Butt Ugly Town...

Check out what the Denver media is saying about our beloved Pittsburgh. Jessica (Pugh) Hardesty from Wilmington, NC sent this article to me that she found in a Denver newspaper this week. Click on the link to see the story.

PITTSBURGH - Exactly why and how I got here, I still am not certain, but let's roll with it.
First impression: This is a hard town, filled with hard people who bop around their gun-metal gray burg with nothing but football on their minds.
Five hours ago, I did not believe it possible to find a town crazier about football than Denver. I could have been wrong about that.
I am not five minutes off the airplane and standing at the rental car desk before a spaghetti-thin man whose nametag reads "Bob."
Bob's face turns red immediately upon seeing my Colorado driver's license, and he launches into a lengthy, completely unprovoked lecture on how his Steelers will kick the Denver Broncos' backsides - and be nasty about doing it.
Bob is fairly snorting when he says there is NO WAY Steeler Nation will not return to Super Bowl glory.
He catches his breath, pauses and asks politely, "And will you be taking additional insurance on your rental?"
I am in enemy country here. In a place that you may not understand.
On my way to the hotel, there is a man standing on a busy street corner, wearing a halter-top dress.
He holds a sign in his hands that says: "I BET AGAINST THE STEELERS."
I will tell you this, something I would never tell one of the locals. Pittsburgh is one butt-ugly town.
It is precisely the type of town that would name its professional football team the Steelers. Old mills, long stilled, dot the town. Weeds spill from smokestacks.
Across the Ohio River from where I write this rises downtown Pittsburgh, as dark and forbidding a skyline as you will ever encounter.
Just to the north, right on the river, Heinz Field, home of the Steelers, rises almost cathedral-like, a bright-yellow behemoth that casts shadows on all that surrounds it.
It is, too, a town of bars. I have been here only a short time, but if there is a city block without a bar I haven't driven by it yet.
In that regard, Pittsburgh might well be heaven.
"This is a drinking town with a football and parking problem," says Jessica Kerr, 23, the bartender at the joint on the hotel's first floor.
"And this is the thing about Pittsburgh," she adds, after learning I have come here from Denver. "Don't ever, ever say anything bad about the Steelers.
"I am not kidding," she warns me. "People are on edge right now."
She tells the story - already grown to legend - of the Steelers fan who literally fell from his stool with cardiac arrest at Chupka's Bar in South Side after Steelers running back Jerome Bettis fumbled the football in the closing minutes of last Sunday's game.
"That's a prime example of how seriously we take football here."
And the thing is, folks here believe there could not be a more honorable and fitting way to go.
If I really want to know about Steeler Nation, Jessica Kerr whispers to me, I need to head over to Jack's Bar, also in South Side.
It is a legendary hole, she explains, a joint where quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and other Steelers hang out after games.
"If Denver wins?" the bartender repeats as I rise from my stool. "There will be jumpers in this town. Yeah, a few."
Jack's rises from Carson Street just as it is billed: It is a hole. But it is a Steelers' hole, which makes it beloved.
This is working-class Pittsburgh, South Side, a long stretch that used to be home to the city's fabled steel mills.
It is why, I am told, it is also home to at least 100 to 125 taverns and bars within its roughly 20-square-block boundary.
"Pittsburgh's Legendary Bar," is how the front door to Jack's reads. Sprawled across the painted bricks out front are foot-high yellow letters: "In Ben (7) We Trust."
"This whole area was, back in the day, an iron-worker area, where the mills ran 24 hours a day," explains Kelly Spinelli, 42, who works the night bar shift at Jack's.
"We still have a lot of old-timers - shot-and-a-beer guys - who come in here."
Ben Roethlisberger still comes in, she says, but not like he did last year, when he and other Steelers would hold court in the back bar, before people started flocking to Jack's and hounding them.
"He only comes in once in a while," Kelly Spinelli says now. "That he does, it has been great for business."
Do I want to know from Pittsburgh? She points out the window at a shop across the street. In the front window, Santa still stands. And he is dressed in Steelers black and gold.
"Last Sunday, complete strangers were kissing each other after the Steelers won. People were honking, high-fiving each other.
"As soon as the game ended, you literally couldn't fit another human being in here. It was a sea of black and gold. I've never worked harder in my life."
The Steelers are a religion here, Kelly Spinelli says. "And it's year-round. It'll be baseball season, and everyone is still talking about football."
She has seen more than one set of good friends go at each other over simple calls. Punches would have been thrown last Sunday if she hadn't stepped between two men who disagreed on whether Troy Polamalu actually intercepted the disputed pass from Peyton Manning.
It is spitting rain when I stand and ask her the Broncos-winning question.
"It'll be . . . people's spirits will be totally crushed. I don't know how else to put it," Kelly Spinelli said.
"It will affect the whole town. Business will suffer. People will not go to work on Monday.
"It is that big a part of life here."
johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com.