Retired broadcaster Cope can still get out a good 'Double Yoi!'
Sunday, January 22, 2006
By Chico Harlan, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com
Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette
Myron Cope, retired broadcaster for the Pittsburgh Steelers, says he's the most boring person to watch a game with because he tries not to say anything except during commercial breaks.
He chooses solitude, for whatever reason. His chatterbox daughter Elizabeth, just five minutes down the road, stops by frequently, but never, this Steeler season, on a Sunday. His close circle of friends, even closer since his wife died in 1994, gathers around dinner tables in good times, hospital beds in tough times, but now, when the Steelers play football, they leave Myron Cope in the last spot they ever expected he'd wish for. They leave him alone.
Before this football season, Mr. Cope, who turns 77 tomorrow, retired. He retreated to his South Hills townhouse -- where the museum stock of autographs and photos lines his basement -- and watched the Steelers games from his living room, his only company being a $2,000 high-definition television and six remote controls, or five more than he can handle.
He owned upper deck season tickets, but he sold them to a friend. A spot always awaited him in the Heinz Field press box, but he tried that once on a Sunday in late September and drove home before the end of the first quarter. He thought, other times, about driving to a bar to watch his beloved team. "But I'd miss two out of every five plays," Mr. Cope figured. "I watch in silence, because I'm thinking as I watch."
Last Sunday, before the Steelers' playoff game against the Indianapolis Colts, Mr. Cope eased into his kitchen and removed the cellophane from a gift basket loaded with corned beef, turkey, lettuce, condiments, pasta salad and brownies -- enough food to sustain him for the next week. Pneumonia, grouch that it is, had overtaken his immune system for almost a week, sending him briefly to the hospital and offering only one consolation prize. His three sisters had ordered him this overstuffed gourmet basket. So Mr. Cope spread out the food and cut himself a sandwich, grinning because it trumped -- by a landslide -- the wieners usually made for himself.
On account of his prescribed antibiotics, Mr. Cope refrained from alcohol -- drinking, he said, would provoke dreadful side effects -- but his refrigerator held rows of Rolling Rock. "Do you want one?" he asked. His accompanying endorsement -- "It's damn good beer" -- seemed redundant, seeing how the brewing company, as a promotion to honor the broadcaster's June 2005 retirement, had printed Mr. Cope's face on its bottles.
In less than an hour, the Steelers would face the Colts, an opponent so powerful that most assumed the Steelers' season would dissolve into dust before sundown. More than 350 miles away from Mr. Cope's sofa, fans crammed into the RCA Dome, picking up white giveaway towels -- the requisite prop of playoff crowds. As creator and curator of the Terrible Towel, though, Mr. Cope had earned authority in denouncing such copycats. "Ha!" he said of the white imitations. "Those are only dust rags."
Earlier that morning, Mr. Cope had called a bookie and placed a $50 bet on the Steelers, 9 1/2-point underdogs. He then drove to Foodland and purchased some Perrier, which he'd drink when swallowing his pills and later belittle as swill compared to his favored beer.
When a Steelers fan, hoping to chat about football, rushed toward Mr. Cope in the Foodland parking lot, it reminded him of previous encounters, the kind that he loved. Like Thursday, when those two delivery men arrived at his townhouse holding his sisters' food basket. Well, one man held the food basket. The other simply presented his idle hands, admitting he'd tagged along for the chance to meet the man who answered the door.
"It's amazing to me," Mr. Cope said later. "Wherever I go, they'll say, 'How are you Myron?' Or, 'How's your health?' And they say it with such earnestness, by God, it's beautiful."
Minutes away from kickoff, Mr. Cope, an elfin 5 feet 4, curled into the corner of his sofa. He crossed his legs and his black corduroys rode upward, revealing pasty flesh. Punching several of the six remotes, he finally situated himself technologically -- the television fixed to CBS, volume turned down, and the radio tuned to the Steelers' flagship, WDVE-FM. There, he could listen to his old broadcast partners, Bill Hillgrove and Tunch Ilkin, inviting them into his living room as millions had done to him for 35 years.
Mr. Cope had entered his jackpot career as if taking a detour. He'd pursued free-lance stories in Pittsburgh and New York for the first half of his professional career -- the fulfillment of a writer's education -- but in 1970 a local program director who knew voices heard Mr. Cope's sparkplug pipes and told him that obnoxious was radio's new sound. Like that, Mr. Cope entered the broadcast booth as the Steelers color man. He devoted more than a generation to stories: He told them, chased them and preserved them.
In the first half of his professional career, he wrote prolifically, penning pieces for Sports Illustrated and True and the Saturday Evening Post. When the fascinating men of sports -- Muhammad Ali, Howard Cosell, Roberto Clemente -- told their stories, he had the best job imaginable: he sat back and listened.
Before typing his pieces, he spread all his notes across the floor, searching for a way to move beyond that terrifying and great moment when the story existed purely in his mind. He thrived like few other writers of his era. He mastered a style that would later mirror his oral storytelling -- he flowed from scene to scene in his narratives, lovingly riding tangents, as if train-hopping, but always returning to the original direction.
In 2002, he published a 225-page memoir, "Double Yoi!" But in recent months, his writing efforts have yielded frustration. He agonized for weeks, beginning and then re-writing passages that traveled nowhere, and he finally decided he'd lost his capacity.
"I had to face it," he said. "I lost my writing skills."
Suddenly, the Steelers were up, and so was Mr. Cope. Seven-zip, fourteen-zip. Ben Roethlisberger completed a downfield pass to Hines Ward, whose stiff-arm of a defender lengthened the play. "Oh oh oh, did you see that!?" Mr. Cope yelped. "Hines hit him right in the mush!"
