I’ve been a sports fan since I could walk, and probably for longer than that. The month before I was born, the Pittsburgh Pirates lost the National League Championship Series to the Atlanta Braves in seven games, and I’m pretty sure my dad’s angst was dire enough that I felt it in the womb. A couple years later my first word was “ball,” apparently, but if I’d been able to better express myself, I’d have said something more along the lines of “Damn Sid Bream.”
But I’ve kept the Pirates at arm’s length since then. After 1992’s near miss on a World Series, the team was bad the next season, kicking off a remarkable run of badness that lasted from the time I was born until my second year of college, when it was briefly interrupted by three seasons of shocking competence before being firmly reestablished for eternity. Unless we get a change in the fundamental laws of the universe or a Major League Baseball salary cap, I’m pretty sure the Pirates will stay bad until I die. I’ve tried not to care too much.
Football, though – football is a different story. I care about football, care too much, mainly because since I first said “ball,” the Steelers have been almost as good as the Pirates have been bad. In my lifetime, Pittsburgh’s football team has won 16 division titles and been to four Super Bowls, winning two of them. Their last losing season was more than two decades ago. Over most of that time they’ve been hands-dirty, hardworking, blue-collar tough, with fun receivers and big running backs and great defenses and grit. They’ve just been good. I’ve loved them for it.
The first season I obsessively followed the team was in 2002, the year we started a former insurance agent at quarterback named Tommy Maddox. He and the team were something of an underdog story. Maddox came out of nowhere – or out of insurance, I guess – and led the group to a solid 10-5-1 record and a division title. But the team broke my 10-year-old heart by losing their second playoff game to the Titans in overtime, 31 to 34. A couple years later, they drafted Ben Roethlisberger with the 11th overall pick in the 2004 draft. Big Ben supplanted Maddox at quarterback in his second game, then went on to hold the position for most of the next two decades, winning a couple of Super Bowls and shrugging off a million sacks before finally ending his career in 2022 as a surefire Hall of Famer. I still get emotional watching his career highlight reel. Yes, I still watch his career highlight reel, often.
When Roethlisberger retired, it marked the end of an era. But it wasn’t a wholesale change, because we still had Mike Tomlin.
Mike Tomlin was hired to coach the Steelers in 2007, replacing local legend Bill Cowher – who himself had coached for 15 years and won a Super Bowl – to take over a team that’d gone 8-8 the previous year. At that point in history, I was about to enter high school and had only recently stopped playing Neopets, the recession was just a sparkle in Michael Burry’s eye, the iPhone didn’t exist yet, and George W. Bush was President. A lot changed over the following 19 years. Coach Tomlin never did, sometimes to his detriment.
Early in his career, Tomlin had all the success it’s possible to have. He won a Super Bowl in his second season, the same year Obama was elected. He took his team to another a couple years later. Do that – win a championship – and you etch your name in stone and Pittsburgh’s good graces forever. But do that early, as Tomlin did, and there’s nowhere to go afterward but down. To his credit, he never descended all that far. His worst teams won eight games.
Today (or at least until this week), if you were to ask a Steelers fan what they think of Tomlin, you’d get a mixed response. People love him and hate him, admire him and respect him and are tired of him. You can make a fair case in either direction, which is to say that he’s human, and his best virtues are the flip side of his worst vices. He could meld a group together like bricks in a wall. His offenses could make you want to pound your head against one. He was legendarily stubborn; he was legendarily consistent. His players knew what to expect from him, and so, said the critics, did his opponents. He obsessed over winning the next game with the focused intensity of attention that a bulldog gives to a raw steak. He was myopic and couldn’t see the big picture. He was, the football people liked to say, “a leader of men,” a relational savant who knew the specific series of buttons to press to get the best from each one of his players. He was, the haters replied, not a good game planner, only an inspiring cheerleader. He lost his last seven playoff games. He never had a losing season.
It’s January 16th, 2026. Less than a week ago, Tomlin was getting ready to lead the Steelers into a Wildcard playoff matchup against the Houston Texans. He had taken the Steelers to the playoffs seven times over the preceding nine seasons, losing his first game every time, most of those badly. Last week, he looked and sounded almost exactly the way he’d looked and sounded for the previous two decades. At his weekly press conference, he said the same sorts of things he’s always said, stuff like, “We’re ready to lean in on the single-elimination tournament,” and, “We look for good men that love football, that enjoy the process, that enjoy the drudgery, that got great relationships with the game.” He smiled his cool, slightly smug smile, looking the same way he’d looked at the podium for half my life: the personification of the sunglasses emoji.
The Steelers got blown out last week, 30-6, ending their season. A day later, a year short of two decades after he was hired, Coach Tomlin announced his resignation.
I’ve been reading Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots.
Rootedness, she says, is one of the greatest needs of the human condition, and also one of its least acknowledged. To be rooted is to be tied into a community with a conscious awareness of its past, common practices in its present, and shared hopes for its future. It is to be living out of and into a place and a people. There were, Weil noticed, very few rooted communities in 1940-something France; there are even fewer in the mid-21st-century global village. Things change too quickly, people are too mobile, news is too fast, the horizons are too big, attention is too fleeting, it’s all only getting worse. Temporality alone makes attachment dangerous, but add on to that the impulsive way we mine for impurity in everything and what we do when we find it, and you’ll notice that rootedness is almost impossible. Are you part of any club you were in a decade ago? Are you a Republican or a Democrat or a Feminist or a Capitalist or a Catholic or an Atheist or a Christian in the same way you were 20 years ago? Does it mean the same thing to say that you are Something now as it did in, say, 1992?
Here’s a crazy thing: I’m proud to be a Steelers fan in the same way I was proud to be a Steelers fan when I was a kid.
Sports are, from one perspective, utterly meaningless. Whether the Steelers win the Super Bowl next year or lose 17 games, I will work and get groceries and walk the dog all the same. Games played by people I’ve never met have no discernible impact on the requirements of my day-to-day life. So maybe our proud sports fandom is just a sign of societal decay, a pointer toward the overwhelming triviality of modern life. Maybe it’s sad that our largest public gathering places are NFL stadiums, that sports are increasingly our proxy for the sacred.
Yes, probably, to all of that. But also: My dad is a Steelers fan. My grandparents were – a little, at least. My aunt is. I’ve even gotten Alli to watch a couple games with me. This year, when the Steelers beat the Ravens on a last-second missed field goal, my youngest brother, Tom, called our family from Nashville, and we exuberantly lived the sheer wonder of the celebration together, our voices gone and our hearts still racing with adrenaline and joy.
Since the time I first said the word “ball,” I’ve been rooted in Pittsburgh sports. There are other things I’ve been rooted in, too. There are many parts to life, the best ones much bigger and deeper than sports. But I’m going to miss Mike Tomlin.
