Bumped. This is a decidedly engaging and worthwhile read so come back to it if you're short on time. It's quite lengthy, though not oppressibly or unnecessarily so. Many thanks to Fahey for taking the time to share. - Blitz-  

*****

As I have been a bit on the aggressive side in responding to negative attacks on Big Ben, I offer the following story of peace, football, and personal experience. It might grow rather long, and so I apologize if I monopolize your time. It also might offer some insight into my fervent defense of Ben.

My wife's uncle moved from Pittsburgh to Berkeley, California in the summer of 1974. He had been a fan of the Steelers since the days when fans of the Steelers were fans of the Pirates. That's not a baseball reference. He had waited and waited, watched the L's pile up, and maintained his support. When a work opportunity opened up for him on the other side of the country he packed his things and left his home; the team he had loved so much, and that had continuously let him down, then went on to win its first Super Bowl within months of his move, while he watched 3000 miles away from the city he never forgot. The Steelers went on to win three more rings before he had returned to Pittsburgh in the late 80s.

There are many years I could recount between then and now, but I'll fast forward to the Neil O'Donnell era, the era that gave many of us new hope. Most of us thought we had our field general; #14 however, gave Super Bowl 30 away. Absolutely gave it away. And in the process gave Dallas cornerback Larry Brown MVP honors, the first cornerback to ever receive said honors. And not the corner you'd expect to win it playing on a team with Deion Sanders.

I clearly remember the entire day: it was warmer than expected, and running many pregame errands (i.e. beer & snack runs) on every corner there was a group of people grilling or eating what had recently been grilled, holding "honk if you believe" signs ... each of which received numerous insufferable honks from yours truly. Neil was more than ‘good enough' I thought, and I was absolutely certain that Greene, Lloyd, Kirkland, and Woodson would stop any semblance of offense from Big D. Ultimately, Pittsburgh walked away from the game with 50-some more yards of offense than Dallas, had held Emmitt Smif to under 50 yards, had 10 more first downs than Dallas, and O'Donnell -who leading up to the game had the fewest interceptions per pass ratio- was not eventually franchised as expected, but through terrible play had earned his free agency where he signed a big deal with the Jets, and continued to fail meeting expectations.

He eventually ended up with the Bengals, but during a 3-13 1998 season (still better than their current season) tossed a 25-yard touchdown pass to beat the Steelers, and later in 1999 as McNair's backup in Tennessee filled in and beat the Steelers in week 17. He was always much better when throwing the ball to the players lined up opposite Pittsburgh. I've also heard rumor that Cowher contacted O'Donnell after Maddox went down, as Coach Chin wasn't quite ready to deal with a rookie Roethlisberger.

There's not much to say about Jim Miller and Mike Tomczak. They were there. Miller never played a full game. Tomczak occasionally stepped in as Kordell Stewart was inconsistent at best.

Mr. Kordell Stewart probably could have been one of the most dominant wide receivers or outside running backs the league had ever seen, but for whatever reason, perhaps due to his position in college, he was always listed as a QB. As said, inconsistent at best, though when Mike Mularkey was calling plays Stewart's game drastically improved. I honestly wonder how Stewart's career would've gone had the Steelers used him exclusively as a receiver, but maybe they learned their lesson with him and used those lessons to more effectively use Hines Ward. That said, Stewart followed the precedent set by O'Donnell: play a good enough season to get the team somewhere interesting, and then blow it on the national stage.

(To address rumors, etc. before they end up in the comment section, if Stewart is gay I only wish the league and the fans were open-minded enough that he and any and all other gay players could be open about who they are. It's a travesty that the active players in the NFL who are gay are forced by social conditions to keep the truth quiet. Rest assured, there are certainly a number of gay players who are active on team's rosters, but they're forced to live in secrecy because of the uneducated, the ignorant, and the prejudiced.)

And so Stewart is benched for old Tommy Maddox. UCLA star, journeyman backup, insurance salesman, Arena League hero, XFL pioneer and MVP, and finally the man to unseat Kordell's spot under center. After college Maddox did jack shit, despite all the hope and promise he had brought with him from his PAC-10 days. Pittsburgh gave him one good year ... or perhaps he gave Pittsburgh one good year. He showed the world that he had an arm, and gave us all another glimpse of success. Or he proved something to himself. Perhaps his one phenomenal season was nothing short of psychological peace for himself, to put his years of wandering and wondering to rest, to get the football out of his system in order to move on with his life. It was good in that it gave Pittsburgh what it needed to release Stewart; it was bad in that Maddox, after years and years of trying, has relegated himself to the one-shot wonder chapters of NFL history.

