"At first, somebody suggested black masks embossed with Chuck Noll's motto, 'Whatever It Takes,' " Cope said. "Then they found out it would cost 50 cents a mask to get the slogan in Steelers colors. No way they're spending an extra $25,000 to do that. Then somebody said we need something that everybody already has and they can take to the game. One guy says, 'How about a towel?' I say, 'That's it. We'll ask them to bring a yellow or gold towel to the game.' Then I really hit on it. I'll say, 'The terrible towel is poised to strike.' The boss sent out for champagne."
Still, Cope wondered if it would catch on for the team's first home playoff game against the Baltimore Colts.
COPE Attempted to live up to on-air vow that he'd swim the Monongahela River
(Gabor Degre, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - AP)
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"I go to the stadium, put my binoculars on the crowd and I don't see anything," Cope said. "But when the Steelers come out of the tunnel, all of a sudden I see 30,000 terrible towels. Bee-uti-ful! They've been there ever since."
So has Cope, who also does television work, including Bill Cowher's coach's show. Cowher, 47 and a Pittsburgh native, has been listening to Cope most of his life.
"I remember growing up here listening to him on the radio when I was a kid," he said recently. "My dad would be out there at night listening to his talk show and I would be thinking, 'Why would you listen to that?' Then I found myself listening to that. Now I never listen to that. But you go full cycle in life. I do my show with him; he makes me feel young."
Four years ago, Cope made Washington Redskins mostly feel angry. Cope has always liked to give opposing teams goofy nicknames. Back in the George Allen era, Cope was infuriated because he thought Allen's team used cheap shots. On the air, he called them the Washington Dirty Skins. When Daniel Snyder purchased the team in 1999, then purged most of the team's employees from the Jack Kent Cooke era, Cope had another idea.
"Snyder came in and fired everyone, down to the lowly secretaries," he said. "So they came here to play the last game at Three Rivers Stadium in 2000, and I decided to call them the Washington Red Faces, because they should have been ashamed about what they'd done."
Early in the third quarter, a Redskins publicist showed up in the Steelers' radio booth during a commercial break and asked that Cope stop.
"I said, 'Oh, really?' " Cope said. "When we got back on the air, I talked about it and then I said, 'If [Snyder] thinks he can give me orders, he can stick his head in a can of paint.' "
Cope counts that as one of his finest moments on the air, and can hardly wait until the Redskins come back to Pittsburgh on Sunday. His head has cleared, his voice is fine and he's ready for another "bee-uti-ful" day.
