DETROIT – They’re rowdy, they’re loud and they sometimes boast too much, but you have to respect the fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Jennifer Buchanan / The Herald
They’ve taken over the streets of Detroit in the days leading up to Super Bowl XL between the Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks. You can’t turn a corner, walk down a block or step into a building without seeing that nauseating gold and black.
They travel with the team. They’re with their guys through thick and thin.
But I still don’t trust any fan base that stakes its entire identity on a yellow dish towel.
When my dish towel starts turning yellow, that’s when I know I need a new towel.
But the folks from the Steel City who wave those towels truly put the “fan” in fantastic. Sure, this year’s Super Bowl is closer to Pittsburgh than any Super Bowl has ever been, but these fans would have made the trip to Siberia if the National Football League had decided to really stretch it.
Rick Faulkner, who Friday wore a sweat shirt that sported a near obscenity directed at Seattle, made the trip from Seal Beach, Calif., to be with his team.
The fact that Detroit has become Pittsburgh North has been evident all week, but inside the Hockeytown Cafe in downtown Detroit, the gold-and-black to blue-and-green ratio was at least 10 to 1.
“It’s a blue-collar town, just like Pittsburgh, man,” Brian Basile of Johnstown, Pa., said of Detroit. “We ain’t drinkin’ no Starbucks, man. We’re drinking Iron City Beer.”
Yes, they have beer. But we’ve got good beer.
I had to sample this famous Iron City brew – which was brought into Hockeytown Cafe in bottles by the truckload especially for this week – and the stuff tastes like carbonated motor oil with a hint of cigarette ash and moldy cardboard.
“I’m from Pennsylvania, man, and I can’t drink that stuff,” said John Fradic.
He now lives in Charlotte, N.C., but made the trip. He wasn’t clearly identifiable, though. He’s too superstitious for that.
“I don’t wear any Steeler stuff until game day,” said Fralic, who sported a burgundy sweater and no hat on Friday.
But if anyone was a measure of the Steeler fans’ loyalty, it was Mike Durica of Pittsburgh, a season ticket holder for 34 years – not counting the time he bought season seats for the Buffalo Bills.
In 2001, Durica was planning a huge outing for about 80 Steeler fans to a game in Buffalo, where the hometown fans are nuts for their team. The stadium there seats 75,000 or so, but Durica wanted to be absolutely certain he could score 80 seats. The only way to get an early chance at getting his group’s ducats was to be a season ticket holder.
“The cheapest ticket was $25 (per game), times that by eight games,” Durica said. “I became a Buffalo Bills season ticket holder.”
He bought his group’s tickets, asked each person to pay an extra $3 to cover the cost of the season ticket package, and gave the Bills tickets for the other home games to a Buffalo fan he met in the parking lot.
That’s the kind of guy Durica is. The kind of guy who Seahawks fans at Hockeytown Cafe specifically said I should talk to. They said, “He’s totally cool.”
He was.
“We appreciate people who are willing to go on the road and show their colors,” Durica said. “Anybody who travels with their team – when people do that, you owe it to them to be a little bit kind to them.”
“Big Tim” Pustelak of Erie, Pa., is certainly owed a little something.
The day after the Steelers clinched their spot in Super Bowl XL, he and three buddies planned to make the trip to at least hang out in Detroit in the days before the game.
That wasn’t good enough for Big Tim, “with a capital T.”
“I bought four tickets for my friends; they’re all paying me back,” Pustelak said, “$2,850 apiece.”
“This all started when we went to the game when they played the Chicago Bears at Pittsburgh, halftime blizzard,” said Pustelak, recalling the first win in the Steelers’ current seven-game winning streak. “Since then, they’ve never been anything but the baddest team in the NFL.”
With some of its best fans.
Reporter Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@ heraldnet.com.
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