In Youngstown, most fans will pull for the Ohio State Buckeyes against Oklahoma on Saturday. But native son and Sooners coach Bob Stoops and his family remain celebrities in Youngstown, where football is always a priority.
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- With the weekend of the Ohio State-Oklahoma game approaching, a stranger asked if he had found what some call "the shrine of Mahoning Valley football."
The three men at the bar said in unison, "This is it."
Behind the bar was a photograph of Ron Jaworksi, former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and a Youngstown State star. Near the bar is a framed Browns jersey with the name "Kosar," on the back. Bernie Kosar played high school football down the road at Boardman.
On the wall inside the front door of Cassese's Mahoning Valley Restaurant on Walnut St. near YSU hangs a photo of Bob Stoops, a Youngstown native, smiling after his Oklahoma Sooners won the 2000 national championship.
Hanging on the same wall, Jim Tressel, now president of Youngstown State, who won four national championships at the school as its coach, sings the alma mater with his Ohio State players after a win.
Former Kansas coach Mark Mangino, from New Castle, Pa., across the state line, has his place too.
Bo Pelini -- like Stoops a player at Youngstown's Cardinal Mooney High School and a Big Ten starter (Iowa for Stoops, Ohio State for Pelini) -- looks toward the window beside the door at the world beyond it. After several years at Nebraska, Pelini is is now the head coach at Youngstown State.
The steel mills closed
That world has changed. The mills at Youngstown Sheet and Tube, U.S. Steel and Republic Steel began closing n the late 1970s. Their fire and smoke and molten metal are gone. A big part of the lives of the men who worked there went with them.
"It set the economy in this area back 30 years," said Joe Dercoli, seated between his friends Tony Catania and Eddie Diana.
In Youngstown, they are more informally known as "T-Cat," "Motorhead Joe" and "Tough Eddie." Catania is 63, Dercoli 69, Diana 79.
Motorhead worked at Youngstown Sheet and Tube. "I was in seamless tubing," he said.
Asked to explain the job, Dercoli said, telling a joke he has probably told before, "I wish it had been seamless hosiery."
Tough Eddie was a laborer at Republic Steel.
T-Cat was part of the Steel Valley solar system. He supplied uniforms and towels to workers in the blistering hot mills, thus orbiting the furnaces the way Earth orbits the sun.
"There was a lot of work, so there was a big need for uniforms. There were all these buildings and trucks and people," Catania said, "and now there are just empty fields."
None of them will forget the most blighted year, 1982.
"Nobody was working," said Dercoli.
"Most of us were living on unemployment checks," said Catania. "The line at the unemployment bureau was out the door and around the block. We would car pool on Tuesday to the unemployment bureau. That was our big day."
The football remained
The best days became Saturdays and Sundays. College football and pro football. They fixated on the Ohio State game, or the YSU game out of fierce loyalty, and then either the Browns, Bengals or Steelers games.
Tressel's take
"And all kinds of fans here have told me they remember getting on the train and going to the Browns' games," said Tressel. "In the whole 20th Century, as the steel business was building, so many pockets of immigrants here formed unique communities. They weren't going home because they were from all over the world. Football tied them together.
"From the Canton Bulldogs to Paul Brown as the father of studying the game and not just playing it - there were a lot of boys who loved playing it and loved coaching it too," Tressel said. "That includes D.J. Durkin at Maryland and Pat Narduzzi at Pitt."
A mere game sounds insignificant, compared to the upheaval in family lives as the economy bottomed out, but it really was not. At times, it seemed football was all they had.
"This is it," said Catania, "a neighborhood bar, good food, good beer and football talk."
The stranger, feeling more welcome every minute, ordered a bowl of "Tressel tortellini." "Oh, that's a big seller," Tressel said, laughing.
The food is good. So is the football.
Stoops' take
Asked why football is so important in the Mahoning Valley, Stoops said on his national conference call this week, "As the mills left, it became something to take pride in. But it was always a priority. There are a lot of great football coaches in the Mahoning Valley."
One of those coaches was the late Ron Stoops, the father of the Oklahoma coach and of the Sooners defensive coordinator, Mike Stoops.
The three men in the bar will root for the Buckeyes on Saturday night in Norman, Okla.
But they all know, as Eddie Diana said, "The Stoops family are celebrities in Youngstown."
Stoops and Tressel
Under Stoops, the Sooners won one national championship in the second year of his OU career in 2000 and suffered three championship game losses and a national semifinals beat-down last year in the College Football Playoff.
Under Tressel, the Buckeyes won one national championship in the second year of his OSU career in 2002, then suffered two championship game defeats.
The losses have brought the same criticism of Stoops in big games that followed Tressel after his disappointments.
Whenever either coach lost, people in Youngstown hurt a little.
Commitment
Fan loyalty here is so bone-deep that it seems to come from a deeper source than mere victories and losses and to belong to a realm of personal character. Maybe it stems from the similarity of the hard days at the steel mills and the way football, more than basketball or football, tests through its brutality the breadth and height and depth of a player's commitment.
The three fans feel that YSU has improved enough to bother the bigger schools, leading West Virginia early before losing last week.
"I like what Pelini is doing, but they need to work on their conditioning. They fade in the fourth quarter," Dercoli said.
Youngstown guys finish the job. They stay the course.
Catania's son James, a 14-year-old Bengals fan at the time, was so crushed by their loss in the Super Bowl in 1989, the defeat coming on a masterful last-minute drive by (Monongahela, Pa. native) Joe Montana, that he didn't want to go to school the next day.
On his father's orders, James wore his Bengals' colors to class, proudly.
"You see the games at the Browns Stadium, and it's snowing, the Browns are losing again, most of the fans have left, and the ones who stay to the end, they're from Youngstown," Catania said. "It's what we do."
