Text Size:
A|
A|
A
Email
Print
Take a walk down Penn Avenue in the Strip District and nothing will seem amiss at first. It could still be 2009.
On the outside wall of Wholey's, a sign shows a happy family of four shopping at the legendary fish market, and a smiling, sweet-faced girl, not much older than 7, wears that same digit on her Steelers jersey.
Walk farther down the sidewalk and the great city sub shop, Peppi's, has a sign declaring, "Home of the Roethlisburger."
PG STORE
But between 19th and 20th streets, in Yinzers, an edgy purveyor of T-shirts and such, it's clear 2009 was another time entirely. People are picking up T-shirts and laughing.
"Dumb and Dumber" says one, with images of Tiger Woods and Ben Roethlisberger. Another shows the image of a devil wearing a helmet bearing the number 7, Roethlisberger's number. Then there's the newest: a $5 shirt that carries a sketch of the Steelers quarterback, wearing shades, with "Big Ben" above his head and "The $100,000,000 Jerk" beneath it.
Only it doesn't say "jerk."
What's used here is a more colorful term, one that has been passed down from generation to generation in Western Pennsylvania. It's a synonym for "jerk," but is not suitable for the family newspaper. Whether said with great force or out of the side of one's mouth, the word sounds vaguely Russian, kind of like "Jagov." *
That shirt came out last week.
"Right now, that's what's paying the rent. Definitely," a Yinzers employee says when I ask about the taunting tee. He doesn't give his name, but directs me down the street to a newer, larger, Yinzers at the corner of 22nd Street. That's where I meet the owner.
Jim Coen, 50, has been a T-shirt vendor for 12 years. He started with a spot on the Penn Avenue sidewalk, across from Pennsylvania Macaroni, but opened the small shop three years ago and this big one eight months ago.
When Sports Illustrated did its May 10 cover story on Roethlisberger, Mr. Coen told SI that he had moved thousands of dollars worth of Roethlisberger jerseys to a storeroom in the back. He pointed to a little pink jersey with a number 7 on it and asked, "Would you buy your daughter this jersey?"
But Mr. Coen has to make a living, so he marked the jersey down from $40 to $10 and has sold about 250 of them in recent weeks, mostly to out-of-towners, he said.
The simplest shirt he ever sold, just a hamburger and the word "Roethlisburger," was probably his biggest seller ever. The one hailing Pittsburgh's Super Bowl and Stanley Cup victories -- "On Ice or Grass We'll Kick Your [Hindquarters]" -- also was big not so long ago. But more than 1,000 "Dumb and Dumber" shirts have sold and may become the third-best seller, while the "Hundred Million Dollar" one is likewise soaring with a bullet.
Mr. Roethlisberger may still have a small army of apologists (or at least a platoon) saying he has not been convicted of any crime, but with this T-shirt it's clear that much of Pittsburgh, however crassly, has reached a verdict on his behavior.
Mr. Coen may find some new slogan to rally the fans as Steelers training camp approaches, because he is at bottom a Pittsburgh sports fan. "I don't know how far I want to go pushing Ben," he says.
But just to show he's a three-sport guy, his friend David Burns has designed a T-shirt with a Pirates ship going down while a bespectacled man in a lifeboat rows away with bags of money.
"Captain Nutting's Loot & Blunder," it says.
This take on Pirates owner Bob Nutting is succeeding an earlier version, "Spend Nutting, Win Nutting," that is being dropped because "customers didn't understand it."
There's no misunderstanding the Big Ben shirts.
*I'd be remiss if I didn't thank Roy Blount Jr., who used that Russian spelling in his great 1974 book on the Steelers, "About Three Bricks Shy of a Load."
I am indebted to Mr. Blount, who hails from Georgia, the very state where Mr. Roethlisberger had his infamous evening. In gratitude, I intend to send Mr. Blount either good bourbon or a $5 T-shirt.
