For the first time since 1997, Tomlin could attend his annual family reunion, which typically conflicted with Steelers training camp. He cheered on his daughter at every single one of her gymnastics meets, home or away. He went to Augusta for the Masters, New York for the US Open, Miami for the Grand Prix.
And, when he had a moment alone with the PlayStation his sons left behind after going off to college, he put the finishing touches on his Minecraft city, a virtual sprawl of ritzy high-rises and ambitiously situated aquariums Tomlin had been building over the previous decade with the steady and unglamorous accumulation of digital concrete powder. When I asked to interview him, I hadn’t planned to talk about video games, or even considered the possibility that Tomlin, Super Bowl champion and hard-boiled leader of men, had been privately nursing an obsession with “rooftop penthouses” and socially conscious architecture. But a few days before we met, the 54-year-old uploaded a video to YouTube revealing that playing Minecraft had helped him “detach from the pressures” of his unusually unforgiving job.
Of course, the news that football’s foremost hard-ass was a closet miner delighted the internet. Within hours, someone had charted the splits on the Steelers’ playoff record before and after Tomlin started gaming, suggesting that perhaps he’d have won a second championship had he not been so preoccupied. Across the timeline, memes were abundant.
But when we met earlier this month, in a millennial grey midtown conference room that bore a striking resemblance to the “multipurpose spaces” of which Tomlin is evidently so fond, he encouraged me not to read too much into it. Being the boss, he told me, had been isolating, and from his time as an assistant to Jon Gruden in Tampa Bay he’d learned to leave his credit card and let the guys have their fun. But he disputes the notion that his departure had anything to do with a nine-year playoff win drought and an increasingly cranky fan base.
Tomlin, after all, speaks in zen koans and zingers, some inscrutable and others sneakily profound. He also once observed that “there’s a fine line between drinking wine and stomping grapes.” And in January, when a reporter asked a hypothetical question after Pittsburgh's division-clinching Week 18 win against the Baltimore Ravens, he countered with a now-legendary Tomlinism: “If my aunt had male parts, she'd be my uncle.” None of this is a performance, says his friend Sean McDermott, who played football with Tomlin at William & Mary and coached the Buffalo Bills until this past January. With the volume on, for the first time ever, and with a fresh perspective on his old team.
The night before we spoke, the Steelers lost ugly to the Cleveland Browns. Trailing 21-10, Steelers All-Pro edge rusher T.J. Watt put on a headset and let his defensive coordinator have it.
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