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Something we can ponder this holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving Earthling. And thanks again.

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And is it me, or does AB look quite different this year? The beard? He used to look like a happy kid, now he looks adult and yet is somehow less recognizable to me.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Earthling

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I don’t think I grew up in an oasis of racial harmony. Far from it. That little town in western PA was then and it is now racist to the core. In fact, it may be worse now. I hate small towns (everyone knows their place, everyone knows your place) and I hated that one with a passion. But my school was a little less awful than it could have been, a little less awful than many of the schools around us.. We had a chance to become less racist, to think about it.

I don’t know how many did. Not all, maybe not even a few but not just me. It’s always easy to see and detest bigotry in others, but first we have to see it and then we have to care. Eventually, we have to do something about ourselves. I was the right age for noticing–too young for social competition or the emotional trauma of puberty but a moral purist about what was fair. Third or fourth grade?

The others I scrutinized for signs of racism included my parents, so perhaps I had doubts, perhaps I thought my dad was a hypocrite. I meant only that I think I would have noticed if they’d said something ugly because of my school experience. But they didn’t. Perhaps they did when they were with their friends or simply didn’t object if someone else did–I really don’t know. But in the living room, watching a game, they didn’t mention race. (I also wonder if that was actually a bad thing, but it’s usually best to interpret the behavior of dead parents as kindly as possible.) As I said, a small thing, one that moves me somehow. They weren’t out in the world fighting for civil rights but they were decent.

And of course I have no way of knowing now where I fell on the spectrum of bigotry back then, even now. Maybe you never really know. Every one seems to believe only other people are racist, but obviously enough people are that–Fill in ugly statistic. We have some kids who belong to this household in various ways, some white, some black. They are not treated the same, and they know it. That part always makes me sad–when I realize they see the difference.

thoughts for another evening–there are always, always, a few sentences in your articles that cause me to think for days.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Earthling

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You could be forgiven if you thought based on what you saw in sports that Western Pennsylvania was an oasis of harmony and good feeling where people are only judged by their batting averages and completion percentages. Not true. Similar to you I attended a school that was 97 percent white (however, I wasn’t, which made it a different experience). Though the day to day reality doesn’t always measure up to the solidarity that the community experiences on football Sundays, it would be cynical to suggest that it had no impact at all, perhaps if only validating the impulses of your parents. It has to be a challenge of dissonance to wallow in divisive thinking when the teams that you admire and root for consistently project the spirit of brotherly cooperation and love.

Part of how I interpret my task when I write a piece like this is to reflect how events were perceived at the time, not how it might be viewed from a more distant or enlightened lens. Black quarterbacks are considered somewhat unremarkable today, but at the time, Noll’s decision to start Gilliam as groundbreaking and controversial. What was done was merely both the right and decent thing to do, but it is a measure of the society we live in that right and decent can be thought of as provocative and edgy. Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that action and a few others like is directly related to the fact that black quarterbacks are not controversial today. Somebody had to get the ball rolling.

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Here are two more linebackers to add to the list.

One lost his first season to a torn ACL suffered in the first preseason game. Then in his second year he lost another 1/2 season to another knee injury. Really, like Sean Spence, the Steelers should have given up on him. Instead, in part thanks to Mike Merriweather’s 1988 hold out, this gent got some reps at mid season and was a starter by the beginning of the next.

I’m talking about Greg Lloyd of course.

And there’s another linebacker who comes to mind. He made a lot of noise as a rookie, even had the team captian calling him “Greg” in the huddle. Yet he couldn’t beat out Carlos Emmons as a rookie. And in fact, when he was held sackless during the 2000 0-3 start, the word on this player down at the barricades was “Bust.”

You might remember him too. His name is Joey Porter.

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But here’s an odd one. Reading your comments about the 1974 QB “controversy” I thought: I remember three Terry’s competing for QB about that time, but wait, one of them was black? Why didn’t I know that? I was sure of Terry Bradshaw and Terry Hanratty (I remember that he looked like Rollie Fingers, so apparently I paid more attention to baseball than I would have guessed even if he didn’t look much like Rollie Fingers and who the heck is that other than a baseball player with a big mustache? Another Google search is in order.) so I googled Terry Gilliam.

Oops. Apparently I “misremembered” and made one of the Monty Python guys a Steeler. So I googled Gilliam Steeler and found Joe. A sad life in some respects and one I’m sorry about, but he certainly kept trying and I was happiest to read that at the time of his death he’d been sober for 3 years.

But black? In 1974 I was watching Steeler games while lying on the floor in my parents’ living room. I was probably doing homework, reading a book or drawing pictures (nerdy kid) but I was always listening to my dad and mom narrate the games and I do remember those 3 QB’s and arguments about who should start and who was better and who…And they never mentioned that one was black.

It’s a small thing but I grew up in a small town in western PA and went to a school that was 99% white until some kind of redistricting made us about one third black in 1972. It was the best thing that happened to our school, partly because our population had been dwindling for years and so we got a lot of new kids who shook up everything and made it fun again, and partly because we all saw the ugly face of racism (from neighbors, classmates, other schools that had no black students) and some of us came to understand how very ugly it was. My dad’s only words on the subject were that you should judge people by how they conducted themselves, not by the color of their skin. My late night google search on Joe Gilliam proved to me that no matter what my dad thought of him as a player, he judged him only as a player and so, belatedly indeed, I’m proud of my parents. At some point, my family became mixed race, as people used to say, and my parents never acted like it meant anything, so perhaps I should have known they really didn’t care but it’s nice to find confirmation in words that weren’t said in the living room in the middle of a heated debate about football between 2 people who weren’t sophisticated or had much experience of the world beyond the small circles they grew up in, and yet they had values they lived by.

And sorry if this seems ridiculously ignorant about Joe Gilliam. When I looked up from my books way back then, I saw guys wearing helmets. I love the Steelers because of those conversations between my parents in the living room–my mom was the smart analytical one, so I’ve never discounted women’s opinions on football and my dad pretended to yell and complain but ended every game by pretending to shake hands with the team (mostly with Bradshaw) and thanking them. Mostly I remember them laughing and enjoying the game, even when things went badly and liking more players than they ever disliked. That’s what it’s all about to me.

Thanks again,

Earthling

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