The first time I saw Ben Roethlisberger take a regular season snap for the Pittsburgh Steelers, I was in a hospital room visiting my grandmother recovering from a stroke. My mom was there that Sunday afternoon, too, and she switched on the Steelers-Ravens game on the small hospital room TV, presumably thinking I wouldn’t want to miss any of it.
Under normal circumstances, she would have been right. Rooting for the Steelers was a salient interest of mine growing up, so much so that if you asked my family to regurgitate some defining qualities, “oh, he likes the Steelers” would likely come up fairly quickly. At the time, I felt a little embarrassed that my mom felt my attention was elsewhere, though she likely figured it was helpful during a sorrowful moment.
I would have been ashamed if I neglected my grandmother for some NFL game, even if I took notice that starting quarterback Tommy Maddox had been injured, and first-round pick Ben Roethlisberger was suddenly under center. I forced myself not to focus too much on it. My grandmother died several weeks later.
As a teen in the ‘90s, I admit too much of my emotional wellbeing was tied up in the ups and downs of the Steelers’ fortunes. To some degree, it made sense. Under Bill Cowher, they were a consistently good team with regular extended playoff runs. Rooting for them was usually rewarding as well as compelling for a good chunk of the year, a fine way to channel some teenage angst. But the Steelers of that vintage were always a quarterback away from ultimate success. I could spend a lot of time getting my hopes up, only to be denied the catharsis.
I was born a few years after the end of the Pittsburgh dynasty of the ‘70s, so while I was plenty familiar with the Steel Curtain legends of that era, I didn’t experience them firsthand, so they didn’t feel like they belonged to me. That the Steelers could have a quarterback in Terry Bradshaw who had four rings, it almost felt like it happened to a different franchise.
Neil O’Donnell wasn’t a bad QB - in fact I think he ended his career with the ironic stat of having the lowest interception rate; he simply picked an especially unfortunate time to have the worst outing of his career. Pittsburgh very nearly derailed the swaggering ‘90s Cowboys dynasty. In those days, the NFC had won 11 straight Super Bowls, and the AFC was seen as the lesser conference. Dallas was a pop culture sensation, and the team of the decade. Before Super Bowl XXX, I bet some roughneck kids in my middle school that Pittsburgh would win straight up, knowing full well they wouldn’t pay me even if I won. I was foolishly defiant about something totally out of my control, but it was important to me all the same.
In 1997, Kordell Stewart took the world by storm in his first season as starter. It seemed like he was destined for stardom. Silly as it is to think about, I remember how excited I was to see him as the cover athlete of the first console version of NFL Blitz. My team shed its purposely boring ethos and had some cultural cachet.
Even my dad, a Joe Montana superfan who deems all other passers fundamentally lacking, confessed then that Kordell had a bit of magic. If you saw the victory the Steelers had that regular season over the eventual Super Bowl champion Broncos, you might have sworn Kordell was a sure-fire Hall of Famer.
Kordell folded in the AFC Championship against that same Denver squad, punctuated by Bill Romanowski slapping his helmet, mocking Kordell as stupid after a critical turnover. The promise of Stewart’s first year as starter dimmed over the subsequent three seasons. In 2001, he rallied back to solid form, albeit toward a similar result: a shaky and deflating loss at home in the conference championship, this time serving as a stepping stone for the ascendant legacy of Tom Brady.
Roethlisberger’s first three seasons were as chaotic as any for me as a sports fan. For a few years prior, I’d been going through a pretentious collegiate phase, which had the benefit of broadening my interests, but meant sports hit the backburner of my attention. Big Ben’s arrival shook me from that. His undefeated regular season rookie campaign, highlighted by a two-week stretch where Pittsburgh ended New England’s record 21-game winning streak then dispatched the 7-0 Eagles, remains the standard for rookie QB success. The first playoff run struck a familiar tone to the Kordell years, as they needed considerable luck to outlast the Jets then got throttled by New England in the rematch. The following season the Steelers’ record unsurprisingly dipped from 15-1, in part because Big Ben missed a few starts due to injury, yet 11-5 is a respectable record for any season. It just so happened that the AFC was stacked that season, so it was only good enough for the 6th seed.
Most recall that Roethlisberger didn’t play particularly well in Super Bowl XL, and there was contention over whether he got in on his goal line dive against the Seahawks. The playoff run of three road wins over the conference’s top three seeds was nothing short of astounding, however. His shoestring tackle of Nick Harper to preserve the win over the Colts in the divisional round is the enduring memory, yet his play over that run was stellar throughout. The defense flustered Peyton Manning as the offense showed a steady hand, in a setting where they appeared overwhelmed a couple months earlier, building a lead large enough to withstand a late surge made possible by a wrongly overturned Troy Polamalu interception then a Jerome Bettis fumble.
His comeback drive over Arizona years later dispelled the idea that he couldn’t shine on the grandest stage, and capped one of the better Super Bowls of the last 15 years.
The day of Roethlisberger’s near-fatal motorcycle accident in 2006, I was preparing to leave on an international trip the following morning. I had been dating a young Argentinian woman who came from serious money (Surprise! She was attending needlessly expensive George Washington University!). She offered for me to spend a week with her family in Buenos Aires, where they owned an entire apartment building. Far be it from me to say no. But there I was getting ready to leave, and there’s was a legit possibility the guy who helped my team finally break through to win a championship might be dead or never play again. And I was preparing to enter a news black hole for a bit. Of course I still went, but it was nerve-wracking for a few days. I know, please feel bad for me, fan of annoying marquee franchise and international traveler.
