adding both current and past player team rosters, personal blogs and a collection

of comment artwork sent to me by friends and widely distributed throughout the Steeler Nation MySpace world.  What

I discovered is that I was limited in what I could do graphically on my profile and I wanted to do more.  My solution was

to create my own Steelers website where I could expand my profile page while still interacting with my MySpace

Steeler Nation friends.  My new website includes larger, more detailed current and past player team rosters, a library page, a history page, a tribute page for Art Rooney and more.  One of the new featured pages on Steeleri.com is the Steeler Nation Sport Bars Directory, based on the Pittsburgh Post Gazette directory and then narrowed down by online verification of internet pages.  Also featured is a page dedicated to Steeler Fan Clubs.  Both the Sport Bars Directory and the Fan Club Directory were inspired by the interaction I had with my MySpace friends.  I had received and answered many questions from them about where they could watch televised Pittsburgh Steelers games in cities they were either visiting or moving to.  I was also inspired by Steeler fans from Pittsburgh who I ran into on New Years Eve, 2006 during a Las Vegas trip with my fiancé.  They were at the hotel that we were staying at and asked if we knew

where they could watch the upcoming Steelers vs. Browns game.  This got me thinking about all of the other Steeler fans out there that may be asking the same questions and how much I want to help them watch their favorite team.  I hope that I can do this through my directories.  Having worked on this project, on and off, for the past year, mostly on weekends and at night after coming home from work, I finally launched Steeleri.com in October 2008.  With the creation of this website I hope to interact with even more fans out in Steeler Nation.

Organize, Organize, Organize

In the months that I was searching the internet for anything Steelers I came across unofficial Steeler Fan Clubs,

websites and groups all over the country and in many parts of the world, but found less than I thought on the subject

of Steeler Nation.  I found  two Steeler Nation web pages, both created by newspapers: the Pittsburgh Post Gazette

and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.  Both had photo galleries, directories and links to some stories that were written

by the newspapers on the subject.  In fact, it was in reading one of the stories that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette’s Steeler Nation web page (Steeler Nation Reaches Far and Wide written by Chuck Finder) that I found the inspiration to create Steeleri.com.  Under the subject line “Organize, Organize, Organize”, Mr. Finder writes that even though the Pittsburgh Steelers statistically have more devoted fans, for some reason the Cleveland Browns have

more fan clubs around the world.  In the article he urges all Steeler Fans to create their own connections so all of the

fan clubs, fan sites and groups can be united.  This is one of the missions that I see for my website: to unite everyone and everything that is Steelers.  One thing I noticed on both the newspapers' Steeler Nation pages is that they only devote a page to the subject and not an entire website.  This is also one of the reasons I created Steeleri.com, to have a website devoted to everything Steeler Nation.  Even though I’m creating and managing Steeleri.com, I’m looking for all fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers out there in Steeler Nation to help build it up by participation in our Steeler Nation census, by sharing your own personal Steeler photos and stories to post, by submitting your Steeler reviews and by sending comments and ideas to tell us how you’d like to see the website grow.  It’s all up to you!

Thank you Chuck for your inspiration.

Contact Me

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Thank you

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