The Pittsburgh Citizen

This ten-part series is devoted to the topic: How did Pittsburgh get revitalized? If there is a sense that the city and region have an esprit and momentum today that was lacking in Pittsburgh even ten years ago, where did those things come from? So far, I've written about historical factors, livability, sustainability and the environment, Pittsburgh's "character," and politics.

Today's topic is sports, and the relationship between Pittsburgh's sporting successes -- and failures -- and the city's and region's sense of themselves. Certainly, when the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pittsburgh Penguins win championships, Pittsburgh residents and ex-pats share an intangible collective sense of pride in the city itself, as if they had something directly to do with what happened on the field or on the ice. The same feeling extends to professional baseball, though a dwindling number of living Pittsburghers remember the championship seasons of 1979 and 1960, or the near-misses of the early 1990s.

In other words, today's aura of Pittsburgh success owes no small debt to the recent successes of its professional athletes. It also owes no small debt to long-ago athletic successes. The Pirates won the World Series over the Yankees in 1960 under circumstances so miraculous that fans still gather on ths anniversary of the deciding game to relive the deciding moment. The Steelers won four Super Bowl championships during the 1970s, and the Pirates won again in the 1979, at a time when it might be said that the city had virtually nothing else going for it. Pittsburgh was the City of Champions then, as some say it is again. But then the point was simply survival. Without the Steelers and Pirates of the 1970s, and the Penguins of the early 1990s, I wonder whether there would be have been much to revive in the late 1990s. [Updated: Chris Briem and Martin Andelman try to refine the timing of the region's industrial decline relative to the success of the Steelers, a mapping that my original post left vague. The Super Bowl years concluded before the region really imploded, but after reading both of their posts it seems likely that Pittsburgh had already absorbed a sense of economic foreboding as the Steelers came to prominence -- even if that foreboding had not matured fully in economic terms. As regional mythos, Steelers invincibility gradually took the place of steelworker invincibility.]

If you live here or grew up here, you don't need me to tell you any of that. Today is the opening game of the Steelers' campaign to make Pittsburgh "Seventh Heaven" (in recognition of the team's anticipated seventh Super Bowl victory), and like many residents, I'm wearing my jersey as I type this entry.

If you're an outsider getting caught up on the mechanics of Pittsburgh's renewal, then it's likely that the hold that sports have on this area is not a complete mystery. The fan support should seem familiar. All but two of the G20 nations that will descend on Pittsburgh later this month compete today or have competed previously at the top levels of international soccer, and the passion of Pittsburgh sports fan is matched, if at all, only by the passion of football supporters for local clubs around the world. To a G20 visitor, the meaning of a Steelers jersey on game day, and the value of Steelers supporters to the aura of the city, translates roughly into the meaning of a ManU jersey for Manchester, or a Barca jersey for Barcelona.

But the sport itself, and the implications of the sport for the region, require some untangling.

Read more at Pittsblog.

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here]

Photo by alpineinc licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.