He glanced at the photocopied rosters on his coffee table, then identified an injured Indianapolis player -- Nick Harper, already basted in lowbrow controversy thanks to an incident a day earlier, when his wife allegedly stabbed him in the right knee with a filet knife.
"What a weekend he's having!" Mr. Cope said, plowing on with excitement. "He gets slashed and then he's out of the game in the first quarter. That's worse than my bout with pneumonia. Oh, if I was in the booth ... how much fun I'd have with that.
"People always ask me if I miss it. There was a time last week against Cincinnati when the center snapped the ball wild, and Billy Hillgrove described what happened. And he said it was the [Bengals'] long snapper, Brad St. Louis. And I immediately wanted to yell, 'Brad St. Louis snapped that ball from Cincinnati to St. Louis.' But I couldn't. I wanted to rise to my feet, because that's what I would do in the booth. I wanted to yell about it; I mean, proclaim it! But if I did that now, I'd make a fool of myself in an empty living room. So at those moments, you see, I miss it."
Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette
The excitable Myron Cope familiar to generations of Steelers fans re-emerges during the action-packed fourth quarter of the Steelers-Colts game.
Solitude, of course, affords him one clear benefit -- neither his several dear friends nor his daughter could guilt-trip him about his smoking habit. Stubborn, his friends call him. Four years running of health problems, including a cancerous bump in his throat, never caused him to stop smoking. Before the required pneumonia antibiotics forced a brief pause, Mr. Cope, too, drank at roughly the same pace he set for himself when free-lancing in New York. His routine: A martini before dinner and a scotch in the evening, plus some of the free beer Rolling Rock distributed to him. A 2001 driving-under-the-influence charge and a resulting 90-day license suspension did little to change his habits.
And watching football, for the angst it stoked, only encouraged his urges. Still, at halftime, Mr. Cope pulled himself away from the sofa and the settling Marlboro smoke. The Steelers led, 14-3. "Who could have expected this?" Mr. Cope said. "That's a nice half, you betcha."
Mr. Cope only retired, the abridged story goes, because of a call from a friend. Joe Gordon, the former Steelers publicist, always promised he'd tell Mr. Cope honestly if he detected any drop-off in the broadcaster's on-air performance. In 2004, he noticed just that, and so he called on a Monday in June to tell him. And four days later, when Gordon mentioned it again in person -- "You're slipping, Myron" -- Mr. Cope paused for 10 seconds, said nothing and then nodded, "OK, that's it."
In the months that followed, he often felt tired. Problem was, he never felt retired. Publishers wanted a 5,000-word update for "Double Yoi!" -- they still want it, actually -- but Mr. Cope struggled to write. He dealt with merchandisers who wanted to sell his image and function organizers who asked him to speak, but mostly, he dealt with doctors, lots of them.
The first ones, almost four years back now, sought to explain the mysterious pains he felt in his upper legs. They performed surgeries, once implanting a battery in his belly, later removing it and trying something else. By March 2004, his life had devolved into 24-hour cycles of sickness. Finally, a bright mind at UPMC Presbyterian diagnosed the problem: Myron Cope had polymyalgia rheumatica, a disease characterized by muscle stiffness that was hell to pronounce and even worse to live with.
Doses of prednisone relieved the symptoms, but at the same time, he struggled with his vocal cords. In July 2004, doctors found a cancerous bump in his throat, and though the resulting operation removed the bump, it reinstated -- for a reason still unknown -- some of old muscle stiffness. That prompted him to switch doctors.
"Even now, I'm examined regularly," Mr. Cope said. "They stick a tube down me, it's a camera, and it takes pictures of my vocal cords, which come up on all these monitors. You can see my vocal cords in Technicolor."
The fourth quarter commanded the old color guy's attention. The final minutes of this football game had a way of forcing men toward their vices, so Mr. Cope, unable to drink, settled on his second vice, retreating to his kitchen and grabbing two chocolate chip cookies. The Steelers led, 21-10. When the referee ruled an apparent Peyton Manning interception incomplete, Mr. Cope cursed with dismay. The Colts maintained possession, and four plays later, the Steelers lead shrank to three.
"This is the first time in my retirement I've been nervous," Mr. Cope said. "I'm finding out what them fans go through."
Then, he watched the final, breath-stopping procession of plays, those now recounted in Pittsburgh as instant history: Jerome Bettis' goal line fumble; Ben Roethlisberger's tackle; Mike Vanderjagt's field-goal attempt with 21 seconds left.
As he offered thanks to God for a strong heart, the Colts kicker paced three steps back, hoping to tie the score. Mr. Cope rose from his sofa and jolted toward his television, eyes glued. The kick boomeranged off toward the right -- No good! No good! -- and he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling in blissful disbelief. The voices on the radio continued to roll, gathering excitement from this realization: The Steelers had pulled off one of the most profound upsets in recent playoff history.
But Mr. Cope, whose voice crystallized so many previous signature moments, only listened. He returned to the sofa, still quiet, and finally allowed, "I've never seen anything like this."
One of his friends called, and he spoke for less than a minute. The phone rang again -- his daughter. She wanted to talk. Mr. Cope didn't.
"They're just about to interview the Bus," Mr. Cope said, rushing his words. "I gotta go."
He hung up the phone, and like that, he was back in the world where he started: He sat back, and listened to some of the best stories he could imagine.
First published on January 22, 2006 at 12:00 am
Chico Harlan can be reached at aharlan@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1227.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06022/641678-66.stm#ixzz1BrTyNjXv
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