Praying to the fickle football gods, one towel at a time

It’s the end of the fourth quarter, and the people around me are praying. We’re in a basement,… It’s the end of the fourth quarter, and the people around me are praying. We’re in a basement, with couches and crunchy snacks, the light from an overlarge television bathing us like an aura. Nevertheless, heads are bent, lips are moving and members of the black-and-gold nation are dialing the hotline to their deity of choice.

This is full-on prayer.

The Steelers have rallied, tying the game, and the Jets are about to kick their second field goal, after the first missed, glancing off the crossbar. This is it. We can feel it — the end of a historic season.

Jets kicker Doug Brien’s foot is about to connect with the ball, and I scrunch my eyes closed and grind an un-popped popcorn kernel between my molars. “Tell me when it’s over,” I say to a woman who’s been twirling a Terrible Towel like the breeze it produces can be felt at Heinz Field.

I open my eyes to find that, miracle of miracles, the ball curved wide. We thank God. We thank fate. We thank Art Rooney’s ghost who’s clearly summoned those opposing winds.

Football, it seems, makes me believe in the supernatural. It’s been a while since I’ve prayed with others, or believed that groups concentrating fiercely have the power to sway anything. Organized religion — well, being Jewish, disorganized religion, ha, ha — never really appealed.

Being a football fan, even a neophyte one like me, requires such beliefs. The Terrible Towel is the perfect talisman: a bright yellow symbol, baptized in Iron City, with a series of ceremonies to be implemented at certain points in the game in order to harness its positive energy. Even Myron Cope, the high priest of the Towel, admits he can’t produce the Towel’s seemingly inexplicable power; he can only hope to direct it.

And that’s not even counting the ritualized chants and behaviors. Before the game, there was a debate among the people I was watching with whether to repeat their typical game-time behaviors, thus preserving the regular-season magic, or to switch behaviors, because the playoffs were a whole different animal. All this was said jokingly, of course, though serious undertones were present.

But perhaps the best example of football’s religious iconography was my friend’s mother, who took down her Christmas decorations only to replace them with Steelers ones. Now that’s devotion.

Religion isn’t anything new to football. Perhaps the greatest (and most over-the-top) lead sentences in sports writing belonged to Grantland Rice: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.”

Writing in 1924, he was referring to four Notre Dame backs who won against Army in what must have been a doozey of a game. But Rice’s decision to cast them as the horsemen of the apocalypse, cementing the connection between football and religion, overshadows their victory.

Yet it’s not Christian belief I’m seeing in this basement. Instead, it’s a collection of folk practices all aimed at one thing: bringing the Steelers victory. Pittsburgh might spend its Sunday mornings in church, but this Saturday belonged to the fickle football gods.

This sort of dual-faith has occurred for centuries. Christianized peasants still twirled around maypoles, which were pagan fertility symbols, and even today many Americans deck the halls with mistletoe, once sacred to the druids.

So this worship of all things black and gold is just a continuation of whatever beliefs in the power of rituals and objects we’ve held onto.

All this might seem odd to point out, but to non-fans, it’s mystifying. My mother, for instance, called me about 30 seconds after kickoff to tell me about socks. I asked her if she knew what time it was or what was on TV. She said she didn’t, but that she’d found an unpaired sock behind my dresser and I shouldn’t throw out its match. She didn’t understand why I had to get off the phone so quickly, but she let me go nevertheless.

Still, after that phone call, I knew we were going to win. My missing sock, whose mate resides in Pittsburgh, sealed the deal. The sock is gold, with black details. I took this as a good omen, sipped from my beer and sat back to watch the folk work their strange magic.

Pray with Sydney Bergman at sbergman@pittnews.com.