Stronger Than Steel
Next week Three Rivers Stadium is being blown up. But it will live on as a testament to those four Super Bowls the Steelers won a generation ago -- and to all the things Pittsburgh still wants to be.

By STEPHEN J. DUBNER
January 28, 2001

Twenty-eight years after the Miracle, he still has the most recognizable face in town. The sharp eyes, the Roman nose, the caramel skin, the plush beard. And a regal, weary carriage, like one of the three wise men.

On his way into the stadium, they paw and claw -- One picture, Franco!" "I was there, Franco, just lemme shake your hand!" -- and he stops for everyone. They know his face, his career stats, his provenance: one of nine children born to an Italian mother and an American soldier, a black man from Mississippi, who met in Italy at the end of the war.

Now a dusky blonde, no more than five feet tall, nearly knocks him over. "Oh, my God, it's you!" she says. "Oh, my God. Thirty years I've been waiting for this." The woman starts beating her chest with both palms.

He looks perplexed for a moment, then glances down and grins. She is wearing a faded mesh Steelers shirt, No. 32, his number.

"Whoa," he says. "Thirty years. Get out the mothballs."

He is dressed in an olive raincoat over a nice, greenish sports jacket, a black sweater and black trousers. His shoes are black leather -- with rubber soles. The Astroturf is slick from the rain, and they are asking him to re-enact the Miracle today, one last sip of glory before they drill 2,700 holes in Three Rivers Stadium, plant the dynamite and, on Feb. 4, blow it up.

He watches the last few minutes of the game from the end zone. He pulls on a crisp black No. 32 that a Steelers marketing man unpacks from a box and, when the p.a. announcer calls his name, joins the rest of his old teammates parading out to midfield under the steady throb of cheers. Then the announcer says, "How about one more look at the greatest play in N.F.L. history -- one more time!"

Franco Harris, out at the 30-yard line, is tossed a football and, at maybe one-third the original speed, retraces the steps of the last-second, hair's-breadth, game-winning catch that came to be known as the Immaculate Reception. By the time he reaches the end zone, the fans are practically genuflecting. Although many of them weren't even born in 1972, the Immaculate Reception is ESPN's Zapruder film, endlessly replayed and dissected. After the fireworks and "Auld Lang Syne," the fans file out, heads bowed.

The last time they tore down a ballpark in Pittsburgh, they really tore it down. After the Pirates' final game at Forbes Field in 1970, the fans pried up their seats, stuffed chunks of turf in their pockets, tried to haul the urinal troughs out of the men's rooms. But today they behave as if they'd been invited to the deconsecration of a cathedral.

Which isn't such a surprise. In Pittsburgh, the handshake between sports (particularly football) and religion (particularly Catholicism) is so firm that it can be hard to tell where one hand stops and the other begins. At least a few Steeler fans, thanks to their equally devoted next of kin, had their ashes quietly strewn on the bright green plastic carpet of Three Rivers.

But it goes beyond that. In a city of a certain size, there is nothing more important than its big-league sports teams -- for revenue, for unity, for self-esteem. Sure, New York gets exercised for a Subway Series and, this week, for a Super Bowl, but it all gets swallowed up a day or two after the fact, when the next spectacle comes along. In a town like Pittsburgh, the conquests live on for years. In a town like Pittsburgh, every victory is a vote for yourself. That's why they love the Steelers so much: the Steelers are them. The same owners for 68 years, only two coaches in the past 31, a tough-minded team that doesn't paste some silly bird or cat on its helmets. It's the steelmaking logo the Steelers wear, and only on one side. (Thrift!) Of course, nobody expected it to become an antique.

On Super Bowl Sunday, it is worth remembering that somehow, beneath the blizzard of corporate sponsorship and go-go commentary, a football game gets played, and to the 45 people in pads and maybe a million or two back home, a victory means everything, forever. That's why cities like Charlotte and Jacksonville and Phoenix fight so hard to bring a team to town; it's why Cleveland and Baltimore and Pittsburgh fight so hard to keep theirs -- and celebrate every victory as if it might be their last.

Pro football grew up in western Pennsylvania and so did half the National Football League, it seemed. Quarterbacks especially, Unitas and Namath and Montana, but plenty of guys like Mike Ditka, people made for football. Each steel mill fielded its own team; high-school games drew 10,000 spectators.

In their first 40 years, Art Rooney's Steelers were, with slight exception, dreadful. Only the Steelers could have cut a young Johnny Unitas. One of the Rooney grandkids recalls how embarrassed he was to ride to school in the family car, a Buick they got free for having "Official Car of the Pittsburgh Steelers" painted on the side.

