INSPIRED PERFORMANCE
I've been waiting my whole life to do something like this.
I love the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Cornerstones of my youth: Sunday kielbasa. Styx Greatest Hits. A never-washed Hines Ward jersey. Throwing temper tantrums after typical yet less than significant early season losses.
I did not live in Pittsburgh as a kid - but my parents both brought me up big on black and gold. Living in (Virginia, West Virginia, North Central PA), the game wasn’t on TV most of the time. You can picture 3 foot me swimming in an adult-sized Steelers something, sitting on my feet and suffering through the blip-blip-blip game casts on espn.com. But we would visit my mom’s family in Deer Lakes fairly often, and I’d get the full dose from my dad and two uncles. I remember a little bit of Kordell Stewart but my core early memories are Tommy Maddox teams.
People always talk about the quarterbacks, but I’m a coach guy. I take a cool crew neck over a jersey, and I think coaches act and talk in a way far more applicable to our lives as humans than do their players. Mike Tomlin cannot make a tackle (lol) - just as I cannot hit someone at work when they do something I do not like. I often find myself searching for inspiration on lunch breaks while listening to Mike’s Tuesday Press Conferences.
I moved to Pittsburgh before my freshman year of high-school. That year, the Steelers lost in the Super bowl to the Green Bay Packers. To this day, I regret watching the game with my girlfriend instead of my dad. Because when they lost, she didn’t get it - my legitimate off-seasonal depression by way of a horrid Rashard Mendenhall fumble.
“It’s just a game,” she said. “It doesn’t actually affect your life.”
But that’s the thing some people miss about the Steelers - about any team to which you tie your soul. They actually do affect my life. (How many Nebraska Football fans have checked into therapy over the past 2 weeks?) For as long as I can remember, and as sad as it sounds, my well-being has fluctuated with the performance of the Pittsburgh Steelers. And while I appreciate them almost entirely through the television screen, I love them much more than I would a television show.
What’s crazy is: I’m not the only one.
That’s because the Pittsburgh Steelers are an institution. They do not care what people think about them. They do not blink in the eyes of adversity - and today, they are entirely emblematic of the work-ethic that still exists in the part of this country from which I come.
The Pittsburgh Steelers f*cking bring it.
I live in Philadelphia now - a town that also knows a thing or two about hard work - but the Pittsburgh Steelers and their colors have been a tough sell, to say the least.
Recently I’ve been busy working on a seasonal collection called Original Equipment. We make classic mesh shorts - they’ve have been a hit. We sell them for $75 a pop. I drive to a sewing factory like 12 blocks from my apartment and pack the boxes into my backseat (my Chevy Trax trunk is too small - wtf - car SUCKS). I wear them to the gym and sometimes when I’m out in the summer.
Usually I don’t get to pick colors - but I do get to name them. They’re called the O.E. Classic Mesh Shorts - easy money. The color combos are always in some way or another sports-team adjacent but they’re never explicitly on the nose.
But when we launched shorts this fall in Brown and Orange, I’d had enough.
The f*cking Cleveland Browns.
We’d done Packers, Clemson, Virginia Tech, no Eagles colors yet, but… The Cleveland Browns. We even had socks to match - in merino wool, no less.
It was time to make a stand. I lobbied hard - in Photoshop I mocked up what would become: The O.E. Terrible Mesh Shorts. I went back and forth on a few different names but in the end I think the name works from both a consumer and Steelers sense. I put together this whole pitch about how people in Pittsburgh (and Steeler fans worldwide) will wear anything black and gold.
If nothing else, the Steelers can outsell the Browns.
Shop the shorts with this exclusive link. Use the promo code BEATTHEBROWNS for 25% off - you’ll see the pre-shipping price as $41.20 - you know what it is.
And btw.
Don’t be like that. This isn’t business.
It’s personal.
Some of my favorite non-football Steelers moments of all time:
Let's go Steez! Tell the purchasing department to get some more Medium's in inventory. There's a long line.
American football and American manufacturing. 1776 came 2000 years too late but i’m glad we’re here now