Hawks Fan Zone: Celebrity corner, Pittsburgh facts

Celebrity corner

Nanci Donnellan, aka "The Fabulous Sports Babe"

As a veteran of more than a dozen Super Bowls, I ask: How can it be that when Hooterville finally gets there, the game is in freezing cold Detroit? It's supposed to be sunny and warm, not depressed and icy.

It's one of the perks of actually getting to the Super Bowl. Be glad there is a dome in Motown. However, you must be prepared for a couple of things:

• Any idiot can drive from Pittsburgh to Detroit in a matter of hours. They will. All of them.

• The Seattle 12th Man will be hard to find. You'll think you are in Heinz Field. The Hawks had the luxury of playoff games at home. This is going to be a huge change. Can they handle it?

The Steelers are the fashionable, darling and smart pick. The QB has shoulders like the Bremerton ferry. Defense, fabulous. Almost as fabulous as, well, you know.

But then again, these certainly aren't your mother's Seahawks. Nor are they the Seahawks of Largent and Zorn, Cortez or Jacob, sweet Dave Brown, Curt Warner, Dennis Erickson's mediocrity, Elmer Fudd masquerading as the owner, the graceless firing of Chuck Knox, the embodiment of ineptitude under Tom Flores. A franchise in such chaos, Flores actually let me choose a draft pick.

Your team will forever be tied to my team, the Buccaneers. Entering the NFL together in 1976, Seattle was always 10 times better than my Bucs, put together the way a new franchise should be: good drafting, good scouting, winning. Then the unthinkable — new millennium, new ownership, new coach, bingo: my Bucs, Super Bowl champs. In my euphoria, I never stopped to think how hard it probably was for the Hooterville Faithful to endure the Yuccaneers raising the Lombardi Trophy high into the warm San Diego night air.

In the next 12 days, you will hear ad nauseum the stories of the grand old NFL original owner Art Rooney, the Terrible Towel, Myron Cope, Bradshaw, Franco, Lynn "He's Running For Governor" Swann, the Immaculate Reception, Jacks Ham and Lambert, Mean Joe Greene.

Just give me the MVP half the country never saw until the playoffs, the quarterback whose, uh, haircut makes him look like an extra in Fox's "Prison Break," Gray and Jones (The Babe still loves her offensive linemen!), Lofa, Marcus, Michael and the coach with all the rings.

The Hawks are getting four points?

We don't need no stinkin' points.

The Fabulous Sports Babe was the country's first female sports talk show host, and did a stint at KJR-AM before departing for ESPN. She now lives in Florida, but still has a warm spot in her heart for Seattle and its sports teams.

Pittsburgh fun facts

And you thought Puyallup was tough to pronounce.

Try Monongahela. The great city of Pittsburgh is located in the Monongahela Valley, where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers meet to form the Ohio River and provide the only known reason for using the word "confluence."

Anyway, today seems as good a time as any for a serious discussion of the use of "Monongahela" in song. The three best:

Bruce Springsteen, "Youngstown"

From the Monongahela valley

To the Mesabi iron range

To the coal mines of Appalachia

The story's always the same

Seven hundred tons of metal a day

Now sir you tell me the world's changed

Once I made you rich enough

Rich enough to forget my name

Bob Schmertz, "Monongahela Sal"

Roll On, roll on Monongahela,

Where the catfish and the carp left long ago

You used to be so pure,

But now you're just a sewer,

You're messing up the Gulf of Mexico

Oak Ridge Boys, "Gonna Take a Lot of River"

Gonna take the Mississippi, the Monongahela and the Ohio,

Gonna take a lot of river

To wash these blues away

Bill Reader