What Makes a Steelers Fan Makes a Good Steelers Reporter

“When you get into this business, kid, ya gotta stop being a fan!”

So said former KDKA Radio sports director Goose Goslin to me when I was a 22-year-old intern, writing sports copy for him and generally not doing much of anything else other than taking his abuse three times a week, four hours a day, for four months.

While Goslin’s remark was more a statement of his cynicism than professional advice, I would later hear his statement repeated by many other members of the sports media with much happier personalities.

What did that mean?

My passion for Pittsburgh sports teams knew no boundaries. I had chosen to attend Point Park College because, yes, they had a good journalism program, but more importantly it was the college that was located closest to Three Rivers Stadium.

Three years later during a leave of my studies, I found myself living in Johnson City, Tenn., where there were no sports bars showing Steelers games.  

Unable to watch the Steelers every week on local TV, I collected my weekly tip money from a job delivering pizza and drove my 1981 Chevy Citation to the nearest Steelers bar every week they were not shown locally.

It should be mentioned the nearest Steelers bar was in Winston-Salem, N. C. some 141 miles away from Johnson City.

On mostly two-lane, U.S. Highways; not interstates.

Is it any wonder I went back to school in Western Pennsylvania the following year for my internship?

Still, what did this mean?

I knew enough not to refer to the team I was covering as “we” or “us” and certainly wasn’t going to wear my Myron Cope T-shirt to the press box, but was I supposed to renounce the revered moments of my youth rooting passionately for the Steelers so that I could live in the city I loved covering the teams I had loved?

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