Unqualified Offerings

Jeet Heer probably has the best William F. Buckley appreciation today.

I hope someone will write as good an appreciation of Myron Cope, who also died today. Cope was the voice of the Pittsburgh Steelers for 34 years, and invented the Terrible Towel on-air one night while doing the sports for WTAE Channel 4. In my memory, which needs checking, he was trying to wind the city up about a crucial game that week with the Bengals. He wanted Southwestern Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia and parts of extremely Eastern Ohio to get as annoyed with the Bengals as he was. Naturally he did this the way any crazed eccentric would who held the soul of a city in his somewhat erratic hands: by pointing out that “Bengal Orange” was the same color as the vests and flags of the road crews slowing you down in traffic every morning! Or close enough to that color! And therefore and of course - I am missing a link or two in Cope’s chain of argument - it was incumbent upon all good Steeler fans to come down to Three Rivers Stadium that Sunday waving . . . towels. The secret to understanding the place of Myron Cope in Pittsburgh history is that everyone agreed that this was exactly what people should do. I initially typed, “This made perfect sense to everyone,” but that would have misstated. “Sense” was not the point.

The original Terrible Towels were whatever you could acquire that was Steeler gold, or yellow, or nearabouts. Later came the Official towels, the trademark now owned by a school caring for autistic children, like Cope’s son, who survives him. Also, what I wrote in the above paragraph is not the way it happened at all. It’s the way I remembered it happening, and then I decided I’d better fact-check myself before publishing. The Bengals rant with the construction-crew imprecation did happen. I now recall that Cope simply urged viewers to honk or otherwise signal displeasure with the flag men, standing in for the Bengals. Another time, Myron Cope invented the Terrible Towel. That the two conjoined in my mind demonstrates the essential unity of the Myron Cope Experience. By Super Bowl X, I was in the Boston area for what passed for college. During the pre-game network broadcast somebody crossed the wires and for just a moment, the national audio feed dropped out, replaced by the local feed and the distinctive head tones of Myron Cope. Sounds like home, a couple of us in the TV room thought, looking at each other in surprise and delight.

He was no jagoff.