Only a Pittsburgh guy would try to carve his nickname in a hillside on his hands and knees.
For Dave Wannstedt, Pittsburgh guy of the first rank, the hill rose 40 feet behind the east end zone of Baldwin High School’s football field. Highlander football players for years had labored up that hill for conditioning or atonement or both, but one summer day Wannstedt decided he would add a twist to the torture. He decided he would cut “W,” for his nickname Wan, in the hill. Beginning at the base of the letter, he would ascend the hill on all fours, then sprint back down.
“He started doing that one summer before the season,” said Jim Gillooly, Wannstedt’s coach at Baldwin High. “Before long, there’d be a couple of kids following him.”
Pittsburgh guys, no doubt.
It didn’t take long for a dusty “W” to appear on the grassy hillside. Opponents would come to play Baldwin and wonder, “What’s that stand for?”
The Highlanders knew who had left his mark. The exercise became known as “the Wannstedt drill” even after its creator had crossed the Monongahela River to captain the Pitt Panthers, whose art-deco bowl sits, of course, on the crest of a murderous hill.
“When I left five years later, we were still doing it,” Gillooly said. “One time this big kid was down at the bottom on his hands and knees. This happened a lot. I said, `Get going, son!’ He said, `I can’t, coach. I lost my (glass) eye.’
“I felt terrible for yelling at him. But darned if he didn’t find it and get back up and go at that hill.”
The hillside since has grown back, but the 40-year-old Wannstedt would appreciate that kind of gusto. His family and friends describe him as a real guy from “the ‘Burgh.” He’s the oldest of six children raised in a strict Catholic home, but not so pious he won’t visit the Willock Social Association to have a cold Iron City brew and swap stories with other Burghers in that odd local accent.
“David’s real blue-collar,” said his sister, Cheryl, who lives here. “Just sitting in Willock’s having a fish sandwich and a beer-that’s David. He’s so down to earth. You go in there in the summer and you’ll see them sitting there, just like he’d never left.”
That’s what’s known as “loafing” in the Burgh. A Burgher won’t say he’s going to Willock’s. He’ll say he’s “goin’ t’loaf dahn t’Willocks.”
(Chicagoans may need a translator for some of the coach’s utterances. If he says the field is “slippy,” he means it’s wet. If he refers to the “Stillers,” he’s talking about Pittsburgh’s NFL entry. “Dahntahn” is where Soldier Field is located.)
Wannstedt didn’t become an NFL head coach at 40 by loafing. He thrives on work, and that’s one reason he idolized the man he’s succeeding. Mike Ditka came from Aliquippa, 32 miles from here. Aliquippa is a rugged mill town crippled by the collapse of Big Steel. Baldwin, though populated by many ex-millworkers, has a more suburban flavor, with stout red-brick houses, neatly trimmed yards and strip malls along Route (say “Rot”) 51.
Baldwin, a 15-minute drive from downtown Pittsburgh, used to be dominated by Germans and Scots, but it has become a hodge-podge. Wannstedt’s church, St. Wendelin’s, is named for a German monk, but the last two priests have been of Irish descent.
Ditka is the most famous Aliquippa High product, but Wannstedt takes a backseat to fellow Baldwin High grad Orrin Hatch, the senator from Utah. Until Wannstedt wins a Super Bowl, that is.
If you want fame here, play football. Or coach it.
Last week, a reporter from Chicago called up the directory operator and asked for Baldwin coach Don Yannessa’s number. “Oh, Coach Yannessa?” the operator said. “He’s great. My boy plays for him.”
That’s not an uncommon occurrence in Pittsburgh, which fancies itself the biggest small town in America.
The towns that produced Ditka and Wannstedt have plenty of similarities: the backbreaking hills, the work ethic, the intense ethnicity and the mad devotion to football. The area has produced not only Unitas, Namath and Montana, but thousands of kids with rugged surnames willing to crawl up hills in pursuit of gridiron glory.
“Ditka could have been raised in Baldwin, and Wannstedt could have been raised in Aliquippa,” said Yannessa, who played high school ball with Ditka and knows Wannstedt. “They’re the kind of guys, no matter what the environment is, they make it fit them.”