'Wherever people gathered, the Steelers were the dominant topic. It gave people something pleasant to talk about for a change, instead of, ''Where the hell am I going to get work?'''

In 1972, however, the year of the Immaculate Reception, the Steelers began a turnaround that would soon produce an unprecedented four Super Bowl titles in six years. "It was like Moses crossing the desert," says Art Rooney Jr., then a team scout. "After 40 years, you're somebody."

Delirium rained down. It helped that Pittsburgh was small enough that you might run into Mean Joe Greene at the supermarket. The stars -- Greene, Franco, Jack Lambert -- were deities; even the kicker had a fan club. Terry Bradshaw, the mouthy young quarterback from Louisiana, he and Pittsburgh didn't always get along * but God, could he throw! On Fridays all over western Pennsylvania, the kids wore black and gold to school. On Saturday nights, priests tripled up their Mass schedule since no one was coming on Sundays. On Monday morning, you'd walk into the hospital and all the old emphysemic steelworkers would still be going on about how the Steel Curtain smothered the Clowns -- that is, the hated Cleveland Browns. And on Sundays! Well, on Sundays, Three Rivers Stadium was the place where anyone who'd ever been made to feel small just for being from Pittsburgh, which was pretty much everyone, finally got to watch his football team beat up any other city foolish enough to send in theirs. During those six years, the Steelers won 45 games at Three Rivers and lost only 6. People painted their entire cars black and gold, without Buick even asking them.

But victory came with a Faustian twist. Just as the Steelers rose, real-life steelers began to lose their jobs by the tens of thousands. So now the team was called upon to do even more: give a downward-spiraling town one thing it could trust, one thing it could be proud of. "You can't put a price tag on how valuable it was to the human spirit here," says Myron Cope, the dean of Pittsburgh sportscasters, whose style might be called Overcaffeinated Cosell. "Wherever people gathered, the Steelers were the dominant topic. It gave people something pleasant to talk about for a change, instead of, 'Where the hell am I going to get work?"'

The steel industry vanished, and the city buckled. "We had a 20-year run of bad news here, the largest population losses per capita of any area in the country," says Tom Murphy, a former seminarian and neighborhood activist who is now the mayor. "Between 1978 and 1985, we lost 150,000 jobs in heavy manufacturing alone."

So yes, the air is clean -- no longer do office workers have to change their white shirts at midday -- but there aren't so many people around to breathe it. The city is down to about 325,000 residents, less than half its 1950 population, and what's left is graying fast. Allegheny County has the second oldest population in the United States, after Dade; hospitals are closing their obstetrics units. Despite some good news -- boomlets in biotech and e-commerce, a leap in the city's bond rating -- it's hard to hide from the bad: a monstrous debt, high taxes, whispers of bankruptcy.

Only one misery could beat a bankrupt Pittsburgh: a bankrupt Pittsburgh without its sports teams. Although the Penguins haven't won the Stanley Cup in nearly 10 years, and the Steelers and Pirates haven't gone all the way in more than 20, the Pittsburgh newspapers look like local editions of The Sporting News. If you were living in Pittsburgh this fall, you could be forgiven for not knowing there was some kind of problem with the presidential election. On Dec. 8, the Post-Gazette front page ran a quiet little item headlined "Court Takes Up Gore's Appeal"; the rest of the page shouted "MARIO RETURNS." Mario Lemieux, who led the Penguins to two Stanley Cups and then rescued them from bankruptcy by buying part of the team, was coming out of retirement. This was a week before the Steelers' final game at Three Rivers. "How about that -- a resurrection and a burial, all in one week," said Tom Rooney, a Penguins executive and a cousin of the Steeler Rooneys. At Lemieux's first game back, a boy held aloft a sign reading "Our savior has returned to the ice."

Within an exploding sports industry, it is a marvel that a shrinking Rust Belt city has hung onto all three of its major-league teams. As the mayor tells it, this wouldn't be so if Pittsburgh hadn't taken bold action: "The Pirates would already have been gone, the Penguins would have been gone and the Steelers wouldn't have been far behind. And the thought of letting the teams go would have been the final statement that this community had given up."

In the mill towns dotting the three rivers that flow through Pittsburgh, schools and churches and entire neighborhoods have been shutting down. But where the rivers come together, two new stadiums have risen, one for football and one for baseball, at a cost of nearly half a billion dollars (and built from steel shipped in from Texas and Alabama). Until it is dynamited, Three Rivers squats there between them -- Three Stadiums River, they call it. If you filled them all up at once, you could fit half the city of Pittsburgh.

