0 The History Of The Terrible Towel

The History Of The Terrible Towel

We'll confess to being a little confused by this whole Terrible Towel business. Fortunately, blogger Neal Ungerleider sums it all up for us in a guest post.

For Steelers fans at Ford Field this Sunday, the "Terrible Towel" is a required accessory. The yellow, dishrag-sized towel with a stenciled-on Terrible Towel logo is a Pittsburgh icon, alongside Primanti Brothers and the "Yinzers." Unsurprisingly, outsiders and non-football fans often scratch their heads. But, sociologically, it's something that matters: A lone reminder of the age when teams could get away with things like the Super Bowl Shuffle and the Homer Hankie.

The story of the Towel stretches back to the pre-disco 1970s, a time when the influence of sports promoters like baseball's Bill Veeck ensured that, for better or worse, pro games could have a cornball element. That playfulness spilled over to television and radio; one radio broadcaster in Pittsburgh, Myron Cope, indulged in it regularly, creating words on the fly and using obscure Yiddishisms and Italian slang while covering the Steelers. But then the Steelers made the playoffs in 1975, and Cope managed an accidental and extremely successful publicity coup de grace for his team.

In broadcasts leading up to a playoff game against the Baltimore Colts, Cope urged fans to bring their yellow dish towels to the game to show support for their team. And like a good pre-internet meme, it happened. Thousands of fans showed up waving their yellow dish towels.

More important, the Steelers gave an amazing performance. They won 28-10 in a game no one expected them to win. Newspapers and magazines seized on the Terrible Towel, seeing a good story in the making. By the time the Steelers made it to Super Bowl X and their victory over the Dallas Cowboys, the majority of households in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area had a Terrible Towel of their own.

Cope, of course, copyrighted the towels. An article in the Boston Globe detailed efforts against towel counterfeiters. Starting in 1996, all sales from the Terrible Towel were given to the Allegheny Valley School, a Pittsburgh-area school for the mentally challenged.

Nowadays the Terrible Towel commands a mighty marketing empire, including, yes, a Terrible Towel scroll. More than 460,000 Terrible Towels were sold in 2005. It's safe to say this one has outlived the Super Bowl Shuffle.