They are the kind of guys who like to take their challenges nose-first, no blinking allowed. Wannstedt’s next hillside, pardon the metaphor, is the 5-11 Bears. Whether he can take the Bears back to the peak-where Ditka led them in 1985-remains to be seen. People here say he’ll bust his gut trying.
“You have a good man there,” said Pittsburgh Steelers President Dan Rooney, who nearly hired Wannstedt as his own head coach last year before choosing another Pittsburgher, Bill Cowher. “(Pittsburghers) don’t take anything for granted. The pride is in the work you do. He’s not going to change that when he gets to Chicago.”
The question isn’t whether Wannstedt will change when he assumes field command of Chicago’s chief sporting obsession. The question is: What will he do for a hill? The only thing resembling a real western Pennsylvania-style wrinkle between Lake Forest and Soldier Field is Evanston’s Mt. Trashmore, a grass-covered compost heap. Come to think of it, that’s a hill a Pittsburgh guy could respect.
Pittsburghers have been taking on hills since the 1700s, with a .500 lifetime record at best. They once built vertical trolleys-called inclines-to make it easier for workers to commute from their hilltop neighborhoods to the steel mills along the rivers. After the mills died, the two remaining inclines were left to ferry tourists up Mt. Washington for a postcard view of Pittsburgh’s striking downtown, where the “Mon” and the Allegheny join to form the Ohio River.
But the hills still pose problems. On the highway connecting the Greater Pittsburgh Airport to downtown, the first-time visitor may be unnerved by signs that say, “Runaway truck sandpile, 1 mile.” It’s there to stop trucks whose brakes fail on the slope-this just a few miles from the heart of the city.
“To be a Pittsburgher, boy, you have to be tough,” said Wannstedt’s father, Frank. “They brag on that. You don’t find that too many places. They work hard here.”
They play hard, too. In a place like Willock’s, the guy on the next stool may offer to buy a stranger a shot and beer, or he may offer to rearrange his face.
Frank Wannstedt toiled for 25 years in the steel mills before he underwent heart bypass surgery in 1973. During his three-month recovery in the hospital, the doctors told the family to prepare for his death. But 20 years later, the 69-year-old Wannstedt carries his own clubs when he plays the hilly local nine-hole golf course three times a week.
“I can play better than David,” he said.
Think this guy was surprised when Ditka showed up in Washington’s RFK Stadium two weeks after his heart attack?
Rooney and Steelers General Manager Tom Donahoe liked Wannstedt’s background so much they made him a finalist for their own head-coaching job last year before choosing Cowher. This winter they sent strong recommendations on Wannstedt’s behalf to the Bears and the New York Giants, who also were interested in him.
Wannstedt’s family and friends desperately wanted him to win the Steelers job. It was the second time he had lost out in a bid to come home a hero. In 1989, everyone thought he had a shot at the vacant Pitt job, but the Panthers gave him only a courtesy telephone call before hiring Paul Hackett, who was already on staff.
Wannstedt began his coaching career as an assistant to Panthers coach Johnny Majors in 1975, two years after graduating from Pittsburgh. When fellow Pitt assistant Jimmy Johnson left for Oklahoma State in 1979, Wannstedt followed. Three years later, Wannstedt went to Southern California, but he later accompanied Johnson to the University of Miami and, finally, to Dallas, where he served as defensive coordinator and assistant head coach.
No matter where he went, Wannstedt would call his parents before every game. And he still checks up on his brother, Dan, and sisters Cheryl, Peggy, Diane and Joane nearly every week.
Every summer, Wannstedt comes home with his wife, Janet, and their teenage daughters, Keri and Jami. No visit is complete without a trip to South Park, where the kids have to find the tree on which David and Janet carved their initials when they began dating at age 16. And on Sunday morning, the family turns out for mass at St. Wendelin’s, perched atop Custer Avenue, said by the locals to be the highest point in all of Pittsburgh.
The girls are used to hopping into a car to go places in Dallas, but Wannstedt makes them scale the hill to church. He tells them the effort is for self-improvement, that they can better appreciate what he went through as a youngster at St. Wendelin’s elementary school: up the hill in the morning, down for lunch, then back up and back down in the afternoon.
“They’re always like, `Dad, do we have to?’ ” Cheryl Wannstedt said.
Wannstedt usually grins when he hears this, then bends his back toward the church, a Pittsburgh guy with another hill to climb.
