The Pittsburgh Steelers team that came to Dublin last weekend had a long winning tradition behind them, and won again here, beating the Minnesota Vikings 24-21 on an extraordinary afternoon in Croke Park.
But there was a time when the Steelers were perennial losers in the US National Football League, incapable of reaching end-of-season play-offs never mind the Super Bowl.
And their transformation into one of the most successful teams in history has been widely credited to an Irish priest who brought a change of luck – or divine intervention, depending on your beliefs – in the early 1970s.
The franchise’s original owner, Art Rooney, famously funded it in the early years on the proceeds of a horse racing accumulator bet, worth $160,000, won at Saratoga in 1936. Even with that, however, he could not for decades buy success.
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Although Rooney’s roots were in Ulster, his Steelers were the Mayo of the NFL, incapable of turning promise into achievement at the business end of seasons. Then in 1970, the story goes, two of his sons visited Ireland to trace ancestors, and so doing met a Kilkenny-born priest named John J Duggan.
Their subsequent relationship was founded on a misunderstanding. When the priest asked what line of business they were in, he thought they said “in vestments” (it was actually one word), and invited them to see his collection.
When they then invited him to come watch their football team next time he was in the US, he at first didn’t realise they owned one. But by the time he got to Pittsburgh, the Steelers were on a losing streak lamentable even by their own standards, winning just one of the previous 13 games. They promptly won four from four during his visit, and a reputation for supernatural powers was born.
Appointed team chaplain, Duggan became a counsellor to players of all religion and, in weekly masses, took to invoking divine help. He didn’t pray for victory, exactly. He asked only that the better team would win, “but I have an understanding with God that the Steelers are the better team, always.”
Increasingly, they were. A Central Championship game against the Oakland Raiders just before Christmas 1972 was pivotal in the change of fortunes. They had never won a play-off match until then and were losing with 20 seconds left and no timeouts.
The night before, Duggan had been asked to leave the stadium by an Oakland official worried he was spying on team practice. When he protested that he knew nothing about football, the official said that didn’t matter: he was a priest and therefore “dangerous”.
The notion he had cast a curse grew wings next day when, in the game’s last gasp, the Steelers’ quarterback threw a desperate pass from near his own end line, which ricocheted off an Oakland player to the 104kg Franco Harris, who ran 60 yards for a touchdown that won the game. Harris’s catch became known as the “Immaculate Reception”.
Sporting rationalists will argue there was sufficient reason for the change of luck in Rooney’s appointment in 1969 of Chuck Noll as head coach. Noll proved a genius at recruiting gifted players in the annual “draft”. But despairing Steelers fans (and players) knew they needed all the help they could get. Many were happy to believe God was suddenly on their side too.
In any case, they now embarked on a glorious decade, winning a string of divisional champions as well as back-to-back Super Bowls in 1974/75 and 1978/79. That reputation now precedes them.
In his main vocation, Fr Duggan spent most of his later life as a pastoral counsellor of college students and graduates in the US. His many achievements are detailed in an obituary for the Maynooth College website by Denis Bergin, who had also – almost 50 years ago – written an essay on Duggan’s sporting fame for the journal of St Kieran’s College, where the priest taught classics in the 1950s and 60s.
But it must be said that not everyone in Kilkenny has fond memories of Duggan’s early teaching days, when he was known, at least to some, for the severity of his physical punishments. Sensitivity to that issue may explain the relatively muted local coverage of his death in 2021.
In what was a generally triumphant weekend for the Steelers, meanwhile, there was an unfortunate prelude when their reserve quarterback, Skylar Thompson, was reportedly injured in a Friday night mugging in Temple Bar.
It could have been a PR disaster for both Dublin and the NFL’s European outreach project. It was certainly a godsend for those keyboard warriors who like to portray Ireland’s capital as a lawless “kip” or their other favourite word “sh*thole,“ even though that is usually a cover for their main interest in life: blaming everything on immigrants.
In the event, neither Thompson nor the Steelers made any formal complaint. And, although well-reported in the media (contrary to what the keyboard warriors would claim), the incident was not allowed to ruin a generally glorious occasion.
