Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy looks back at his Pittsburgh roots

FRISCO, Texas — As Mike McCarthy talks, the memories of Pittsburgh keep flowing.

“Roberto Clemente, that was the first guy I think I had on my wall as a young kid in the late sixties,” the Dallas Cowboys‘ coach said in his office at The Star earlier this week of the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ Hall of Fame outfielder. “He dominated in the ’60s and the early ’70s in baseball.”

Mention the college football games at Pitt and it is as if he can still see running back Tony Dors-itt — he didn’t become Tony Dors-ett until he came to the Cowboys — run for a touchdown.

“My dad would always be like, ‘Hey, pay attention, keep your eyes open. He’s going to break one. Thirty-three is going to break one,'” McCarthy said. “It was just a matter of when, not if.”

After attending mass on Sundays and cleaning his father’s bar, it was time to watch the Steelers.

“I could name the whole defense [from then] probably still today,” McCarthy said, and then he does.

McCarthy has not lived in Pittsburgh since 1992, but it’s still home. Always will be. He still sounds like he is from there, growing up in Greenfield, just a few miles from dahn-town.

This week, McCarthy returns home for the first time as coach of the Cowboys (2-2) to take on the Steelers (3-1), who still play in the same spot where the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers meet. Gone is Three Rivers Stadium. Acrisure Stadium is the Steelers’ home now.

McCarthy’s parents, Joe and Ellen, still live there, not far from the Greenfield Ave. homes where they raised five children. Now, they’re up on a bluff next to McCarthy’s sisters Ellen and Kellie. Colleen lives nearby too. They will all be at the game Sunday, as well as other friends and family. With help of the Rooney family, McCarthy was able to secure a suite.

“Between our people and their people, we were able to get what we needed,” McCarthy said.

On Saturday night, his first stop will be at the mausoleum at Calvary Catholic Cemetery, where his younger brother, Joe, rests after passing in 2015. Then he will drive to his parents’ house and spend time with family.

“It’s always a special opportunity,” said Kellie McCaffrey, one of Mike’s sisters, who is the senior director at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. “He has been in the NFL for 30 years now and it’s so intense, but we’re always happy to get the chance to see him. I know he’s focused on the business at hand and we’re absolutely thrilled to support him and his team.”

McCarthy wishes the Cowboys were staying closer to downtown Pittsburgh instead of out by the airport.

“I’ll take the scenic route to the house because it’s always cool to ride through the neighborhood,” McCarthy said.

They will have some pizza from his favorite spot, Aiello’s, but his mother will also cook up a feast.

“My mom is a great cook,” Kellie said, adding, “She pretty much sets the menu. He’ll be happy with whatever she makes.”

McCarthy first returned as an NFL head coach in 2009 with the Green Bay Packers. The next trip home in 2017 was especially painful, since it was the first game there since Joe’s death. The Packers lost both games by a total of four points. In fact, the Steelers are the only team McCarthy has played multiple regular-season games against and not recorded a win.

But he can still claim bragging rights over his hometown team. More on that later.

“Growing up in Pittsburgh, I am so proud to be from there. I think the generation that I grew up in, I don’t know, it couldn’t have been any better growing up right there in the city,” McCarthy said. “Our neighborhood is Greenfield. We’re one of the first neighborhoods right out of downtown Pittsburgh. You can jump on the 56E on a Saturday morning and go run around downtown Pittsburgh. As long as you’re up for dinner, your parents didn’t even know you left the neighborhood. Just so many great times.”

The steel mills were “busting at the seams,” McCarthy said of his childhood. Neighborhoods were filled with kids. The Greenfield Ave. kids would play games against kids on Exeter St. and then Loretto Rd. and so on down the neighborhoods.

Sometimes they would go to Pitt Stadium and grab a football out of the locker room. They would play a pickup game on the same field their sports heroes played. When the grounds crew shooed them away, they would go to Carnegie Mellon University.

“No one was on them fields,” McCarthy said.

In the summertime, the pool at Magee Park would open at 10 a.m. Two baseball fields. Two basketball courts. They were always busy. It was just about a 10-block walk — or sprint — from his home.

“Then you went home for lunch, went back down, went home for dinner, went back down, and then you had to be home when the streetlights came on,” McCarthy said. “But then once you figured out most of the fun started after the streetlights came on, you’d ask to stay out later. But no, hell, I can remember being out there in high school playing basketball ’til 1 o’clock in the morning because the police, they were worried about other people running around.

“Looking back on it, it was like having your own country club.”

McCarthy was almost 8 when the Pirates won the World Series in 1971. The “We Are Family” Pirates won it again in 1979.

