A Nation Needs Embassies
Left: Play of the Day Sports Bar is the home away from home for Steelers fans living in Las Vegas.
Wherever you happen to be, Steelers bars serve as welcome centers and slices of home for thousands of transplanted Pittsburghers.
Some left Western Pennsylvania looking for work during the mill closings of the 1970s and view these bars as physical stand-ins for a home left behind. Others are retirees like Pelc and her husband, who help run a Steelers fan club that has headquarters at a bar called O'Brien's. Tucked away in a strip mall along one of Tampa's busiest avenues, O'Brien's is a dark, invitingly cool antidote to Florida's hottest days. Watching games at O'Brien's, Pelc says, is "like having 60 minutes with friends back home."
Occasionally, the club even gets its mail there.
Then there are the young people such as Niggle, propelled across the planet by the global economy. He and his wife moved to China days before the 2006 Super Bowl and arrived at Big Bamboo at 7 a.m. to see the game. The place was loaded with Steelers fans. "I was stuck here in Shanghai, but we made friends that day that we still have today," he writes in an e-mail from China. "I couldn't think of a better way to start out here in Shanghai than with a bunch of Steelers fans!"
It's not just Pittsburghers. Earth's Steelers watering holes are also mobbed by fans who, like Tacoma, Wash. native Horrigan, have no personal 'Burgh connection. He got hooked by the powerhouse Steelers of the 1970s and never looked back. Not born or bred here, they bleed black and gold just the same.
It's a mind-bending exercise trying to assemble a geography of Steelers bars around the world. At one end of the spectrum are hundreds of full-on Steelers havens, where every day is black-and-gold day. At the other end are countless outposts where a handful of diehard fans gathers like clockwork each week. In between are hundreds of other places that cater to the Steelers crowd when the team is on top but are otherwise generic sports bars. And if you know where to look, you'll find hundreds more stealth Steelers bars that devote their main space to fans of their local NFL team, but have a dedicated back room or patio for the Steelers crowd. Or check out the online lists and listen to fans' war stories: They'll tell of Steelers bars in Whangarei, New Zealand, and in Christiansted, St. Croix; in Quepos, Costa Rica, and in Camp Taji, Iraq.
Some Steelers bars are born when a transplanted Pittsburgher opens a bar and hangs the team's logo on a wall. Others are made when a fan club asks to colonize a place. And some have their Steelerness thrust upon them: A fan includes them in a list of supposedly Steelers-friendly places, and suddenly the establishment is packed. That's what happened at Panini's, a restaurant in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. "One regular who was from Pittsburgh, he put it online," manager Dave Wright says. "And they started coming out of the woodwork."
Left: One thousand miles south of Pittsburgh in Largo, Fla., Steelers fans come together at Rudy's Sports Bar to celebrate the season.
Among the true havens, you'll find places such as Rudy's Sports Bar in Largo, Fla., where a huge Steelers helmet dominates the entrance and waitresses dress like the sexy cheerleaders our family-friendly team doesn't have. Or the Steel Pit Sports Grill, in Tujunga, Calif., which boasts "Home of the XL Champs!" on a sign towering over their parking lot. Or The Locker Room, in Charlotte, N.C., so well known for its support of the Steelers that its owners were approached years ago by a distributor offering Iron City and IC Light.
Places such as these have plenty in common. Regulars say you know you're in a Steelers bar if you find:
- Lots of black-and-gold decor, including Steelers memorabilia, Terrible Towels and neon Steelers beer signs. The stuff's on the walls, the windows, the doors, sometimes even on the ceiling.
- Big-screen TVs tuned to the game. No muting or closed-captions here; pump up the volume.
- Iron City, IC Light, pierogies and kielbasa on the menu. There may also be recipes named after popular players. "A lot of places have, like, their Roethlisberger sandwich," says Tom Tansey, a Clarion native living in Charlotte who frequents The Locker Room.
- Hordes of fan-club members who cart in truckloads of goodies on game days. Think life-sized cardboard cutouts of favorite players, lucky talismans to help the team win - even homemade noisemakers made from empty Iron City cans. Die-hards have reserved seats and raffle off Steelers-related prizes.
- Whole families cheering together, preschoolers included. The team has the NFL's largest female fan base and a family-friendly image that encourages people to get their offspring involved. Steelers fandom is often handed down through generations along with the china and the crystal.
- Tailgaters in the parking lot. Tansey and his pals love throwing around a football and partying outside The Locker Room before games. Pelc's group tailgates before games with such traditional rivals as the Browns or the Bengals. "We do the kielbasa thing, bring the stuffed cabbage.... We get everyone to bring a covered dish," Pelc says. And yes, in case you're wondering, "We bring our polkas."
But the vibe can vary. "Saturday Night Live" star Seth Meyers says that at Revolution, his preferred Steelers bar in Manhattan, you won't see fans clutching life-sized cutouts of team players. They play it cooler, he says, but "during games, there's not a person there who's not wearing a Steelers shirt." Meyers, for the uninitiated, is a lifelong Steelers fan who waved a Terrible Towel on "SNL" in March in memory of the late Myron Cope, a legendary local broadcaster.
Right: Steelers fans gather in D.C. to watch last season's playoff game against the Jaguars.
In many places, Steelers fans can get their fix unmolested. But in enemy territory, it can get ugly.
In Cleveland, where loyalty to the Browns runs as deep as Steelers obsession in Pittsburgh, the guys at Panini's briefly hung a Steelers flag in their main bar during the 2005-2006 playoffs. It didn't last. Browns fans tore it down. "We don't put anything like that up now," says manager Dave Wright. "People will just ruin it."
A few miles away at Blue Moose bar in Parma, Ohio, owner Pat Potopsky received death threats by phone in 2005. He'd lost a bet with some Steelers fans and agreed, as a joke, to advertise that his bar was the ultimate place for Steelers fans to watch the playoffs in Cleveland. The threats didn't stop him, and on the day of the first playoff, angry locals ignited smoke and stink bombs in his bar. The next Sunday, Potopsky had cops parked outside - "We fed them some wings and stuff," he recalls - and the disorder ended. Some Browns backers still shun his bar, he says, but welcoming Pittsburghers was the best move he ever made: They watch their team at bars, he says, and most Browns fans don't.
Some bar owners avoid this kind of dustup by keeping things low key. In New Hampshire, a bar called Billy's is "actually a New England Patriots main bar, but there's a back room that's a Steelers bar," says Meyers. "I talked to the owner about it, and he said it's financially crazy for any bar not to have a place for Steelers fans."
Here's the thing about Steelers fans, though: If space is available, they tend to fill it. The battle lines at O'Brien's in Florida, once clearly drawn between Pittsburgh partisans inside and Tampa Bay fans at the outdoor patio, have shifted. Says Pelc: "We've taken over the tiki bar."