Pittsburghers: World Series or Super Bowl?

I’ve been a die-hard Pittsburgh sports fan for 70 years and it hasn’t been easy. As a kid, I watched the Pirates’ Rickey Dinks, who should have worn their gloves on their shins, and the Same Old Steelers, who, with their single wing, played 1950s football like it was the 1930s. I’ve endured a Pirates 20-season losing streak, a Steelers quarterback named Bubby, and another nicknamed Tommy Gun.

But, thanks to Pittsburgh sports teams, I had the time of my life in the 1970s. By the end of the decade, my Steelers were on their way to a fourth Super Bowl victory, my Pirates won two World Series and even Pitt’s football team had come through with a national championship. I saw an Immaculate Reception, a leaping Swann, an immortal Clemente, an ageless Pops, and a dazzling home-town running back who committed the unforgivable sin of playing for the Dallas Cowboys after winning the Heisman Trophy at Pitt.

My only problem was that I had accepted a teaching position in Southern Illinois University’s Department of English in 1969 and watched those championship teams and players of the 1970s on a television screen. While Pittsburgh fans danced in Downtown streets, I danced around my living room in Makanda, Ill., while my kids looked on in astonishment.

I once made the mistake of asking my wife Anita why Pittsburgh sports teams waited until I left my home town before they started winning all those championships. She thought that my leaving was probably the best thing that had ever happened to Pittsburgh sports. It was obvious that I was a jinx and, once I left Pittsburgh, its sports teams went on a rampage out of relief and gratitude. She also believes that all the talk in the past about the Pirates or the Steelers moving to another city was a warning just in case I had the notion, after retiring in 2001, of returning to Pittsburgh.

My greatest thrill in the 1970s came at the end of the decade when the Steelers defeated the Dallas Cowboys in the 1979 Super Bowl and the Pirates won the 1979 World Series against the Baltimore Orioles. The championships gave me that rare opportunity for a Pittsburgh sports fan of deciding which meant more — a Steelers Super Bowl or a Pirates World Series victory.

It wasn’t an easy choice. Going into the 1970s, the Steelers hadn’t won a championship of any kind since they entered the NFL in 1933 as the Pittsburgh Pirates. I’d waited so long to watch the Steelers win a championship that the night before they played the Minnesota Vikings in the 1975 Super Bowl, I was afraid to go to bed for fear that I would die in my sleep. The 1979 Super Bowl victory was also a special moment because it was likely one of the last for a now aging team that had transformed the Same Old Steelers into a dynasty and its fans into the Steelers Nation.

For all of Anita’s talk about jinxes, I was still in Pittsburgh when the Pirates beat those hated Yankees in the 1960 World Series. Ironically, I couldn’t get a ticket for the 7th and deciding game and had to watch Bill Mazeroski’s home run on a television set in the furniture department of Gimbels, where I worked as a stock boy. I wasn’t at Forbes Field that day, but I was an escalator ride away from the biggest celebration in Downtown Pittsburgh since World War II.

What made the Pirates 1979 World Series victory so special was the inspired performance of Wille Stargell and its echo of Roberto Clemente’s brilliance in the 1971 World Series. It was the 39-year-old Stargell’s last hurrah and the end of arguably the greatest decade of baseball in Pirates history.

After the Pirates won the 1979 World Series, I remember taking a walk outside just to savor the moment. I gradually realized that the Pirates victory meant more to me than the Steelers Super Bowl win just nine months earlier. I love the Steelers, but the Pirates were my first love. When my father took me to my first game when I was nine years-old, it was to a Pirates game. When we played catch it was with a baseball, as my father regaled me with tales of Honus Wagner, Pie Traynor and the Waner brothers.

These days Pittsburgh sees itself as a football town, but, when I was growing up it was a baseball town. and, as I grow old, I still see it, admittedly with fading vision, as a baseball town.