About Three Bricks Shy by Roy Blount Jr

Author:Roy Blount, Jr. [Blount Jr., Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822979685
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

But these reflections have led us away from the question of Pittsburgh fandom. Go back to contact. “The tradition here was always Jock Sutherland rock ’em sock ’em coal miner football,” said Artie Rooney. “In the old days Paul Brown beat us by throwing the ball—killed us. Our players went up to the Browns after the game and said, ‘Why don't you join the Celtics?’ ” The Browns had won, in other words, but they hadn't been playing football. “That was a lot of b.s. But football is controlled violence, and the people around here were close to violence.”

“Football was something you tried to play to get out of the mill,” said Dan Rooney. And you figured the way to get out of a steel mill was to blast your way out. Dan recalled going to speak to fans in some millworkers’ bar. “Somebody would ask a tough question, and before I'd get a chance to answer, somebody else would yell, ‘What do you want to ask a question like that for?’ and there'd be a fight.” Afterwards he would be given a jar of pasta fazool as an honorarium. He sounded nostalgic.

“There's a new breed of fan now,” said Artie. “They're one step beyond the real old violence. But only one generation beyond it.” He said if you spoke to the Mount Lebanon Jaycees, pretty soon the questions and the tone of the rooms would get rowdy enough that you would think, they're getting back to what they came from.

If I wanted to get a feel for old-fashioned Steeler fans, suggested the Rooneys, I ought to go out to Chiodo Tavern in Homestead, the area where the historic Homestead Strike raged in 1892—strikebreakers were poisoned, strikers fought off barges full of Pinkertons and then let them land and ran them through a vicious gauntlet of kicks and blows, and authorities hung a man up by his thumbs for applauding the attempted assassination of the president of Carnegie Steel. Things were considerably quieter in Homestead now, but the mills were still turning out steel and Steeler fans there, and they drank at Chiodo's. “We were looking down from our box one time and Joe Chiodo had a guy around the neck, defending the Rooneys,” Dan said.

“Well,” Joe told me in his place, “a couple of boys were calling the Rooneys everything but white people, and I got between ’em. I took an elbow in the mouth. I saw the Rooney family watching from up above. I was defending their honor. I could tell they were ready to help me out.”

“He was wrong there,” Dan said later. “We were ready to call a cop, though.”

Joe took a flashlight and shone it on each of a rich assortment of mementos over the bar: helmets and jerseys from the past; a pheasant (“Somebody's father shot that”); a pennant from Lake Chargoggagogmanchauggagogg-chaubunuagungamaug. On the side of the phone booth was a mounted deer's head.

Joe was the organizer of a group of about forty fans who paid a few bucks a week all year for a season ticket each and a trip or two to road games.

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