This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The new NFL season marks the golden anniversary of perhaps the most iconic dynasty in the game’s history. The Pittsburgh Steelers team which won its first Superbowl in 1975 didn’t just kick off a run of four titles in six years, a strike rate unparalleled to this day: it also stood for principles which showcased the best of its city and country alike.

Hardscrabble northern industrial cities — Green Bay, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland — are the game’s heartland both literally and metaphorically, and never was this more true than of 1970s Pittsburgh. It wasn’t just a steel town: it was the steel town, all mills and soot, smoke and dust. Ever since the war the Steelers had been amiably useless, reaching only one play-off game in more than three decades and being dismissed by talkshow host Johnny Carson as “loveable losers”.

When they finally built a dynasty to rule, however, they did so in Pittsburgh’s own image: blue-collar, tough, hardworking, unpretentious, uncomplaining, resilient, and fiercely proud of each other and their community (many Americans will introduce themselves with reference to their home state, but Pittsburghers will always tell you they’re from Pittsburgh. Not Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh).

Quarterback Terry Bradshaw had a cannonball arm, but really won the fans’ hearts by his willingness to keep putting himself out there when things weren’t going well. Centre Mike Webster was a force of nature on the line. Linebackers Jack Ham and Jack Lambert were key parts of the vaunted Steel Curtain defence. Ham was the ultimate team man, a phenomenal athlete who would pull off play after play without fuss or drama.

Lambert was terrifying, a marauder with no front teeth who hit like a truck and marshalled the defence with keen intelligence. A skinny kid drafted from Kent State University, his lack of bulk led many opponents to underestimate him the first time round. No one underestimated him twice. And he never downplayed the role he and his teammates could have off the pitch. “I’ve had kids at my [sports] camp who I know damn well would listen to me before their parents and their teacher,” he once said. “We have a responsibility, and if I can keep one kid from going on drugs I’ve accomplished something.”

That the Steelers’ gilded age took place during a rough period for Pittsburgh itself made that success even more important. Steel production dropped by a third between the Steelers’ first Super Bowl in 1975 and their fourth in 1980, forcing tens of thousands of people to leave the city.

But the diaspora continued to keep the black and gold of the team’s colours in their hearts, and as a result the Steeler Nation now has pockets all over America. Where once steel had symbolised Pittsburgh, now the Steelers did, their importance growing as the city’s population shrank. Emotionally at least, the city rode or died on the results of its football team.

It wasn’t just a specific type of blue-collar mindset that the 1970s Steelers represented. It was also a racial equality extraordinary for the time. Joe Gilliam was the first black starting quarterback since the 1969 merger which produced the modern NFL: unremarkable now, but seismic in an era when quarterbacks were white almost by birthright. Of the ten 1970s Steelers who became Hall of Famers, only Bradshaw, Webster, Ham and Lambert were white: the other six were black.

There was defensive tackle “Mean” Joe Greene, whose nickname said it all; cornerback Mel Blount, so good the rules were changed to try to neuter him; running back Franco Harris, whose statue at Pittsburgh airport stands alongside (and gets far more selfies than) Washington’s; wide receivers Lynn Swann and John Stallworth, who ran like Bolt and leapt like Nureyev; and the interception king Donnie Shell at strong safety.

Some of this was down to scout Bill Nunn, who at a time of de facto segregation combed historically black colleges for players whom other teams would overlook. Blount (Southern), Stallworth (Alabama A&M) and Shell (South Carolina State) all came through this route. The black players trusted Nunn implicitly, and he in turn helped create a culture of inclusion.

Dan Rooney, the team’s general manager and president, would introduce the Rooney Rule, obliging teams to interview at least one minority ethnic candidate for any major role. He lobbied for the change after two black head coaches, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’s Tony Dungy and Dennis Green of the Minnesota Vikings, were perceived as having lost their jobs unfairly (Dungy had a winning record when dismissed; Green had endured a losing season for the first time in a decade).

Pittsburgh today is in many ways unrecognisable from the grim town of 50 years ago: a hub of technology and academia which regularly appears on lists of the most desirable cities in which to live. Its three most famous bridges, honouring baseball player Roberto Clemente, environmentalist Rachel Carson and artist Andy Warhol, speak of a place with a deep and eclectic hinterland. But the Steelers continue to be integral to that city’s vitality, and the city’s values are in turn integral to the Steelers: a very special part of football, of Americana, and of life.