Reply #30: Yoi and Double Yoi it is a sad day in Steeler Nation [View All]

[RamboLiberal]

He was best known as the squawking talisman of Steelers football and had the good fortune of arriving on the scene just as the ballclub was escaping some four decades of losing. Cope hit the glory road sprinting in 1970 and never lost momentum for the next 30 years. Locally, his celebrity dwarfed many of the players, even those of Super Bowl pedigree, and was surpassed by only a very few.

"He was a true celebrity," said Roy McHugh, the former columnist and sports editor of the Pittsburgh Press. "In the '70s, he and I went to closed circuit telecasts of big fights at the Civic Arena. One night as we were leaving we fell in step with Billy Conn. We couldn't get three or four paces without people wanting Cope's autograph. Conn they ignored."

Regardless of the ever-more-corporate-imaged NFL he'd walked into, Mr. Cope remained a wag and raconteur of a sporting era from the other side of that transition. Though he was riding the new Pittsburgh wave of Dan and Art Rooney Jr.'s strictly business acumen and seasoned football calculations, he still had both feet in the smoke-filled rooms and occasional "toddy's" of Art Rooney Sr.'s world, which thrived on seat-of-the-pants adventurism.

Once at halftime in Cleveland, Cope found his intermission routine interrupted by an occupied restroom on old Municipal Stadium's roof, which is where the radio booths were situated. His long-standing para-military ritual of urinate, get a hot dog, and get back to the action now jeopardized, he improvised. Without being too graphic, let's just say that anyone walking by Municipal Stadium near that portion of the roof in the ensuing minutes had to wonder from where that sudden shower had come.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08058/860748-100.stm



Myron, I hope you are having a toddy tonight with your beloved wife Mildred and trading Steeler tales with "The Chief" Art Rooney.