The Slanch Report

Say you’re a member of the 1975 Pittsburgh Steelers, you work hard all season long and you get rewarded with the greatest present possible, a Super Bowl victory. The next year you’re given a ring to commemorate your team’s accomplishment, on the side of the ring are included the scores of the playoff games your team won.

Now, don’t you think you might at some point between say, 1976 and oh, 2008, you might look at that ring. I know if I won a championship, I’d treasure that ring and probably memorize every detail of it. You’d think that any of the numerous players, front office and other staffers who received rings would have thought, “Hey, remember when we played the Bills for the AFC Championship and we won, 32-14? Why does our ring say the score was 32-6?”

A Pittsburgh front office employee recently passed away and his personal items were up for sale in an estate auction, included among the items were his two rings from 1975 and the 1976 Super Bowl championships. After a story about the auction appeared in the paper, an eagle-eyed fan noticed that the score was incorrect on the ring.

Jostens–the ring company that desperately wanted me to buy a college ring–the manufacturers of the ring went back and looked at the molding for the ring and found that while the original design had the correct score on it, somehow the mold had the incorrect one, leading to the erroneous rings. It wasn’t until this auction came up that anyone noticed.

“I’ll be damned,” said Joe Gordon, the Steelers former public relations and marketing from 1969 to 1998. “I find it almost impossible to believe because so many of us checked it.” Gordon went on to say that no one had ever brought this to his attention before now, saying that if someone had, the team would have rectified it right away, “it’s an incorrect ring and it has historical significance,” he said, “It was the first Super Bowl in Steelers history. I’m positive we would have made Jostens do it over again.”

Instead, no one noticed it until now. Former running back Rocky Bleier when informed about the error on the ring was very surprised. “I wear them all the time, he said, “I give presentations and people always want to see them. And nobody ever noticed the score.

“But I’d bet most of the guys wouldn’t remember the scores anyway. I’m not sure I ever looked at the scores. And now my eyes are so bad, I can’t see them.”

Amazingly, it took over 30 years for anyone to spot the mistake, which goes to show the quality of intellect that was working on those Steelers Steel Curtain teams I suppose. Then again, they were piloted by Terry Bradshaw, what more could you expect?

“[This] blows me away,” Gordon the former PR flak said, “When [a ring is] distributed, you coddle it, you look at it, you stare at it. It’s a cherished memento, it’s so significant. And you do it again and again. How it could possibly go unnoticed is beyond my belief. It’s funny, but I’m also a little bit dismayed.”