He saw the Immaculate Reception by Franco Harris on a black-and-white television when the Steelers beat the Oakland Raiders in 1972. He was devastated a week later when the Steelers lost to the Miami Dolphins in the AFC Championship Game.

But then the Steelers won four Super Bowls in a five-year span. Twice they beat the Cowboys (Super Bowl X and XIII). The Steel Curtain was born.

“It was just such a phenomenal time to grow up in the ’70s in Pittsburgh,” he said.

During that time, McCarthy met Art Rooney, the Steelers founder, known as The Chief. Jack Butler played nine years for the Steelers and McCarthy was friends with Butler’s sons, Tim and Kevin. One day, they had to deliver a mass card because Art’s brother, Silas “Dan” Rooney, a priest, had died.

“So here we go down to North Side and pull up to the home, and I still remember two black Cadillacs sitting in front of it and just a normal neighborhood, not far from the stadium, Three Rivers Stadium,” McCarthy said. “The Blue-Gray Game was on the television. I think it was the Blue-Gray Game. And there he was, Art really sitting on a couch. I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ So we walk in, and Kevin’s big Irish, I’m Irish so we could pass for brothers. He introduced us.”

When The Chief found out McCarthy’s grandfather played football at St. Rosalia’s Prep, he said, “Well, he must’ve been one tough son of a b—- if he played there.”

“It seemed like two hours, but it could have been 10 minutes,” McCarthy said. “That’s something you never forget.”

Thirty years later, McCarthy’s Packers were getting ready to play the Rooney Family’s Steelers in Super Bowl XLV at AT&T Stadium on Feb. 6, 2011.

McCarthy swears he did not get caught up before the game in the emotion of playing against his favorite childhood team. Too much to get ready for. Too many things to worry about. An ice storm blanketed Dallas that week, so the Packers’ practice plans were shifted, moving from SMU to Highland Park High School’s indoor facility.

“We had a lot of moving parts,” McCarthy said.

But on Sunday, hours before kickoff, it hit him when he saw the “green and gold and the black and gold,” everywhere in the stadium.

On the field before the game, he spoke with Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, the same coach he will face again Sunday (8:20 p.m. ET, NBC).

To get to the Steelers’ facility, Tomlin had to drive through McCarthy’s old neighborhood down Greenfield Ave., then across the Hot Metal Bridge to the South Side. Over the years, Tomlin had become friendly with the crossing guard at St. Rosalia’s, the Catholic grade school four generations of McCarthys attended.

Normally, the crossing guard would wave the Steelers coach through.

“Mike says, ‘I come down Greenfield Ave. the beginning of the week, school guard blows me off. Gives me a stop sign. She hadn’t made me stop since I’ve been there. She’s waving everybody else through,'” McCarthy laughs at the memory.

When Tomlin pulled into the local CoGo’s for some gas, a couple of loudmouths screamed, ‘You’re going down this time, Tomlin. You’re going to get your ass kicked.’

“He said, ‘Where the hell am I at?'” McCarthy said. “He goes, ‘It was pretty cool driving through Greenfield this week.'”

The Packers beat the Steelers, 31-25, to win the Super Bowl in an iced-over Arlington, Texas. The Pittsburgh kid had beaten his team in the biggest game of all.

On the corner of McCarthy’s desk, behind a family photo, sits the Lombardi Trophy.

“Did you ever pick one up?” McCarthy asks a visitor. “It’s heavier than you think. That’s the thing that shocked me when they handed it to me. Because you’re up on that stage, they hand it to you and you’re going to do the, ‘Hey, here we go,’ or whatever. I mean it’s not super heavy, it’s just surprising.”

For nearly 40 minutes, the trophy, mixed in with an assortment of photos and papers, as well as a lit candle, went almost unnoticed as the conversation steered toward Greenfield, food at Aiello’s and Rialto’s, Clemente and the Pirates, the Steel Curtain Steelers, Dors-itt and the Pitt Panthers, and a Pittsburgh kid coaching the rival Cowboys.

“Meeting Roger Staubach, it was unbelievable,” McCarthy said. “I mean no different than the first time I met Terry Bradshaw.”

After the Super Bowl, one of the Steelers’ minority owners found McCarthy.

“Hey, obviously we wanted to win,” he told McCarthy. “But if we didn’t, we’re glad it was you. I always appreciated that because we’re a tight fraternity back there.”

Some Cowboys flags will be spotted in Greenfield. Kellie said the neighborhood supports her brother regardless of where he coaches, even the Cowboys, despite the rivalry that started in the 1970s, and especially this week.

On Thursday, Kellie took her daughter, Reese, Mike’s goddaughter, to Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital for a checkup.

“She just got dressed, got in the car and didn’t realize she had a Cowboys shirt on,” Kellie said. “She wears it with pride. And no one gave us a hard time.”