PITTSBURGH — Amir Grigsby is standing on North Shore Drive, just blocks from the Steelers' home stadium, where Pittsburgh is hosting this year's NFL draft. He's talking fervently about how the Steel Curtain dominated the NFL "back in the day."
He's referring to the fearsome Steelers defense of the 1970s, when the football team won three Super Bowls, launching one of the greatest American sports dynasties.
Grigsby wasn't born yet — he's only 22. But as a fifth-generation Pittsburgher, he was raised on those stories of the city's winning spirit.
"The need to be great is very prominent in Pittsburgh," he said.
The city expects between 500,000 and 700,000 fans to attend the draft, or about double Pittsburgh's population. During the three-day event that runs through Saturday, 32 NFL teams are picking which college players will join their rosters.
It's the first time Pittsburgh has hosted the draft in almost 80 years. But natives like Grigsby say the city's passionate fanbases and 16 major professional league championships make the selection a natural fit.
The draft returns
The last and only other time Pittsburgh hosted the draft was in 1947. But the event was nothing like the public-facing extravaganza it is now. The owners and coaches of the 10 teams at the time gathered at the Fort Pitt Hotel downtown to make their picks. And that was that.
Back then, Pittsburgh had already started to establish itself as a sports town. In baseball, the Pirates had two World Series titles under their belt. The city is also where professional football got its start: The first documented instance of someone being paid to play a pro football game was in Pittsburgh in 1892. Some of the earliest pro hockey games happened in the 1890s in the city's Duquesne Gardens, a barn-turned-ice-rink, said Mark Fatla, a native and the author of Pittsburgh's Historic Ballparks.
But Pittsburgh was just getting started, and the city turned it up a notch in the 1970s. In addition to the Steel Curtain victories, the Pirates won two of their total five World Series in those years.
That era, Fatla said, "captured the imagination of sports fans far beyond Pittsburgh."
From the steel mills to the football fields
But what cemented the city's champion legacy was that they kept winning. The Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team sealed back-to-back wins in the 1990s and again in the 2010s. In the 2000s, the Steelers won two more Super Bowls.
Fatla credits all that success to the city's blue-collar work ethic, forged in its steel mills since the 19th century. Pittsburgh later emerged as the world's top producer of steel.
The hard work it takes to manufacture steel shows up on the field, Fatla said.
"It's not always as flashy as some places and some teams," he said. "But it's very workman-like, very gritty, very much get the job done by whatever means you have to do it, within the rules."
The Steelers were founded on that industrious spirit. Team founder Art Rooney turned a horse race bet into big winnings — enough to keep the football team afloat financially. Franchise ownership has since been passed down the Rooney family line.
Jimmy Coen, owner of Yinzers in the Burgh, a souvenir shop that sells Pittsburgh sports merch, says the Rooney family has kept the team's standards high all these years.
"If you're gonna play for the Steelers, you're gonna be a winner," he said. "You're not gonna come into Pittsburgh and be lazy."
The steel industry started to collapse in the 1970s and 1980s due to foreign competition. With fewer jobs, thousands of Pittsburghers left. But Coen said sports brought those who stayed closer together.
"Things were rough in Pittsburgh," Coen said. "People were leaving. So that's all we had was the Steelers."
But Pittsburghers took their pride in their teams on the road.
"There is this whole Pittsburgh diaspora out there that still maintains this kind of emotional connection back to the city, and those people show up at games and other places wearing their Pittsburgh regalia," Fatla said.
Even people who have never lived in Pittsburgh flock to the black and gold, the colors of all three of the city's major professional teams.
Albert Martinez is traveling all the way from Houston to attend the draft. He inherited his love for the Steelers from his mother, who grew up in Monterrey, Mexico — a major steel manufacturing hub nicknamed the "Pittsburgh of Mexico." His mother felt a kinship with Pittsburgh, and would tune into Steelers games in the 1970s.
"I bleed black and yellow," Martinez said.
The future of Pittsburgh sports
Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O'Connor, a native, says the "City of Champions" reputation endures because different generations have seen different eras of winning teams.
For one generation, it was the 1970s Steelers teams. For Grigsby, it was the Steelers of the 2000s.
The most recent Pittsburgh championship was won by the Penguins in 2017. But, as Grigsby tells it, it won't be long before the city seizes another one.
"Confidence just comes from you already proving to yourself that you've already done something," he said. "We're just waiting for time to catch back up again. History repeats itself, that's how it goes."
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