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Jerome Bettis fan Marty Higbee, of Cincinnati, wears a foam Bus as he waits for the induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame of Pittsburgh Steelers running back Jerome Bettis at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, Saturday, Aug. 8, 2015, in Canton, Ohio.
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Gene Collier: Another year, another pilgrimage to Canton for Steelers Nation

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Gene Collier: Another year, another pilgrimage to Canton for Steelers Nation

Every now and again in this town, just as summer makes the turn into its last full month, an emotional momentum starts to build that’s as tangible and enduring as our most hallowed traditions.

So yes, another bloody fistful of Steelers are about to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, and the number of persons who’ll be crossing state lines with the willful intent to commit idolatry again figures to be massive. To many of those who’ve made the 101-mile drive multiple times for this precise purpose, the singular magic the weekend delivers unfailingly might have less to do with football and tradition and history and community and pomp, and more to do with, as Art Rooney Jr. put it this week:

“You can get to the darn thing.”

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Bingo.

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If this Hall of Fame were in Canton, Kan., (Gateway to the Maxwell Wildlife Refuge), for example, the number of Pittsburgh eyewitnesses to Terry Bradshaw taking “one last snap” from Mike Webster would have been reduced considerably. Golden induction memories would not be nearly as extensive, and the shelf life on the ceremonies’ cherished memories would not be as long if this event were in Canton, Colo. Fewer Steelers fans would be able to recall Jack Lambert’s electrifying gooseflesh soliloquy, the one about, of all people, them: “A proud and hard-working people who love their football and their players. If I could start my life all over again, I would be a professional football player, and you damn well better believe I’d be a Pittsburgh Steeler.” Fewer still would be able to recall that Cleveland joke sometimes overheard in Pittsburgh’s Turnpike caravans: “Hey, know how many Browns are in the Hall of Fame? Six – Bob, Jim, Paul, Roosevelt, Tim, and Willie.”

(Perfunctory disclaimer: There are actually 16 to 22 Cleveland Browns in the Hall, depending on whether they were Browns primarily, including Jim and Paul.)

Fortunately enough, Canton and Pittsburgh share a lot more than easy access to I-76. For one, they share an outsized delivery system — nearly 11% of the entire roster of Canton enshrinees represent either the Steelers or Western Pennsylvania (38 of 353). More significantly, in the historical sense, Pittsburgh and Canton appear in the most crucial passages of pro football’s Book of Genesis, much in the way next weekend’s group of Pittsburgh inductees — Troy Polamalu, Donnie Shell, Alan Faneca, Bill Cowher, and Bill Nunn — have origin stories as compelling and diverse as the history of the NFL itself.

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Something vaguely identifiable as professional football was getting played all over Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the Midwest at the start of the 20th century, but no particular concept was on track toward becoming the NFL until some of the game’s far flung architects finally convened in a Hupmobile showroom in Canton in 1920. The car dealership was owned by Ralph Hay, who also owned the Canton Bulldogs, one of 11 teams represented at the meeting. Thus was established the American Professional Football Association, soon to become the National Football League.

Still, that was nearly 30 years after a big man on Yale’s campus, one Pudge Heffelfinger, surreptitiously pocketed $500 to play for the Allegheny Athletic Association against the archival Pittsburgh Athletic Club at Exposition Park on the North Side. Historians later conferred upon Pudge the distinction of being the first professional player, and thus it followed that the Allegheny-Pittsburgh clash had to have been the first professional game. A historical marker at the intersection of North Shore Drive and Art Rooney Avenue reports a 4-0 Allegheny victory that day in 1892, with Heffelfinger scoring the winning touchdown at a time when they were worth only four points. The best you could do as a ball-hawking defensive back in that era was a Pick Four.

Like the genesis of the game itself, this year’s inductees bring poignant and portentous origin stories:

• Cowher, the heart-on-his-sleeve Pittsburgher who had to replace the coach who’d brought Lombardi Trophies home in bulk, who first knew Steelers glory as a teenager growing up in Crafton and tearing it up in a multi-sport way at Carlynton High.

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• Polamalu, whose athleticism was so extreme growing up in California and Oregon (All-State in baseball and basketball), that when he reached the height of his powers in the NFL, he wasn’t so much an All-Pro safety as a kind of violent acrobat.

• Shell, scuffling out of that one-square-mile town called Whitmire, S.C., playing an undersized linebacker at South Carolina State anonymously enough that he’d go undrafted in 1974, yet when he retired from the NFL 13 years later, his 51 interceptions were the most ever by a strong safety.

