Steelers Sayings Quotes

If you’re not from Pittsburgh, I should probably explain that “yinzers” are people with heavy Pittsburgh accents. For example, instead of “you” or “y’all,” they say “yinz.” Another feature of yinzers is that they wear Steelers apparel at all times, including in the workplace and at weddings.

How can you guys do this?” Cotton paces back and forth. “How can you act like everything is okay when these people are doing everything they can to break us? Haven’t you noticed things have gotten worse since the ocean race started? Every single day, worse! Sometimes I don’t even know if they want us to survive at all.” Braun stands up, walks over to Cotton, and puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” he says. “I understand. You’re from Minnesota. I’d be angry, too, if my team hadn’t gone to the Super Bowl since the seventies.” Cotton jerks back but smiles despite himself. “I’m from Pittsburgh, dick.” “Jesus H. Christ,” Guy pipes in. “The Steelers are the worst.” “You want to say that to my face?” Cotton says. Guy cracks his knuckles absently. “Think I just did.

People always said to me, “You must have been dyslexic.” I wasn’t. Why is it that when a white kid can’t read people say he’s dyslexic but when a black kid can’t read people say he “fell through the cracks.” This is a racist thought. I was as white as they come, and I fell through the cracks known as my parents and the Los Angeles school system. That said, Dyslexia would make a great black name. Sounds like a good wide out for the Steelers.

We've been here three days already, and I've yet to cook a single meal. The night we arrived, my dad ordered Chinese takeout from the old Cantonese restaurant around the corner, where they still serve the best egg foo yung, light and fluffy and swimming in rich, brown gravy. Then there had been Mineo's pizza and corned beef sandwiches from the kosher deli on Murray, all my childhood favorites. But last night I'd fallen asleep reading Arthur Schwartz's Naples at Table and had dreamed of pizza rustica, so when I awoke early on Saturday morning with a powerful craving for Italian peasant food, I decided to go shopping. Besides, I don't ever really feel at home anywhere until I've cooked a meal. The Strip is down by the Allegheny River, a five- or six-block stretch filled with produce markets, old-fashioned butcher shops, fishmongers, cheese shops, flower stalls, and a shop that sells coffee that's been roasted on the premises. It used to be, and perhaps still is, where chefs pick up their produce and order cheeses, meats, and fish. The side streets and alleys are littered with moldering vegetables, fruits, and discarded lettuce leaves, and the smell in places is vaguely unpleasant. There are lots of beautiful, old warehouse buildings, brick with lovely arched windows, some of which are now, to my surprise, being converted into trendy loft apartments. If you're a restaurateur you get here early, four or five in the morning. Around seven or eight o'clock, home cooks, tourists, and various passers-through begin to clog the Strip, aggressively vying for the precious few available parking spaces, not to mention tables at Pamela's, a retro diner that serves the best hotcakes in Pittsburgh. On weekends, street vendors crowd the sidewalks, selling beaded necklaces, used CDs, bandanas in exotic colors, cheap, plastic running shoes, and Steelers paraphernalia by the ton. It's a loud, jostling, carnivalesque experience and one of the best things about Pittsburgh. There's even a bakery called Bruno's that sells only biscotti- at least fifteen different varieties daily. Bruno used to be an accountant until he retired from Mellon Bank at the age of sixty-five to bake biscotti full-time. There's a little hand-scrawled sign in the front of window that says, GET IN HERE! You can't pass it without smiling. It's a little after eight when Chloe and I finish up at the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company where, in addition to the prosciutto, soppressata, both hot and sweet sausages, fresh ricotta, mozzarella, and imported Parmigiano Reggiano, all essential ingredients for pizza rustica, I've also picked up a couple of cans of San Marzano tomatoes, which I happily note are thirty-nine cents cheaper here than in New York.

The dramatic interplay was more in Lester’s wheelhouse, particularly the scene where Billy Bob contemplates suicide. Wracked with guilt over disappointing his coach (and, in retrospect, possibly suffering from post-concussion syndrome), Billy Bob sits on the back of his pickup with his football trophies, a bottle of tequila, and a Mossberg 12-gauge pump shotgun when he’s confronted by Mox. “Championship trophy. Steelers. We were 9. Remember this shit? Playing Pee Wee?” “Yeah,” Mox says. “It was fun.” “No, it wasn’t. I remember being yelled at.” Billy Bob throws the trophy. “Too fat, Billy Bob!” Bang! “Too slow and dumb!” He pulls the pump handle. Bang! “It was great,” Robbins, the director, says. “I remember that night shooting that scene, and you don’t do that once, you do it over and over again from different angles. And he was just able to deliver that performance over and over again, and those were real tears and real emotion coming out of him.” Lester drew on pain from his personal life, thinking of his late father and his sister Linda, who died at 35. He also pulled from his own struggles with suicide. Inconsolable after Linda passed, he had put a loaded gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. “God,” he says, is the only explanation. “I actually have the bullet, still. It’s not a dud; it’s live. It just didn’t go off,” Lester says. “I was kind of dreading [that scene] because I knew where I’d go. But I’m an actor and I’m making a commitment to the character. To do that, you have to go 100 percent and just hope you pull yourself out of it.

Dungy sees something that no one else does. He sees proof that his plan is starting to work. Tony Dungy had waited an eternity for this job. For seventeen years, he prowled the sidelines as an assistant coach, first at the University of Minnesota, then with the Pittsburgh Steelers, then the Kansas City Chiefs, and then back to Minnesota with the Vikings. Four times in the past decade, he had been invited to interview for head coaching positions with NFL teams. All four times, the interviews hadn’t gone well. Part of the problem was Dungy’s coaching philosophy. In his job interviews, he would patiently explain his belief that the key to winning was changing players’ habits. He wanted to get players to stop making so many decisions during a game, he said. He wanted them to react automatically, habitually. If he could instill the right habits, his team would win. Period. “Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.” How, the owners would ask, are you going to create those new habits? Oh, no, he wasn’t going to create new habits, Dungy would answer. Players spent their lives building the habits that got them to the NFL. No athlete is going to abandon those patterns simply because some new coach says to. So rather than creating new habits, Dungy was going to change players’ old ones. And the secret to changing old habits was using what was already inside players’ heads. Habits are a three-step loop—the cue, the routine, and the reward—but Dungy only wanted to attack the middle step, the routine. He knew from experience that it was easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there was something familiar at the beginning and end.3.5 His coaching strategy embodied an axiom, a Golden Rule of habit change that study after study has shown is among the most powerful tools for creating change. Dungy recognized that you can never truly extinguish bad habits. Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.