Viewed from 2022, maybe it seems quaint that the Big Ben experience ever had an innocent valence. That would come to an end in the following years, as Roethlisberger was twice accused of rape, first in 2008, then again in 2010. This overlapped with an era in which I was writing about football for a living, both in dry analytical terms and very silly satirical ones, so I had no choice but to follow the cases in intimate detail.
I was defensive about the first one in Reno for a while, which is not something I’m proud of, even if the facts of it remain somewhat muddied - a coworker alleges the accuser was bragging about the encounter after the fact and she never pursued it as anything other than a civil case, which was eventually settled. Caught in online NFL stan discourse, I wanted to have the moral high ground over rival Ravens fans and their own checkered superstar Ray Lewis. That’s just incredibly dumb and juvenile. All NFL teams are only slightly varying shades of gross and corrupt. They certainly don’t give a shit about you, me, anyone. I didn’t need to pretend any aspect of it is more virtuous than it was. And for what? Vacuous bragging rights?
The Milledgeville incident was ghastly. Obviously, only those involved know exactly which of the described events are accurate (one narrative from another patron suggests the accuser was dragged into a back room while intoxicated, and a local police officer resigned after being initially dismissive of the accuser), but even if for some reason you want to be extremely generous to Roethlisberger, he was still a millionaire 28-year-old superstar athlete predatorily trawling a small town college bar with his teammates. Frankly, criminal charges or not, if you want to assume Roethlisberger is guilty of one or both rapes, I’m not going to stop you. It’s not like it has substantially harmed his life in any way. He got suspended for a grand total of four games. He had to settle both cases in court, though given the fact he has made $270 million over the course of his playing career, I think his finances are okay. He lost a couple minor endorsements at the time, yet for a player who occupied one of the more high-profile positions in professional sports, Big Ben as awkward, lumbering galoot who goes golfing with Donald Trump has never been the most marketable athlete in the world anyway.
What’s more, if you watched what was likely (hopefully) the Roethlisberger sendoff season this past year, establishment media and many fans are fine letting the incidents fade into distant memory. On one hand, viewers can only be beaten over the head with decade-old information so many times before it becomes old hat. “What’s that? Roethlisberger is a rapist? Yes, yes, we know.” But also I worry that NFL access media and announcers have been intentionally downplaying it (some are even going so far as to call Ben a class act) because they know he’s a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, and it’s in the league’s interest not to have someone enshrined in its pantheon of greats shrouded in permanent scandal. Hell, Lawrence Taylor is currently a registered sex offender, but you aren’t likely to hear NFL media discuss that openly.
So the last decade has been a mixture of deep uneasiness watching an unquestionably great athlete have his misbehavior excused in the spirit of winning. Of course, Roethlisberger is hardly alone in that regard, even on the Steelers. James Harrison was another notable recent example. Read “League of Denial” and see how the Steelers played a central role in the league’s CTE disinformation campaign for years. There’s a lot of murkiness to overlook, enough that fandom can feel like a vice.
There’s also no small measure of resentment from me about how his story is used as a pawn in culture war, as dishonest corporate liberal pundits, motivated to deny the existence of cancel culture point to Roethlisberger as proof that it isn’t real in any form. That’s only a convincing argument if you literally just fell off the turnip truck and missed a decade or so of cultural context.
Had Big Ben’s allegations happened in the post-2017 era of MeToo, certainly the consequences for him would have been more dire. The dominance of identity politics had yet to take hold in the late Aughts or even very early 2010s, whereas now they dictate almost everything in the mainstream. Just look at Deshaun Watson’s status, which after missing the entire 2021 season remains in limbo, despite the fact that many teams would clearly love to have him as a player.
Like Mike Tyson, Big Ben is a high-profile man with misdeeds who has essentially been grandfathered into the new mainstream cultural standard. Because of influential celebrities like them, corporate liberal culture created new reckless standards that ensnared vulnerable people like me with hefty and permanent consequences (sometimes without actually even doing anything), while those who transgressed before receive forgiveness and redemption.
So, in a way I got the wish of my upbringing. I saw my team win a few championships. They had a bona fide franchise QB, one who morphed his game from contact-seeking brutishness to pure pocket excellence, changing a culture of Steelers football that had prided itself on spartan offense mixed with punishing defense to a pass-first frenzied attack that often ranked among the best in the league. Watching them with more detached perspective, it’s been an amusing ride, and Roethlisberger’s drama queen antics have frequently provided head-shaking chuckles. It’s been a fixture of my life for almost 20 years now.
Can’t say it didn’t come with a price, though.
I am not normally a betting person, but when the Milledgeville incident was coming out, I said to my coworker, a Pittsburgh native, that I would bet him twenty bucks that at the very least Ben would be engaged by the end of the year. When he said "bullshit," I said that Dan Rooney would be exactly the type of owner who would get Ben on the carpet and say "if you want to stay on this team, you get married. Preferably to a girl from your church." My coworker took the bet, and sure enough, Ben's engagement was announced just before Christmas. And yes, it was a girl who went to the megachurch he supposedly attended. It was claimed that they met at training camp, but remembering my younger years, I can tell you that it's next to impossible to pick up an NFL player at training camp. She rarely makes public appearances. If I was married to a guy who was accused not once, but TWICE of rape, I wouldn't either.