I would have never guessed that my life-long beloved Pittsburgh NFL team (which I’ve followed since the 1975 playoffs and Super Bowl X) was actually the first in the league to have a cheerleading squad! But since we’re dealing with the team owned by the late Art Rooney, a practicing Catholic (he actually had a priest-chaplain for the team during its first Super Bowl season, 1974-75), this was a squad that, during its existence [1961-69] was more akin to college-style rather than all the immodesty and wiggles and jiggles made infamous by the Dallas[s] outfit in the late 1970s. In fact, Rooney insisted that the so-called Steelerettes “remain ladylike on and off the field. Fraternizing with the players was forbidden.”
But with the onset of the 1970 season, a number of changes came to the Steelers. The AFL merged with the NFL, and the Steelers were one of three NFL teams placed into the AFC alongside the former AFL teams. Future Hall-of-Famer Terry Bradshaw, first overall pick of the 1970 draft, started his career. (His rookie year was the polar opposite of Ben Rothlisberger’s, to say the least. He really didn’t hit his true stride until the 1978 season, the campaign that would lead to the then-unprecedented third Super Bowl ring.) Three Rivers Stadium opened, which would become the home of years of future glory: the article says that this was the occasion for a transformation of the team’s image, one that college-age girl cheerleaders didn’t quite fit.
But there was one more component of that transformation that the article doesn’t mention. The point of fact is that, as any true Pennsylvania-rooted Steeler fan knows, the team hasn’t needed pom-pom dancing girls since 1970 because that was the year they acquired the best damn [one-man] cheerleading squad in all of football: Myron Cope, ostensibly the Steelers’ radio game analyst, but in truth, more of a Iron City cheerleader than anything else, with his references to such things the Cincinnati “Bungles” [and, this year, "Bagels"] and original Jacksonville Jaguars coach “Colonel [Tom] Coughlin” [that was no compliment, either], his “yoi, double yoi, and triple yoi”s or the occasional “Zounds!”, and in short, his absolutely, positively biased pro-Steelers “commentaries” delivered in an over-the-top shouting barrage (which, nonetheless, revealed that he knew more than a thing or two about football)! This was a city that had by 1975 replaced the pom-poms with twirling “Terrible Towels,” a Cope invention (and for which he donated the rights some years ago to a Pittsburgh school for the brain-disabled).
Maybe this will finally be the year Mr. Rooney’s team gets the “one for the thumb.” Every weekend, Myron’s sandpaper voice comes over the Internet to my computer speakers [mmm-hah!], and my Terrible Towel hangs in a place of honor for as long as they keep playing.
[Now here's a sobering thought. If I had a serious Catholic wife, and especially a serious Catholic family, I'd have to forget about all this....]
GO STEELERS!!!
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