State of My Steelers

This is not the team I admired as a child. This is not the team I admired last month.

The test of a fan’s faith cannot always be determined through wins and losses. In the case of the Pittsburgh Steelers, my faith is being tested outside the lines of the football field.

I can remember growing up in the late 70’s, watching the great Steelers teams of that era dominate the NFL. In those days, it was the Pittsburgh Steelers and everybody else and it really wasn’t that close. Four Super Bowl wins in six years is quite a sports dynasty by any standard. I remember my older cousins, sporting Jack Lambert and Franco Harris t-shirts, playing pick-up football games in the field next to my grandmother’s house, in a grass-stained haze of black and white, sweaty exuberance. I looked up to my cousins. They liked the Steelers and therefore, so did I.

Fast-forward to the modern era, and my love for the team stuck through those early, highly impressionable years. My Dad would take me to games at old Three Rivers Stadium. I remained loyal through the bumbling losing seasons that followed the great years in the late-70’s and early 80’s. I watched with amazement as the Steelers rolled through three-straight playoff road wins in January 2005, to an improbable Super Bowl win. I watched Ben Roethlisberger toss the game winning pass to a triple-covered receiver, Santonio Holmes, while keeping his tip-toes inbounds, in the waning minutes of the 2009 Super Bowl. My young daughter shared the couch with me and cheered along for the team that she had adopted as her own. My long allegiance to one of the NFL’s great franchises had been worth the wait.

Sometime after that, the wheels began to fall off. The players on the team that I loved to watch began to behave like lawless fools.

How am I supposed to explain to my daughter that the star quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, may be suspended for a few games, because he chose to have sexual relations with an intoxicated co-ed (allegedly against her will) in the bathroom of a Georgia bar? How am I supposed to explain that Santonio Holmes was "traded" for ten cents on the dollar, after several off-the-field incidents where he smoked more joints than a Cheech and Chong festival? There have been other incidents including drunken place-kickers being arrested for public urination, domestic assaults and my personal, tongue-in-cheek favourite, the smashing of a paper towel dispenser at a gas station.

Within 14 months of their last Super Bowl win, the star quarterback has become a pariah, a laughingstock, an example of misguided fame and a failed standard of behaviour. The former Super Bowl MVP was sent packing in a hasty trade for a middle-round draft pick, due to his continuous refusal to change his misguided, off the field lifestyle. The wheels fell off.

Thursday night is the NFL draft. I hope the GM takes a long hard look at the players he seeks to bring to this team, and the impact their actions could have on the image of the team abroad. This team needs a severe public relations shine job, and fast. I want to win as much or as more as the next fan who watches religiously, each weekend through the fall and winter, but after everything I've observed and read during this off-season, I'm going to be a little slow, pulling that black and white jersey over my head when the games start up again.