Mayor Murphy got the bad news two weeks before his inauguration in 1994: the Pirates were for sale.

The team was, if nothing else, venerable. In 1903, they played in the first World Series. In 1960, they ended a decades-long losing streak when Bill Mazeroski hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to beat the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series. Until the Immaculate Reception came along, Mazeroski's home run was the Miracle; fans still gather every Oct. 13 at the old Forbes Field site and listen to the broadcast of Game 7, which always ends the same perfect way.

In their first decade at Three Rivers, the Pirates won two more World Series and, along with the Steelers, had Pittsburgh calling itself the City of Champions. They put together another wonderful team in the early 1990's but couldn't afford to re-sign their best players and have been lousy ever since.

To small-market teams, free agency has been one big kick in the teeth. How could Pittsburgh compete with its big-city, big-media brethren? Like the former steelworkers before them, a great diaspora of former Pirates -- Bonilla, Bonds, Drabek -- spread across the land. And now the team itself might leave.

A buyer came along who promised to keep the Pirates in Pittsburgh, for a price. Kevin McClatchy, the 32-year-old scion of the Sacramento newspaper family, made it clear that the team would need a new stadium. The problem wasn't simply that Three Rivers was graceless, sitting like a giant gray ashtray on the riverside. Or that it was dank in the spring and blistering in summertime, or that its sight lines were terrible, or that it was too cavernous for baseball, or that the Astroturf-and-concrete field made a baseball jump like a Spaldeen -- though all that is true. "Three Rivers isn't physically obsolete," says Mark Schneider, chairman of the city's Stadium Authority. "It's economically obsolete."

It is the whole era of the multipurpose stadium that has proved obsolete. Instead of urban magnets, they became gigantic roadblocks, dead-ending neighborhoods and strangling development. Dual-sport stadiums weren't exactly right for either sport, and the two teams fought over the too-thin revenue streams.

Then in 1992, the Baltimore Orioles opened Oriole Park at Camden Yards. It was a comely ballpark, old-fashioned and newfangled at the same time; it was instantly embraced and widely imitated. Its architect, HOK Sport of Kansas City, became as hot as a dressmaker before the ball. All over the country, baseball teams and their obedient civic partners began plotting intricate, fine-grained downtown ballparks that echoed Camden Yards. Football teams began plotting muscular HOK stadiums that echoed the Colosseum. The idea was that a beautiful single-sport stadium, with luxury suites and a pricey corporate nameplate and restaurants and arcades and shops that could draw customers 365 days a year might allow even a small-market team to make enough money to bring home a championship.

That, at least, is what Pittsburgh is praying for.

The Steelers, and Dan Rooney in particular, were not heartbroken that the Pirates were moving out of Three Rivers. Rooney is the Steeler president and the eldest son of the late Art Rooney Sr., aka the Chief. He is 68, gentlemanly and no-nonsense, and he still hasn't forgotten how, back at Forbes Field, "the Pirates treated us like poor second cousins."

Of course, that was before the Steelers had won anything, and before pro football was fully reputable. "People thought we'd go outside of town to meet with the other team, decide what the score will be, then play the game," recalls Ed Kiely, the Chief's former aide-de-camp. For years, the Steelers were vagabonds. They played at Forbes Field or Pitt Stadium, kept their offices in a hotel, practiced out at the old city fairgrounds. "Three Rivers was a big deal for us," says Art Rooney Jr., "and in 1970, it was a classy joint."

It would become a shrine. Schoolchildren took field trips to visit the four Super Bowl trophies, mounted in a display case like the bones of a saint. Though far from perfect, Three Rivers had been good to the Steelers. So they had no intention of leaving, provided the place could be modernized.

The first estimate, $75 million, would only buy a minor facelift. Dan Rooney called in HOK Sport for a real renovation. The price: $140 million. "Jeez," Rooney said, "couldn't we get a brand-new stadium for that?"

Just about then, Rooney made a sobering realization: every other team in the Steelers' division was building a new stadium, each with a gushing revenue stream. Before free agency, the Steelers were masters of an N.F.L. trick called Bottom 7/Top 7: a payroll among the seven lowest in the league but a won-loss record among the top seven. Lately, they'd lost the ability to do that. So Rooney asked HOK to draw up plans for a new stadium, which would end up costing about $275 million. The Steelers were willing to pay a substantial share, but the city would have to contribute heavily. If not, there was a sweetheart offer from an outlying county. And the city also had to come up with something for the Pirates, fast.

