We may finally have cracked the case as to why the Pittsburgh Steelers stagnated so much over the final years of Mike Tomlin’s tenure as head coach: he was focused on virtual urban planning.
I’m kidding, of course. It’s good when people in high-pressure jobs have creative hobbies. Count this writer (and his interior designer wife) among those who were gobsmacked on Wednesday night by Tomlin’s reveal of a 12-year-long project in Minecraft, the world-building game. Tomlin had teased that during his coaching career, he took up Minecraft city-building as a way to connect with his young children. We have now seen the fruits of that labor, and they are magnificent. Look my my works, Terry Bradshaw, and despair.
“More than anything, it was therapeutic for me,” Tomlin says at the video’s outset. One can see how this sort of “mindless entertainment” would’ve been helpful to a man in his position. Tomlin was building up his Minecraft city (whose name is still unclear) during a tumultuous period in Steelers history. When star tailback Le’Veon Bell declined to sign his franchise tag in 2018, keeping the Steelers offense in limbo all season? Tomlin had Minecrafting. When Antonio Brown blew up his relationship with Ben Roethlisberger and ultimately forced a trade to the Raiders? Tomlin had Minecrafting. When the Pittsburgh sports media turned on him for not winning any playoff games in nearly a decade? Minecrafting, still.
Where Tomlin’s description of his Minecraft experience doesn’t make sense, however, is when he calls the experience “mindless”. It’s clear that Tomlin’s project was anything but.
The city is built around a central body of water, not terribly unlike the city where the coach built his NFL legend. (Pittsburgh has three rivers meeting at Point State Park. Tomlin’s city has a big lake from which the whole urban landscape flows outward.) “This is kind of where it all started, around this body of water,” the coach deadpans. “I thought it was appropriate to just give you that perspective of where I wanted to get started from.” He sounds like he’s about to read off his team’s Week 4 injury report, but no. Tomlin is about to take us through his universe, one he crafted over the years with evidently painstaking detail.
Tomlin tells us about the first building he ever constructed, ostensibly around 2014, when the Steelers won the AFC North behind a 1,700-yard receiving season from Brown and 1,300 on the ground from Bell. It’s a “boutique hotel” with an executive spa off the main lobby, featuring therapy rooms. He takes us into a multipurpose conference room on the other side, with tall windows and a glass roof.
“I was very lighting conscious,” Tomlin tells us. “You’ll consciously see me do things with glass ceilings where appropriate.”
We see more and more as Tomlin flies us around. He breezes right past a virtual CVS and into an aquarium-themed apartment highrise. “I did it because it was across the street from the aquarium that I built in the city,” he explains, in case anyone thought the water features were out of place. Tomlin promises that we will see the aquarium in a future episode and that it will be “crazy”. His son and producer Dino, a former college wide receiver, tells us that it took a lot of time for his dad to get the water all situated.
“That was a nightmare,” Mike says.
It goes on and on. Tomlin explains that he was “fixated” on providing details in bedrooms. He is also conscious that not everyone in his city will be an NFL fan: Tomlin built an MLS stadium as well as a baseball field that fits neatly into the cityscape, not terribly unlike Pittsburgh’s PNC Park. He relishes in the fact that one of his highrises has a good view of the ballpark. Tomlin tells us that he is “view-conscious”, and indeed, the man seems to take a special pleasure in a city vista.
The finer details are not left to chance, either. In office and multipurpose space, we learn of the coach’s passion for providing an “appropriate number of public restrooms.” Tomlin built his city with the well-roundedness of a good gameplan, understanding that a successful operation means not just acquiring glitzy wide receivers (or swanky apartment complexes) but also good linemen (toilets).
We also see touches of Tomlin’s family life. He built a collegiate apartment complex called “The View”, which shares the name with a particularly grungy complex in College Park, Maryland, where Dino began his college career. (Your correspondent had many long nights in the same complex, one he hopes to never revisit for the rest of his life.) We get the sense that there will be much more to see.
In some dark corners of the internet, Tomlin’s hobby was met with condescension.
“There is a tension between trying to appreciate people’s widely diverse passions, and the feeling that some people are wasting all of their ambition and energy,” tweeted one person with the job title “chief economist”. It was a bizarre sentiment about a man who won a Super Bowl and became one of the most decorated coaches in the history of the NFL before going on to a lucrative career in broadcasting.
Fortunately, it was also a minority view. The overarching response to Tomlin’s Minecraft build could only be described as adulation. People found it refreshing that a 54-year-old with one of the most high-profile, pressurized jobs in the US would develop a personal hobby that bakes in as much creativity and thoughtfulness as this one. The city of Pittsburgh should hire Tomlin as a planning consultant.
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