Editor reaps benefits of Stewart obsession

Thank you, Kordell Stewart.

Had I never had what resembles a slight man crush on this former Steelers quarterback, I wouldn’t be excreting tears of joy or sleeping these nights with visions of grown men dancing in black and gold tights.

(I’m going somewhere with this. Humor me.)

I’m talking about the joy that comes from being a fan of a team who wins. 

For those of you who might’ve scurried into your storage shelters to subsist on canned goods in the face of a fear-induced economy the past few days, the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII. It was the Steelers’ second title in four years.

To understand how much I truly appreciate this feat, let me lay down a little background:

I come from Salt Lake City, Utah — a town where, in my 27 years of existence, a championship of no real significance has ever taken place. 

I couldn’t really count a pair of titles by our minor league hockey team — the Utah Grizzlies — in the middle of the 90s. To this day, half the Wasatch Front is oblivious to the fact we even have a hockey team.

And I have trouble acknowledging the 1984 National Championship by Brigham Young’s football team, considered by many to be the weakest champion in history after it defeated an unranked, 6-5 Michigan team in the Holiday Bowl.

So I can certainly empathize with fans of the Vikings, the Bills, the Chargers, the Suns, the Mariners and even the Cubs (When was their last World Series Championship? The Ice Age?). 

Especially because I’m a Jazz fan. My beloved NBA franchise is considered one of the best teams never to win a championship. The duo of John Stockton and Karl Malone dominated life in the Salt Lake Valley for 20 years (and longer if you count the myriad of car dealerships and streets named after them that remain today).

With them, I experienced the ultimate of spine-tingling highs, when Stockton sent Utah to its first NBA Finals by nailing a 3 at the buzzer against Houston. People remember where they were at these kind of moments. I just happened to be streaking around my house with my pants around my ankles. (If you’re not a sports fanatic, you wouldn’t understand.)

But in 1997 and ‘98, I suffered a pair of crushing blows when Utah finished in the top two in league standings and still lost in the Finals both times to the same team.

That other “team” was Michael Jordan.

At that point, I realized the Jazz may never satisfy the gaping hole in my ego — the one that allows me to brag to every known family member, friend, work associate and some random homeless guy at a gas station that my team was No. 1. No one finished above MY team.

But I didn’t want to find just any winning team and jump on the (bleh) bandwagon. The word itself can be found in the thesaurus with “groupie,” “teeny-bopper” and “loser-with-no-self-esteem-looking-for-the-easy-way-out.”

No, I wanted to suffer a little bit. Experience the anguish of losing alongside the long-time fans. I wanted a good, national fan base I could relate with almost anywhere I went.

Enter Kordell Stewart. I had been following the prodigy out of the University of Colorado. Supposedly, the dude could throw 70 yards on bended knee. His arm was rumored to be half-machine, as he broke two of his receivers’ fingers with bullet passes in college.

He had been drafted by the Steelers, who were an up-and-down team in the late ‘90s, and Stewart was their struggling quarterback. Here was the underdog I could get behind.

The Stewart Experiment failed when he eventually fell into obscurity several years later, but the Steelers gradually rose to prominence and I went along for the ride. 

They went from 7-9 in ‘98 to 9-7 in ‘00 to a dazzling 15-1 in ‘04. They needed one more season to win the Big One, but when they finally did, a funny thing happened.

The old cliche of happiness being found in the journey and not so much in the destination started making a lot of sense.

Don’t get me wrong — the euphoria is still there. And the homeless guy at Chevron WILL be jealous, make no mistake about that.

But the most important thing is that I excreted those tears — from both the joy of triumph and the pain of trials.

Now that the Steelers are on top, I can’t help but ask the question, “Now what?”

I heard some recent scuttlebutt around the NFL, though.

Kordell’s planning a comeback.