Steelers fan Jobie Germano watched the Super Bowl from a Capitol Hill watering hole on Sunday, but said he still felt like he was back home in Pittsburgh. “I found a family here,” said Germano, whose face was painted black and gold at Pennsylvania Avenue’s Pour House bar. “I found the same kind of family here that I grew up with.” Just a stone’s throw away at the Hawk and Dove bar, Green Bay Packers fans used similar language to describe the atmosphere of the place where they had gathered for the year’s biggest day in professional football. “This is the place to come,” said Wisconsinite and Packers fan A.J. Cronin, a political fundraiser. “It gets pretty rowdy here.”
But not all the fans who downed beers and ate wings at the area’s traditional Steelers and Packers bars for Super Bowl XLV were the types of fans you’d expect from Pittsburgh or Green Bay.
Take 34-year-old Tania Farries, a Pittsburgh native at the Hawk and Dove who wasn’t rooting for her home team but instead sported a green and gold jersey — a move considered traitorous by friends back home.
“I’ve never liked the Steelers,” Farries, a long-time Packers fan, explained. “Even though I grew up around them, their fans are obnoxious.”
On the other hand, she said the Packers fans are “the most die-hard and loving people.”
Over at the Pour House, a Scottish man named Stuart Thomson donned a black and gold jersey just like the others there who grew up in Pittsburgh. But he only became a Steelers fan after moving to America in 2001 and striking up a conversation with a bartender at the Capitol Hill joint. “One of the guys who use to work behind the bar was from Pittsburgh, and he was like ‘you got a football team?'”
Ever since then, said Thomson, a contractor, he goes to at least one Steelers home game and away game every year.
Like Thomson, there was also Corey Higgs, who moved to the United States from New Zealand in 2000 and now watches every Steelers game at the Pour House. He became a fan solely because of the team’s black and gold, the same colors of his dad’s old rugby team.
“It’s like going to a home away from home,” he said.