• Faneca, born on the bayou (New Orleans) and destined to turn himself into such a unique blend of brutality and precision that he was selected first-team All-Pro six times in the NFL. The Hall of Fame’s Centennial Class further includes an offensive lineman similarly decorated, that being former Pitt and Freedom High tackle Jimbo Covert, who displayed his ferocity with the great Chicago Bears teams of the 1980’s (and at WrestleMania 2!)

• Nunn, who grew up in Homewood with a long athletic frame suited for winning basketball games, which he did with metronomic regularity at Westinghouse High School and West Virginia State. He’d turn down an offer from the Harlem Globetrotters to work for his father, the managing editor at the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most important Black newspapers, and he’d eventually become managing editor himself in the ’60s.

That’s the mere skeleton of Nunn’s origin story, which might be the most important of all when it comes to the Pittsburgh-Canton Hall of Fame pipeline. Without Nunn’s singular knowledge of what are now called HBCU’s (historically black colleges and universities), gleaned from years of coordinating the assembly of the Courier’s Black College All-America teams, Pittsburgh’s ability to turn 40 years of losing into six Lombardi trophies might never have been realized.

“Look at Donnie Shell,” recalled Rooney Jr., who ran the scouting department beginning in the late ’60s. “We had gone down to South Carolina State because they had a great defensive end. Can’t remember his name. The coach down there [Willie Jeffries] told us, ‘We’ve got a linebacker who’s a great player, too. Great player and a great kid.’ I thought yeah, but he’s like 5-10 ½. He went undrafted. After the draft, Bill would go out on the road with a briefcase full of blank free agent contracts to sign guys. He comes back from his trip and tells me, ‘I got that great kid that you and I love at South Carolina State.’ I said something dumb like, ‘What? He’s a midget though.’ Bill said, ‘No, no, you don’t get it. He’s not a linebacker. He’s a defense back.’

“What a projection!”

At tiny football backwaters throughout the south, Nunn made projections on L.C. Greenwood (Arkansas Pine-Bluff), Mel Blount (Southern), Ernie Holmes (Texas Southern), John Stallworth (Alabama A&M), and others.

Next Sunday in Canton, the crowd will see a video tribute to Nunn from former Pitt tight end Kris Wilson, now a producer at NFL Films.

“For the most part I wanted to show that he was a pioneer,” Wilson said from California, where he’s working on the freshest iteration of “Hard Knocks” featuring the Dallas Cowboys. “I wanted to show that he was a pioneer, the first guy who kind of showed the NFL that there was significant talent in the HBCU system. There were a lot of non-believers around the league who thought those players couldn’t make the cut. Bill Nunn knew better because of his background, he had eyes on things and access to and knowledge of a pool of talent a lot of decision makers didn’t. And they weren’t making prudent decisions.”

With its 2020 ceremonies wiped out by COVID-19, the Hall of Fame 2021 celebration figures to be perhaps the largest and most elaborate ever. No fewer than 19 enshrinement speeches are scheduled, although they’re being limited to six minutes. Anyone who stretches it to eight (lookin’ at you, Peyton Manning) will get played off with an Academy Awards-style musical flourish. Remember, the weekend isn’t over until Jimmie Allen, Brad Paisley, and Lynyrd Skynyrd perform on Monday night, by which time you can expect most Pittsburghers will have taken more than three steps toward the door.

If it all seems like a little much, I’d remind you that it’s only a natural outgrowth of the constant discussion of what and whom the Hall is missing. There aren’t too many Steelers and there aren’t too many Bears and there certainly aren’t too many Bengals (one), but it’s not unreasonable to wonder at times if there aren’t too few Rooneys.

Franchise founder Art Rooney was in the Hall’s second induction class in 1964, and his late son Dan, who hired Chuck Noll and ran the organization for most of the next half century, was inducted in 2000. But Art Jr., nominated multiple times, has seen his candidacy gain zero traction. He ran the scouting and personnel operation that included his best friends, Nunn and Jack Butler, now both in the Hall (Butler as a player).

George Young of the Giants and Gil Brandt of the Cowboys, both honored for their success as personnel execs, are enshrined in Canton. If Art Rooney Jr. had the same scouting success with another franchise, I wonder if he’d have already made a speech in Canton. Is there some other Rooney Rule that we don’t know about?

Apparently, there are some times when you just can’t get to the darn thing.

Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter @genecollier.

First Published: August 1, 2021, 12:00 p.m.

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