The Draft. I was never interested in Eli; I'm a lot like Blitz in that for some unexplainable reason I despise all things Manning. Most of us knew Colbert and Cowher were going to draft a quarterback, and after watching footage of the three frontrunners, I vastly preferred Roethlisberger over both Eli and Rivers. I thought, however, that he would sit a year and learn under Maddox before taking the reigns. I did callously remark during preseason, during a standard preseason discussion with my father-in-law, that maybe Maddox would get knocked out of a game and we'd get to see what Ben was all about. He replied "Well, he needs to learn on the bench for awhile; he's the quarterback of the future." Standard stuff ... I would've said the same thing were someone at that time to say what I had said. Week 2 against Baltimore and we all knew the future was now. 14 straight wins until an AFC championship loss, which I believe was Ben's first loss since his sophomore year in college.

In the summer of 2005 my wife and I were looking to settle in California. I had decided to go back to graduate school, and after teaching some summer school classes and saving up whatever money we could, we found ourselves in Oakland, CA ... a gritty, but very independently minded, artistic, and interesting place. By the 4th week of the season, Steelers on a bye and a 2-1 record I remembered the story my wife's uncle had told us, of moving to the Bay Area the summer before the Dynasty began. I figured my wife had some of that same blood flowing through her veins, and I loved the way the Steelers were playing. I also had some time off, and we were looking to get out of town on a short vacation. It had been awhile since we'd spent any time in a desert, and so we spent some time in some barren wastelands, watching lizards and sweating, a lot of sweating. As it came time to leave I mentioned that Las Vegas would only be about an hour out of our way and I'd like to place a bet. A small bet, but that early in the season I was given 100 to 1 odds on picking a Super Bowl winner. I figured $100 wouldn't be too bad to lose if it came down to it.

If you're near a calculator you'll see that I was handed $10,000 for that little guess of an investment.

We hosted the Super Bowl party that year, as at least half of the folks in the Bay Area are Midwestern transplants, our friends all agreed that we'd do rotating parties based on if someone's team was playing. We had people from Iowa, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, Oregon, Arkansas, and Denver at our place. Many of these people thought that a Super Bowl party was more party than Super Bowl. Not so. Yes you can move around and talk, but the game is center stage and if you start distracting me and my guests you're in trouble. This is my game. I've waited 26 years to be here again. And so on. My wife and I were drunk by the time Willie busted out the longest rushing touchdown in Super Bowl history. He busted it out two seconds after one of the fellas from Iowa said, "Well, it's tight; I'd say the next big play wins it."

As you know, unless you're 3 years old, the Steelers did win it; my wife and I actually cried. It was the complete cycle, a precedent set by her uncle and one that continues now with my daughter. If she finds herself grown and wandering around the country in search of the same answers I myself wandered after, and if that is coupled by a long dry spell from the Black & Gold, she will have been raised to know that if she moves to the Bay Area in a summer following a good season, the next season will give her another Super Bowl victory.

The moral of the story might be the absence of a clear moral. Our time and our lives are not linear, but consist of interweaving webs of influence and multiple narratives. The Steelers are not the most important thing in the world to me; hell, they're probably not even in my top 10. I'm very busy; I work in finance and publishing; I have a beautiful daughter, a beautiful wife, and a fantastic mutt of a dog; I love long fixed-gear bicycle rides, hiking large mountains and alongside rivers; I regularly find myself at independent art galleries and poetry readings; I play the banjo, the guitar, and the mandolin; I tell the change in seasons not by the calendar but by watching populations of different bird species as they migrate in and out around the nearby lake.

Though born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA I never felt it was my home, only that home was an abstract idea that required an endless search. But throughout these different narratives, each of which threads somewhere through the makeup of who I am, Steelers football has always been one of the many lineages I carry with me. Maybe it's always a matter of timing, or context, but I truly feel that it was the draft pick of #7 that the Steelers reaffirmed their commitment to lifelong fans, like myself and many others on this board, who have since found themselves thousands of miles away from the city we knew we had to leave in search of something else, taking with us a little bit of labor politics, maybe the love of a like-minded traveler, and our reciprocal commitment to the Pittsburgh Steelers.