An 11-county referendum was put together to raise money for the new stadiums. The voters in those old mill towns didn't seem to get it. Why is the city tearing down a perfectly good stadium? Aren't the Rooneys and the McClatchys and the ballplayers rich enough to build their own stadiums? And if there's no money to clean up our brownfields and fix our roads, why should we pay for Pittsburgh's stadiums?

Although Pittsburgh proper voted in its favor, the referendum failed miserably. And so it was that Mayor Murphy and various Steeler and Pirate and corporate emissaries went to Harrisburg to tell the State Legislature that the teams of Pittsburgh are a Pennsylvania treasure and that the city might go extinct without them.

The Legislature came up with the money. Now comes the hard sell, at home. "We're doing this very unpopular thing with the voters -- You voted against this, but we're going to do it anyway,"' says Murphy. "But we'd been managing 30 years of decline, and I decided -- no guts, no glory."

Murphy's reach for glory may cost him his job. He is walking a fine line between boosterism and overspending, all while he is up for re-election. If ousted, Murphy -- whose father worked 51 years in the steel mills -- might take comfort in the folk legend of Joe Magarac. He was Pittsburgh's answer to Paul Bunyan: the mightiest steelman ever, made of steel himself. When he could no longer work, Joe leapt into a ladle of molten ore, and he was rolled out as a shiny steel girder bound for . . . the Capitol Building in Washington.

By 8 A.M. on Dec. 16, the deconsecration of Three Rivers is under way. It begins, as always, in the parking lot, with sausage hoagies and Iron City beer. Steeler fans will tell you that they invented tailgating -- as well as the DEE-FENSE chant. They will also tell you how, back in the day, visiting teams needed a police escort to get from the bus into the stadium.

But today is a mellow day. Although the Steelers beat the Redskins, 24-3, neither team will make the playoffs, and the game is without much consequence. It is afterward, when the former Steelers are introduced, that all the emotion spills out. Their stories are civic myth by now: Rocky Bleier, the most unlikely Steeler hero, who returned from Vietnam with shrapnel in his foot and willed his way into the lineup; Jack Lambert, the headhunting middle linebacker -- so mean he even hates himself," as one teammate used to say; Frenchy Fuqua, who, off the field, wore platform heels containing live goldfish and, on the field, was a key figure in the Immaculate Reception; and Franco himself, whose fan club, Franco's Italian Army, was joined, in all seriousness, by Frank Sinatra.

Franco Harris, like a great many former Steelers, stayed on in Pittsburgh after football. There was more success waiting for them here: as investment bankers, coal brokers, restaurateurs, broadcasters. They had done great things for the city, and the city was eager to pay them back. As they take the field now, some trim and some paunchy, they smile -- not with the gloat of fresh victory but with the appreciation of men whose second halves were set up so well by their first.

Within 36 hours of this great farewell, Three Rivers was under assault. Patches of Astroturf were peeled off and sent, like skin grafts, to city parks and Little League batting cages. Some of the turf, along with the stadium's seats, kitchen gear and maintenance equipment, were auctioned off at Mellon Arena, where the Penguins play (and which will probably also soon be razed). Eight thousand people showed up. The going rate for a set of six seats was $2,100; one woman planned to install a pair at her husband's grave site. Some items were not for sale, including the Steelers' wooden lockers, which were taken apart panel by panel, like a church fresco, to be reassembled in the new stadium's Great Hall, a two-story Steeler museum and "fan celebration area."

The rest of Three Rivers will be turned to rubble. Buildings come and go. There is nothing permanent about them except what happened inside. Pittsburgh understands this. It is not uncommon to hear people in Pittsburgh mark their life events -- a wedding anniversary, the birth of their first child -- with a Super Bowl.

It's been too long, of course. But for all the absurdities and inequities of modern sport, the game itself is what becomes an institution, one of the few things these days that transcends both economics and concrete.

David Bianchi also understands this. He is from Syracuse, and he runs the demolition company that will bring down Three Rivers. He doesn't mean to be disrespectful of its legacy, but he is, frankly, unintimidated. "We just shot four high-rise structures in Philly," he says, "three 11's and a 15." Meaning 11 and 15 stories high. The implosion of Three Rivers, he says, will look like a circular deck of cards, falling in both directions, starting at the point where it stands just 65 feet from the new football stadium. It should take about 19 seconds. "You've got to realize," he says, "people think this is a monster, but it's not. It's 70,000 yards of concrete, but as far as height, integrity, distance, this is nothing."